Rib under its sheath of skin holds the level
crossing up for working liver, bustling
spleen to scrub and build and pack
cargo for the journey. Beneath, a churning. Steady.
Category: Poetry
T for the Tillerman
Under the mast of sleep, night breathes
through weave, teasing down
in spots and whispers
on heel, bow, on back of knee. His agile hands
press lids and lash
the barrel stays, these ribs
a sturdy frame
that hasn’t buckled yet. Just above
the place my spine
draws across ocean’s verge
a horizon line, the cumulus parts. Stars consolidate
and then disperse making constellations
of text we feign to understand
as we flounder in the dark.
He fixes our place with sextant and connects
the dots. Contours on the map
of me begin to align, his fingertips
hinting at sentience. Order. At something more.
He marks the way
in code and my skin stirs
as it recognizes an R
or perhaps a D.
Where did I drift? Is that a V?
I missed a passage, I want to say. Go back.
The tide is strong. It drowns
out speech and weighs down my cheek
with sand. I don’t yet trust his touch
to chart our course and so in hush I try
to decipher the braille he makes
on me. That shape feels
like an eel trace. A silent S?
Eight? Infinity? He could tip us
over the edge of a forever
Mobius strip
yet I give way
because sleep ties its rigging
to my eyes and draws the knots
in tight. He writes on
the starboard side as I list
roughly north. Strokes across
a restive sea
shape incantation in argot I may have known
before the paired mitochondria
we were
parted ways. 43 million years we have skimmed
the planet’s skin seeking
a lost shape and song, seeking
the only tongue
matched
to the task of whispering tattered lyrics
back together. An erasure
now, a rumble like mirth. From my lumbus
he wipes away
a what? Mistake? A risk
reconsidered? Still, he writes on.
Rough beams of me
soft from so long in salt
air give way to the press of his stylus
and bear the name
he carves
as if it has always been
mine and I
his. His spelling
casts me off into current. I unfurl
and ferry the rare cargo
over fathoms
and night.
Economy Class
Here’s my kid in his Jack Sparrow
goodwill T-shirt, belly-down
in a spill of hand-me-down legos
pressing flat planes
into airplanes
singing
“I’m gonna pop some tags
Only got twenty dollars in my pocket.”
What what?
The contraption has train wheels
on the front end and truck tires
backing mismatched engines
but it takes wing
with guns blazing, enemy fighters
crashing in a fiery screech,
no match for the patchwork leviathan
my kid is smoking
like threads
like foes
like the beat he pulls
with a what what
nod
from the hole
in his pocket.
—
Apologies to Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. Thrift Shop.
Hickory Dickory
The scent of soil and coffee
rouses a craving
surpassing all other hunger
no matter how true the tongue’s aim
once was. Milk and melon
no longer satisfy.
Rock Candy
Seven months pregnant at least, she drags
me to a shrieking arena jeweled in
lip gloss and taffy, stripped
lights dazzling up black panels four stories high.
He is only a doll down there,
Adonis in skinny jeans
strutting on a flash strobe stage jutting out
into the reaching damp arms of ruby-throated
pubescent hunger, baby birds one and all
wide for whatever might fall
from his ambrosial smirk
She in bubble gum pink, dizzy eyes tearing
up as they do for anything
moving even one cilia of her porous borders,
she presses over the balcony, weight
of son threatening to topple her
over to the much more merciful
end of this story
But she manages to stay
tethered to gravity and bounces in place
for omigod
whatever spoonful of sugar
she can get
which is all any of us
can hope for
From the mass of chirps and squeals
he lifts one stunned, nameless nestling
to his bridge and twines a purr around her
heart, blouse spitting buttons almost
from the impact
before he straight up kisses
the anyone who could be
me or omigod omigod
my friend in pink
She fans hot air over hotter face
with a hand not yet weighed
down by the rock
that will eventually take her
almost completely
under to a place that air has long since
vacated and left only a plundered
locker where the bones are kept
But for one glass bauble
floating somewhere up near the skin
of night
and its faithless promise,
a little curl of the child
she is
herself and to whom she is
now bound, she must reach
towards surface
no matter how tempting
the song,
that lustrous snaking siren
of surrender
Paradise Lapsed
Lilac cones fat dripping
cotton frill and sugar dust
are yellowing now and deflated
sag from a pucker of hulls
up near the splayed wires
and stripped bones
of a telephone pole.
Under a green awning
a man with a drooping white mustache
smokes a cigarette trailing
burnt remains through marble mounds
of strawberries in paperboard
flats softening in the early steam. Can it be
time already for blood-veined
chard and kale’s bitter ruche?
What happened to the white nub
folded inside a husk
where flavor was a milky promise
and if bitten, decanted only earth and lime?
No golden egg
nestles in the belly of a creature
prematurely cleaved. Already
honeysuckle fall heavy
at the roadside, dermis
curling back and dew sliding
ungathered
by any tongue
other than the blind proboscis
of a potato bug pushing
into a nameless season.
Day is a half-life,
here and also
gone.
Fractional Impropriety
I’ll take the cool
night, to see him
lift limbs
in his big man’s jacket
shuffling half scarecrow
half David Byrne
and 2/3 Fred Astaire. He fills
himself and mercifully leaves
some to spare
yet
I secretly call on sky
to ease back, get on
with spring. Heat
this joint up just enough
to dispense with buttoned
cuffs. Inside the place
where his right elbow
folds, a single pink mole
I met once
dwells in shadow. I wait
in the rapidly diminishing
nth of my patience
for shorter sleeves
and longer visits
with fissure
swell
and bend.
Self Swathing
At the bend where curb meets street,
leaf debris writhes as if trying to awaken
at long last
into sentience.
Alas, no such magic here. Instead, intention
or perhaps merely instinct
compels a worm hidden below
to travel without regard for freight
or sight. Under cover of dust and plum
blossom, mint-brushed helicopter pods
and the laced bottlebrushes
of a doll’s kitchen, she undulates
in her inexorable attempt at progress
towards some primal certainty
of open ground. Laden
with ornament, festooned
like a May queen in her azalea crown
and grass skirt, she twists back into the wall
of concrete, unable to climb. She cannot see
past the mantle she must bear
to retain her precious title.
These pretty burdens
we refuse to shed.
How they slow us down.
How our majesty rivets us
to corners.
Struck, Cored
I cut my fingers
raw on you. Deep trench in the
soft tissue, I wince and fight
the urge to pull back, press instead
into the resonant sinew, press
on. It never toughens
or it has not yet
despite callous
feint and cool. It is still inflamed
in those places. Strings
bite. You don’t
pull back so I won’t.
We make this chord.
It is the first one, the only one
Now, the only one
two three notes to twine this way
ever. This stroke is all
we’ve got. I with you, we lay
ourselves bare against fret
and neck, stay there, suck teeth,
let it sting. Hear the thrum
on vein, the way sound
is wave swelling up
from grain and hollow
belly driving me against you,
plunging us
into us.
Book Lovers
Each with his favored arm
made his foray
scorning confections and only sometimes opening a hand
dusted with the crushed stamen
of a hothouse orchid. Walt came bearing small sprouts
at least before his straight-up offer of crotch and vine
while against my throat, Edgar licked
glossed feather. I choked down Eliot’s ragged claws and talk
of Michelangelo, glancing against the vorpal snicker
Carroll carried unsheathed. The graze bared
blood beat and Baldwin fire going the way I dared not ache.
I had barely found my feet and certainly not my sense
when, whispering, Kazuo led me to a corner of the room
I’d never seen and there, Salman with a slow grin
esta-esta-estuttered open his voice in song.
Shannon E. Williams 