2007 - Vol. 4, Issue 3

"Gratitude and Cancer"

In the baffling twilight on the river road,
          apparitions: white dog watching,
                    cyclist
without lights. They chide me: Don't forget your
          thighs are meat, organs jelly,
                    brain
a sponge. Caution wards off nothing, yet
          is all I have to tender; so
                    I do.

In a year of gratitude and cancer,
          I've been chewing ice, gorging toward the pure
                    alarm
called brain freeze. I want pain clean as ethanol,
          urgent, fascinating. I want to
                    clutch
my temples, know the fault belongs to me,
          not to those whose half–care must be half–
                    forgiven.

In this gutshot year, this rod, this cleft,
          this year of nothing left, I'm told to wait.
                    Wait,
and watch the faces reconfigure, watch
          the people smile and stroll into their
                    abattoirs,
watch geometry unspool, earth tip, stars dry,
          watch hope die repeatedly. This is known as
                    healing.

"Grief for Dummies"

Space (spâs) n. 1.a. Mathematics. A set of elements
or points satisfying specified geometric postulates:
non–Euclidean space.

i
is when we space out, when touch or intonation
or nothing pulls the trigger and the bullets of our
bodies are projected from the barrel of the present
into that rotten bullseye, past life of damage,
hated spaces, warped time. These are our
wormholes. We make presence into absence,
make nothing matter, Einstein notwithstanding.

ii
is safe space, which we know to be imaginary,
therefore drape with qualifiers, adjectives.
Shelve it with horizon, gender, and forever:
there are words for many nonexistent things.

iii
thus personal space, quivered moat between
our selves and threat, patrolled by mermaids
who are not beautiful, who do not sing, but keen
and paddle painfully, hands over nipples,
faces surface-strained like swimming dogs.

iv
sacred space.  A woman wearing hijab bursts
into a conference room and utters hellish cries.  Eyes
jerk into contact and apart.  Sudden ushers grasp
her observant garment, eject the sound but
not the hate.  Now the walls are closer.  A pretty
woman with a penis watches stoically, face
masked, passing strange.  We salaam our differences,
bend imperfect souls, submit as far to love
as possible.  The Buddhist hears the As–Salaam–
Alaikum, feels rage, mouths "Namaste."

v
is yours, headspace.  A philter of repose
in which to shelve sensation, or a state of mind,
skin, heart, the art of healing sometimes, or
at other times the art of serving.  Or averting.

vi
my space.  I made a house of cellulose and bile,
colored in with crayons, soft with debt.  I float
in every corner, cells sloughed off in breezes kicked
by no one's human breath but mine.  When you came
you brought the gift of ease, to my bitter surprise.