QUAI AUX FLEURS

I want to just keep on smearing butter

& jam on toast with a blunt knife

and licking foam from my espresso cup,

while listening to Lizzy and Tricia practice French,

but I’m a realist.  Even the songbirds have levels

of mercury in their blood and feathers.  Somewhere,

in the brightness against a wall, a soldier crouches –

sand in his hair, juices dripping from his body.

Here there is joy, like a hole with greenness coming

out of it, but there night pushes against the cylinder 

of his gun.  He probably has a knife, too, in the presence

of the incomprehensible, thrusting his belly

to the ground, feeling the strangeness throb in his blood

as he touches the scope to his cheek.

originally published in The Atlantic Monthly

CARWASH 

I love the iridescent tricolor slime

that squirts all over my Honda in random

yet purposeful patterns as I sit in the semi-

dark of the “touch-free” carwash with you.

Listening to the undercarriage blast, I think,

“Love changes and will not be commanded.”

I smile at the long flesh-colored tentacles waving

at us like passengers waving good-bye.

Water isn’t shaped like a river or ocean; 

it mists invisibly against metal and glass.

In the corridor of green unnatural lights

recalling the lunatic asylum, how can I

defend myself against what I want? 

Lay your head in my lap.  Touch me.

(originally published in The New Republic)

BATS

Each night they come back, chasing one another

among the fronds after gorging on papayas,

to drink from the swimming pool.  With my sleep-

stiffened bones, I like to watch them, careening

into the bright pool lights, spattering the walls with pulp

and guano, like graffiti artists.  Sometimes, when they meet,

they hit one another’s furred wings – Love thy neighbor

 like thyself – and then soar off  again to drink

more bleached water.  Sometimes, it seems as if

they are watching me, like a Styrofoam head

with a wig on it.  “The patient reports that he has

been lonely all his life,” one screams to the other.

I can hardly stand it and put my face in my hands,

as they dive to-and-fro through all their happiness.

originally published in The Threepenny Review