In the Limen, You
In the limen you kept me between
land and a wormy sea, What’s App green,
always poised on the horizon
of creamy notes, the heart sing(e)
of dreamy cell blips, the G-Majors
of long-distance, lesbian longing.
In the limen you found me, between flesh
and word. Digital synapses fire a queer
mind. There are no accidents in algorithms
despite what you said. There are Americans to be had
or just fucked in ways unimagined.
The Internet has its own “book of life.”
You, magician, witchy healer of dreamtime,
the imagined leavening of wounds. Smoke.
Acid. Relentless ache. The silent falls spent by ponds’ hollows.
In the limen you undid me, the dismantling invited.
I’m a cornucopia of human failing, I admit.
What could top a sawed-apart
smiling lady, out-tricked Portia floating in a box
suspended by hope’s spindly webs?
In the limen you kept me, ghost passports, aborted stuff,
sudden (ex)husband, sins by omission, the familiar flicked switch…
Always between things, the truth. We were neo-Catholic
for sure, but I was the inept reader of your script. I admit I am
always a problem. But you were and are the end of language.
The end of hope.
In the limen you held me close
as a knife, later, at the ocean’s heel
where things decay, transmute, and release
their uncarings.
And you, an air story, your intentions streaming, arabesque
and horn like, rising from heaven’s moat,
your suspect smile, seducing, then busting/open some god.
Apropos or No (Ekphrastic on Deborah Remington’s Apropos or Untitled, 1953)
note: I don’t own rights to photo, but here it is at this link: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/deborah-remington-apropos-or-untitled
there was no Christmas in the red and green
an amazing feat by itself as any painter would know
and the pink-haired punk cowboy with the yellow-smoking
erection did not pet the speckled donkey’s head
nor flicker yellow sun rays into a bloody sky
you only saw that through your blinking strobe
while sipping the rum and coke of your teens
and the clear blue patches aren’t menstruating on the whole
damned show or even the crops as they might
have in Karen’s anthropology dream
because this painting was just a pitstop
before you moved onto black and red and geo clean
this was your beautiful dirty moment
there was no Christmas in your red and green
what’s apropos is what the painting is
wet and raw and thick and skinned resisting
a certain destiny while submitting to the urge
of its moment
If the Phone is Off, Do the Fingers Exist?
Love me in a text
With only one or two
fingers. Make it real,
give me the best you’ve
got in thirty characters
or less. I’m busy,
so are you, so let’s just get
to it.
Spare us both the
tangled mess you
fashioned after an
Anais novelette.
I can’t stand her,
and while that might
make me guilty,
it was never
a secret
Condense it, shrink it,
get it right for that
screen that suits
my hand.
Shoot your blazing
blessed-Verizon love,
yes give it to me,
your flaming, scorching,
wireless, Lost in Space
poetica. Emoji-laden,
blinking heart, smiley-faced,
sweet single-digit
nothing(s), there’s one
for every single emotion, including
some you’ve never had.
Tell me what you ate for lunch,
are having for dinner, saw
on the street, and every
random thought you have
in real time. Yes, I want it all.
I need it bad, in fact. Without
It, I probably don’t exist.
Yesterday was yesterday and
today is today.
Can you hear me now, as
you plunk your now-bored
fingers, tired from the
wired-less mania of your
dopamine-driven
love execution?
Wait! I think I hear silence?
The stillness of the phone and
lack of green blinkings is almost
unbearable.
Please, Pavlov’s dog is starving.
Be so kind to animals as to
lend a helping finger...
Unplugged, uncharged, lost
in the car seat, fell out of the pocket,
forgotten in the restaurant bathroom?
The Love Box.
Replace it with
a new model
or not at all.
Does the love exist when
the phone is off?
The person, when the app
Is removed?
I scarcely remember the sound of
your voice anymore.
Two fingers are best
used for pleasing
oneself, as you conveyed in
your freely-shared, lonely,
narcissistic, (and embarrassing)
masturbation poem,
portent of your latest double-digit
adventure. Are all feelings
precious?
Be the fingers.
Colleen Does the Detroit Institute of Arts—Rivera - Kahlo Show
not beautiful or sexy—wrong words
she does the DIA in Colleen style
with no last name
playfully licks the marble
without saliva or arrests
body-defying Mexican breasts
hang at odd angles and
some statues’ penises go missing
never to be found
flirting with a bodiless woman
as someone tests the energy fields
of ancient mummies in the adjacent display
their souls are trapped
in geometric precision forever
her mane it hangs
carefree over shoulders
swaying to imagined rhythms
of frozen bronze women
she sashays through them
arms extended
boat shoes on point
onto the next exhibit
of mechanized people
lost babies
panning Frida’s wasted papered strands
of black hair and awkward parts
delightfully boyish
equivocally womanly
(not beautiful or sexy - wrong words)
the dead art museum springs to life as
the delphic Colleen
does the DIA
Items Found in Her Red Flowered Hippie Bag
Two bottles essential oil blend, ¾ used, myrrh and hyssop
Lip gloss, grapefruit flavored in small tin
Black wraparound sunglasses
Her mother’s lace-lined handkerchief, wadded and stained
Her son’s baby photo, elevated above her ex’s head like a trophy
Beige telephone, landline, the cord wound around it
Notebook, faux yellow leather in wrapper
Embroidery needle and brown thread in frosted plastic case
Bent-nose surgical scissors, one pair
Pliers with red handle
Hair clippers with 1/8-inch head installed
Glyburide, multiple tabbed sheets, half used
Xanax, 10mg. bottle, empty
Bupropion, 300 mg. dosage, bottle empty
Pashmina, red, gray, and black silk from Pakistan
Legal documents, bound by an alligator clip
Brown bi-fold wallet emptied of its contents
Kay Ryan paperback, The Best of It
Foot Loose and Fancy Free: Cliché Messages from My Dead Lover
You’d been dead four days
and I lay back-smack in your bed,
as if the ceiling could make sense of it.
Your ghost showed up a second time,
stroked my head as you frequently did
when alive. You spoke clearly, yet in code:
“Footloose and fancy free,” you said
(on being dead)? “I’m not in the mood for jokes, Max,”
I answered, as I needed something more,
a synopsis of heaven or hint of remorse. “Divorce
is divorce,” you added, and “Remember me
as I was.” Then you slipped out through a crack
in the window pane and I stayed still for hours,
your laconic message pimpling my brain.
Soon I’d write, then later delete, as editor said it was cliché.
For months after, I’d scour the web
for hints. Resurrect it. Again and again. Dictionaries said,
an unmarried, unattached woman or man, one who
does as he pleases, a divorced man who comes and goes freely . . .
I thought of you on holidays smoking cigars outside with the men
as placid women prepared food then later cleaned up the mess.
Jerome Robbins choreographed a ballet, Fancy Free,
coupled with Bernstein’s score. For hours
I watched, searching for you on YouTube
as gay sailors with thrusting bulbous crotches cartwheeled
and air-humped in their white bells along a lonely bar prop.
Might there be clues to your ghost death quip in their hips?
Or could something holy or whitely-glowing emerge
from pneumatic wagging man-ass?
Is that what you meant?
You had promised to dance for me . . .
White was never your color, though you did mention
a fondness for sailor suits.
Then I found Rod Stewart used your cliché in
an album: Footloose and Fancy Free:
Side One
Hot Legs,
You’re insane,
You’re in My Heart
Born Loose
Side Two
You Keep Me Hanging On
If Loving You Is Wrong
You Got A Nerve
I Was Only Joking
You always loved to communicate in songs.
Max, oh the breadcrumbs you left me. And more covers
of your song—Camera Obscura, and Rare Earth,
and others. I listened ‘til my ears blew Dorseys,
and my country ‘tis of thee liberty.
Some sang it before we were born, as many knew,
like you, freedom might shake from a body’s tethers
or slip from its throat in a joke.
What Was Is Not
Gone is the iris
the stars on the arms
the witch’s fingers
her Kant’s cunt hum
Gone is the voice
the nail in the foot
the child’s teeth
her tainted cheek
Gone. Gone. Ash to the sun.
a mother’s breast
the thrum of the womb
the churr of the pigeon
the kettle’s heat
Gone
(D Deficiency)
More than a half-life spent dreaming
phantom orange juice. The sun never stunned me
with even a passing D. Reptilian, I crawled along
on my own embers, ash-glow in my blackened pit
as life wheezed by. Love did not capture me,
it has its escape hatch. Such convenience
in these fleeting things, this life, these loves,
these tickings that quicken, then lose their grip.
The night sprawls and shrouds Earth in its tepid
wings. Scattered stars announce their failed intentions
as Orion blinks in heaven’s vellum
hinting at what’s left of the ephemeral hunt.
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