2004 - Vol. 1, Issue 4

"Some Stones Hurt"

I was ten years old
when I saw the Venus de Milo
posing on clean gray tile.
Shutter clicks were going off
like car alarms.
And I was ashamed of her stone.
Of the air where her arms
were destined to be.
I wondered why she had no scars.
If she hated the eyes —
their rabid dogs, their
pigeon-dropping cloying orbs.
I wanted to give her my clothes.
Pass her a bottle of glue.

"She's broken," I said to my aunt.
"Why is she here — in a place of respect?"
No answer emerged from her tongue.
I thought about my missing leg,
its carcass and its animal.
Later I would share her shape.
Duck cameras like a waiting knife
pressed to a throat of crumbling sand.
She must have taken a fall.
"Someday we'll chat," I said to her,
"over a meal of oysters and art
about the presence
of grit in the shell,
about the impotent rage."

"Paper Cuts from Diaries"

Wishing my diary were a postcard of Vermont,
glossy and perfectly sized,
flushed with deep green hills and minty pines,
I remember the deserts you taught me
to change with the balls of my eyes.
I remember the shape of my stump,
lost and banging against
the flimsy wall of a seersucker dress.
Doctors had taken a stanza of me.
What was left above the knee,
scars like shriveled coffee filters
dry and torn above the void.

I remember your fingers and words
as you buttoned my smock and ribboned my hair.
"A body is only a box," you said;
"you decide what fills it up with pertinence."
I'd never have a pair of plastic Barbie thighs
that hopped the doors of pink Corvettes,
but suffering has been a lamp
and I have learned to live with mirrors.
How did you know I'd finally stand,
resign myself to cloying stares,
rally my flesh to meet the chill,
find my slow way home.

"Pay It Forward*"

A lonely man presses his shirts
in flawless strokes to avoid
the lumps on his face.
He lives in nightmares for romance.
A drunken dad, a poignant match,
a common can of gasoline
become the cloying visitor
who will not leave.
If someone tries to palm the source,
he freezes and bolts —
the soul a pony shaking
in the forest chill.
He's just a jewel that needs
the light to render it muscle and bone.
I felt the shivers in his spine.

It was only a Hollywood flick,
but I fathomed his coriaceous scars —
the way those maps
become a page of parasites
that will not let a day alone —
the way a mirror
becomes a slate of jagged glass
and eyes return no favors
but their glistened rain and pity’s bile
in buckets first, then rivers
no one wants to ride.
I saw my many blemishes
longing for the awkward touch.
I wanted Helen Hunt
to kiss the unkissable land.

*Pay It Forward, starring Kevin Spacey and Helen Hunt, 2000.

"Pay It Forward" first appeared in Impetus.

"Paper Cuts from Diaries" first appeared in Poetry Magazine.com, Fall 2003.

"Some Stones Hurt" first appeared in Kota Press Anthology, 2003.