Published on: 4/25/2011
End Game

A diplomacy of desire has laid tracks
between my eyelids: infrastructure
capable of shouldering this small
army to the troubled hedges that gamble
along my contested borders of sleep
and logic. The attack is mounted down
deep in my cerebral ridges. Courts tech-
nically still hold sway over my advances,
governing discretionary sexual impulses,
balanced by a more flaccid judiciary.
But emotional insurgents lock step
with liberty song, coupling argument and
forces older than any superimposed ego:
itself mere camouflage to tyrannical ends,
my body's terrain intrenched against it.

Published on: 4/25/2011
Cactus

My blooming cactus consumes each winter's strains
of nocturne with curled projections toward spring.
It's called a Christmas plant, but mine remains
a bursting giant all year long, and sings
away my fears through rings of petals. Death
loses to pink. That's how my kitchen floor
has called the game. In heaven's aftermath,
the floorboard's shadows show an upset score.
This morning, allusive sunbeams cross the sink's
unfeeling tile, and rush into bristles on
the sex displays my cactus flaunts and winks.
As the light leaves, forgetting all its done,
I praise the plant alone; and wonder how
its darkened form will keep decay out now.

Published on: 4/25/2011
Good Luck Charm

Someone ran over this tiny frog with a car.
A wet snap announced its skull fracture, then
the full pressure of the wheel exacted a force
capable of making flat a human hand.
The frog's brain split open. Its body
hugged concrete with a saran wrap cling.

Cancer is an abstract subject, if you are not
the one whose internal wheel is turning
against her own body. The difference between
dying and undying is passenger or pedestrian.
And this, our human meaning,
is a five fingered game of leap frog.

She scrapes the frog's spine with her fingernail,
looking sharp at the back of her hand, which
she wishes she had known better: the small
question of her particular tan. All this vanity is
fragile. Touching the frog's flattened back,
she comes to recognize, though not
with ease, that some beings are made
to move from world to world.