Category Archives: Poems & poem-like things

False apple, pale vegetable— green lightbulbs swinging like unripe hearts in the trellis among curled leaves: unchoked among the rampant honeysuckle, sayote that we ate the week after a hurricane and its deadly mudslides locked the city in. Only Sunshine grocery was open; but no bread, only de lata: sardinas, canned mackerel, corned beef, beans (one square of fat the size of a postage stamp, hidden somewhere in a swamp of legumes). No onions, no frying, no lard. But plenty of rice, sayote boiled on the kerosene stove, a squeeze of wild lime. Choppers overhead, long lines at the water main where someone had pried a valve open and everyone came with plastic pails, gallon bottles. Children washed their faces and made newspaper boats in the rain. In the evenings, we piled mattresses in the center of the living room floor and watched our shadows lengthen by candlelight, ash-brown, dark-tinted like a ring we’d drawn, thin membrane between us and the cold.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

The hour will come, oblivious to your noticing,
when you’ll look back and see that the shore
is truly far away and the boat you’re in,

bobbing miles from any clear destination.
From that distance it will be hard to tell
what the sunlight strikes hard and

fractures: the chrome edge of a pair of
sunglasses, the unibrow of the man
wearing it, the neon stripes of the beach

umbrellas that now look ridiculously small
and crowded around the rim of a dirty
yellow margarita glass. And you will ask,

stranded in the middle of it all, whether you
really still need sunblock or if the little
stencils of color floating before your eyes

are a sign— everything that once
pinned you to the business of diminishing
returns, has called it quits. Now only this

expanse, its lesson unrolling like a sutra:
unfurnished, unambiguous, pithy,
comprehensive; continuous, without flaw.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

“Who trammels whom?” ~ Dave Bonta

Look at the screen: do you see
the bird in the handle of a cup?
do you see the snail curled in

the floral organs of a cornice? and
that one, all shy and shifting, that
is a human in the shape of a tree.

Wings collapse and flutter open amid
the branches. Sweet orange blossoms turn
into paper fans. Their scent is best

in the morning. When nights are hot,
sometimes they bring to mind the corpse
flower and its perfumes of rotting flesh.

Too sweet, it putrefies the faster. Pour
something cool down the throat’s sticky lining.
The leaf tends to pull away, startled by a touch.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

This verb cannot be reflexive.

But there on the springhouse roof is a thing
fluffing out its feathers, probing under its wings.

Little promise of flight,
ascending and leaving behind—

The verb is not reflexive.
In many languages, the reflexive is rendered
by the transitive verb followed by a reflexive
pronoun +self e.g. “She threw herself
on the bed.” or “Weeping, she threw
herself on the ground.”

This verb is not reflexive.
It prays to be spared, but if that is not to be,
then it prays to be taken quickly.

I’m moved to get down on my knees.
I’m not even sure what is there.

But if you are, you know the heart
does not exist solely for the purpose
of pumping blood.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

The woman in the cafe wearing red lipstick that matches her red boatneck sweater under a grey raincoat says, The poet is someone who is more a voice overheard, not speaking directly. Not spoken to, of, for. If I hold my head like this, if I hold my head perfectly still, if I hold my head aslant. There is a whiff of a voice that curls from the next table like a wisp of cigarette smoke, though smoking has been banned from restaurants and other such public places. Slide a white porcelain cup filled with hot coffee across the oily film of the counter. Run a fingernail across the velvet-covered upholstery and everything is still there: summer’s burnt caramel and diesel, morning’s toast; sriracha, lemon drop, partly sucked licorice whip. Above the curtains I can watch the sun move through a sky shorn of wildness, which is what some might mean when they say untrammeled. She is right, then. About lyric being a form of lilting paraphrase. Shorthand written in pencil, never ink. Code produced by the faithful stenographer. Careful. A stroke in the wrong place makes unintended meaning. But more, also. If it is spare, it prepares for tenderness. At least, the promise of a listening.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Dawn is a blanket of quiet: a few hours yet before the man rises to take up his work. He will ride his bike down the trail in the cold, his feet shod in sandals. For now there is mystery in the heart of this silence, and silence in the frozen fields where all the birds who are one bird sow and harvest grain in one night while he sleeps the sleep of one near despair. You know that story— where task after impossible task is given, where the stakes are raised a little higher each time: count each pearl of sugar before it dissolves in the rain; turn one lock of hair into a spangle of gold. As if to see if (or how) one might rise to the occasion. Their wings make no sound; not even streaked with snow, their color matches the indigo leaves through which they manifest. What wages will he give them? All the birds who are one bird want to be found. He will follow them to their roost high up in the tree. This is the part of the story where a price will be collected. Where something will change.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Always, there are things afoot in the brush of a dream. If I turn in my sleep, it is because I am made fitful and rousable by the crackling of twigs. The moon lies too on its side; only one cheek sticks out of the inky coverlet. Its sheen is pockmarked calcium: the long flank of a bone, the inside of a scalloped shell, the surface of a dart board on one wall of a bar where no one mouths words like transcendent or renown. Sometimes I forget what I came here for. But there are things that must be observed, like ceremony. Amulets to be positioned, so they face a certain direction. A way to walk, finding compromise despite the elusiveness of balance. Bitter cold swirls down into little cups, all in jewel colors. Serve up one more before the establishment closes. Play one more song as I struggle into my coat and trudge the long way home.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.