lust, observed
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in my hometown
the laundromat
doors are open at 3 in the afternoon
to catch whispers
of a triple-digit Ju-ly breeze.
the machines whir,
and there is country coming
through the overhead.
small talk is all in Spanish: que
calorcito, eh? black-
laced sweet nothings
of a frazzled mamá drip
from the handrail of one of those
little carts. the floor
is dirty, and the air
smells of bleach.
the coke machine doesn’t work,
but the dryers
are wonderfully efficient and she
feels more like mamacita
than she has in months, con-
siders bringing one
of those country songs
to life, stripping
down to her calzoncitos while
watching machines spin
sweat & loneliness from her thin bed-
room sheets.
(between parentheses)
after R.S.
dear poet,
there is nothing
accidental
about this metaphor:
that we are children
reaching hands
in the hard calloused
eyes of the ferryman who
steers between the winks
of channel-markers
into gloamed twilight;
that we step
quietly on the creaking
planks of secrets and
drink in coastlines
like sweetwater;
and that we finally
follow stars hot
& hard as July earth
until each
reaches home again.
What has so far transpired:
contrails of cirrus
like kitestrings are flung
cross a June evening,
laundry lines of the summer’s
sirensong, a rumbling
in the stomach of my soul.
it nears storm season,
longing anticipated before
lightning even
touches down.
the wind builds
castles of our discontent, dust
scattered like glitter &
unicorns ‘cross the page where
we grub out with the back
end of a no.2 lead the lust
which would hang
us up to dry. do i
already drip? i cannot
remember how
the next verse goes.
my black marks
are wound like
kitestrings ’round
but a single wrist, tight,
untangled (and i think),
still my own.
Re-Drawing a Portrait Once Painted on Plywood
A lone housefly myopically crawls
up pale-peeling kitchen walls, entropy
in quotidian microcosms that
screams of a stiletto- hardness
tattooed in both prismic eyes. It
belays the soundful softness
of rounded thighs and arms
of the woman at the table,
the smoke of her solitary
cigarette winding like
lust toward the fluorescence
overhead. There is sex
in this as in everything.
Even death. An unwinding
of flesh into the universe
that birthed it, entropy
again. Or perhaps simply
childhood timelines
tangled with tangential
tomorrows and the
exorcism-autopsy
of memory, a stillframe
of this solitary instant, yellow
and blue, aborted phosphorescent
remembering.
