Killing at a Distance (A Found Poem from Various Print Publications)

Killing at a distance

(the more conspicuous example of course)

a potent heat-trapping effect

abuse of medication

a yen for guns,

a homeless veteran

the smell of body odor,

the rumbling of a hungry stomach, the creaking

from a nightmare,

 

The pigs ate anything

farmers

church leaders

Two musicians—

young women

school children

the little blobs

humanity

 

millions of people

are being turned out

on the street

my doing it—is not the killing

 

in jail since his arrest

self-esteem of the details

an oxymoron;

his apology through Twitter.

 

Original Mixed-Media Piece

 

The Key of C (draft 2)

They called me dirty Shakespeare. They called you Old Joanna.

You, my red wheelbarrow after the rain.

You say if we ever give up on sonnets and symphonies,

We can always marry and adopt,

(From China, so he won’t have either mother’s nose.)

 

He’ll be just like me—

I’ll teach him to swear like a city boy,

He’ll be just like you—

Toothily laughing in the key of C.

 

To bear with indigestion, we’ll give him the truth for breakfast,

And to make him more perfect than possible,

We’ll never let him near a piano or a pen:

Our boy’s going to be a doctor someday.

 

Letter to a Thrift Store Dress

Dear brazen fire-truck red, white dotted,100% polyester,

You look like Minnie Mouse paid her way through college,

As a stripper, and I see those tears along the seams.

Dear dress with those ugly palm-sized brass buttons up the chest,

You cost three dollars and even that was generous,

But someone had to take you home,

And stow you back in the shadows of the closet.

Because after so many revolutions,

Little girls still want to wear a polka-dotted dress.

You belong hidden from plain sight,

Not the costume of a housewife,

Secretary or waitress. There should be a whore in you,

Bearing deep marks where your elastic digs into flesh,

Cheap fabric chafing at high breasts.

I’ll wear you to take you off, Dear polka-dotted dress,

Like a pair of spike heels.

 

Sing, O’ Muse (Draft Two, Originally from the Tupelo Press March 30/30 Project)

Where men and gods cannot ease,

She weaves the epics of her fingers.

The truth would cease to blossom could she not.

Was she first set desire on the song, the chase to drumbeats.

10,000 years of poppy flowers still persuades her,

Dressed in tatters,

To sit with them.

 

Now:  an odyssey and back,

Is a red-eye descending the obscure runway,

And nips of vodka, left unfinished, her libations.

Soldiers missing arms have given up the lute,

So she gives her song to chopping onions;

The sad hum with the simple melody. She still smiles.

Heaven-nourished were the princes,

So beloved of Kallipe, that spit she in their mouths,

Until her tongue was stone.

 

Crimson on the Handkerchief

There were enough tragedies a century ago.

I would have died young, pale, and consumptive,

Of the cold calligraphed names of husbands to be.

The letters; they would find them between my skirts,

On the eve of entombment:

A thousand muslin sheaths mapping,

The apex of my thighs to the ink-stains on my hands.

Might as well be a poet.

Words tickle my throat,

Like a laugh at funeral,

Like a cough at the opera.

It’s a matter of time,

‘Til crimson on the handkerchief.

 

You and McDonalds

A periodic craving,
Which always ends in disappointment.
After the gulp of freedom;
The glee of bad decisions,
Comes the heaviness,
Of incumbent indigestion.

 

Reading Chekhov:

I wonder if I’m the same girl,

Since I started finding loaded guns,

In every room.