Winter/Spring 2015

Grenade

You hold it tight to your chest
like an army-issue outer heart
to replace the inside obsolete one.
A quick twist and pull of the pin
turns a dead thing alive,
a harmless, heavy piece of fruit
into a ticking bomb. Throwing it
is as much self-defense as aggression.
The orb lifts into the placid air,
a small, murderous cloud
whose rain is steel and fire.
You can’t stop staring.
It spins strangely, like a baseball
that has lost one flap of leather,
while inside its suicidal clock
counts down its doomsday.
Moments are torn apart like flesh.
Now that it is on its way,
it has only one outcome, one destiny.
Nothing will shake its grim determinism.
Whatever is near it will be shredded
by bits of metal shrapnel,
each a blade no bigger than a paper clip.
You duck behind the wall,
the grenade blast anti-climatic.
The smell of smoke pinches the air,
as you wonder how such a thing
does not explode the entire world,
how anyone is strong enough to throw it
far enough away and survive.

Their Dark Pearl

Divorce doesn’t happen all at once.
It builds by accretion, grows fat,
pregnant inside a marriage, a dark pearl

they place on layaway, making payments.
Every night he takes out their pearl
and places it on her finger. Every morning

she cracks open their pearl for breakfast.
Now the pearl is her eye, now his nipple.
In the sky a new moon is their dark pearl.

Starlight parries off windows so black
sound cannot travel through, or reflect.
While inside the startled house one sits,

the other slams a car door and drives,
black pearl tires spinning, skidding out,
leaving stretch marks all over the street.

Alert

I was in the middle of penning a poem,
one that had been going smoothly,
when my computer alerted me to the news
ten tourists in Pakistan were shot dead.
It’s a sad event, of course, tragic, unnecessary,
but the more I think about it
the less it seems to have to do with me.
Perhaps someday I will receive alerts from gizmos
whenever a woman crosses the Danube
to visit her dying first love.
Perhaps I’ll learn some guy in Texas
has decided after all to try ballroom dancing.
Already I know when the baseball player eats an apple
or what the starlet thinks of Keynesian economics.
Meanwhile, the poem I was writing is lost,
its flow shot as dead as any tourist in Pakistan.
It lies on the screen, bleeding, its passing
noted only by this solitary reporter.

Free Bird’s Girlfriend Replies to his Dear Jane Letter

If you leave here tomorrow? If?
It seems you’ve already made up your mind
and if you haven’t, well, I have.
After all, Mr. Bird, you cannot change.
Lord knows you cannot change.
Lord help you, you can’t change.
Nobody’s going to change you. No, siree.
Cause there are too many places to see?
Yeah, I know those places: the bar, mostly,
And the nest of some newly discovered sparrow.
As for this love, no, it’s not been all that sweet.
It’s been one grounded hen and one bad egg
who thinks growing up is akin to a cage.
If you stayed here with me?
Who says that’s still an option?
No more freebies. Time to fly the coop.
Surprise! I don’t want you to change.
No, things could never be the same
for I’ve changed enough for us both,
and if anyone’s ready to travel on now it’s me.
Frankly, though you surely are to blame,
I’m not, in fact, taking this so badly.

Swingers

My aunt had three boys,
each with a different man,
but by the time I knew her
she was done with men.

It took her thirty years
but she finally figured out
her soul-mate: a bottle
Of Jack Daniels whisky.

Though there were nights
she cheated on him with beer.
Or brandy. Or whatever booze
happened to be at hand.

If Jack Daniels ever minded
he never said, and their love
stank up the tiny apartment.
and if ever she found Jack

at a bar with another woman,
or even a man, she didn’t care
so long as she could take him home.
Years went on in this way.

I never saw two closer lovers.
You should have seen them kiss,
her shaking hand gripping his neck,
pulling him toward her open mouth.