A Shoe-Box Theory of the Universe

At times God seems
Like a scientist to me,
Patient & persistent,
Experiments still pending
Stashed in a shoe box
On Heaven's marble floor.
And from time to time,
Say once in an aeon,
He lifts the corner
Gingerly, as if not
To disturb us,
Checking on progress,
Then lowers the lid
And inscribes
The statistics.

originally featured in P.F.S. Post, 2021

Evolution

Once before, when I was a woman,
(a diagram distorting the actual
dream),

I hiked a leg,
barking like a seal, &
urinated a long-
lemon stream.

Running south,
syrup over ice
cream, pleasure
over suffering:
the first idea.

originally published in P.F.S. Post, 2007

Medea's Other Child

A dozen years in seasons of days
sweeping light across the girl-child's

eyes unaccustomed to the night.
A kind of wisdom. (I dream of her

in the dark, my darkness, a stage.)
Slight, stooped, dusty, bare feet worrying

the roots of tumbleweeds and fruited bramble
growing in spurts, untended. Father

a conquering hero, liar and cheat,
gone for good. Mother spending time

waiting on men, waiting on tables
in a greasy cafe, the sorceress still,

dyed hair piled high as a crown upon
a furrowed brow. Passion spent in a rush

like the nouveau riche spend: all fleece and rubies.
In the end there's nothing for the kid

but spidery afternoons alone
imagining desire, throbbing

and hot as a black widow's bite,
consuming her flesh against her will.

originally published in Mississippi Valley Review, Spring 1994

Tahiti

Death's young, lush, smooth skinned, canny,
posed au naturel, cocoa belly
down on an improvised divan, eyes

rolled back to study Gauguin (who
flatters himself she's scared of him). Slapping
liverish paint to a faux

background, fantasy blooms
where the native truth would be: an endless
queue of stunted men,

shuffling forward, shifting dumbly
outside thatched huts infested with fleas.
Inside Death squirms, ever horny, flexing

moist pink lips as if he were a child,
slow to see where to fix his bristling
prick, bury Art, take his pleasure now.

originally published in the G.W. Review, spring 1999

Gone

1.
You disappear so beautifully.
Eyes wide, perfectly aligned,

as if you could see, as if
Matisse's joy

might be happiness...the azure/
pumpkin/scarlet fields set

lightly inside his penciled outline.

The main star shines, no glare.
And it's possible that

somewhere less frantic
charged particles

rest before they exit.

2.
But blonde light, like a starlet's
hair, sweeps all things

equally: calamity rests,
fallow in the field.

And the north-bred yearling hawk

looms motionless, like a stuffed
& mounted version of himself.

Watching. Shadowless. Red eyes wide
& perfectly aligned. And then,

when it's time, he just disappears.

originally published in the Minnetonka Review

The Stranger

Consider life's billion anxious
gulps of oxygen, smog porridge
sucked ad nauseam. If a wily

Camus invites us to agree
that Sisyphus is happy, I'm
satisfied to dream Camus'

Algeria: super-heated sands
hemming the Mediterranean,
and a raucous newborn

gleaming with slime, a just-plucked
shell held high into the sun. Her
nomad-father's rutted palms

obliterate all light, his desert-
dimmed eyes squinting to find
stripes, moles, stigma, signs—

imperfections to justify
a drowning. No surprise. Just too few
dried figs, no gods or fires

driving them forward, into the sea,
ancient terrors, shallow waters
heaving salt, fish, history.

originally published in The Brownstone Review No. 5; re-published in P.F.S. Post

Bridge

I know your arms & legs are cold.
In November the river shifts

slowly, silver ghost of its body
barely stirred, ice already forming.

And today, midday, I heard you moan.
Grinding bones of a steel-strapped frame.

As if you had moved, or tried to.
As if the surging light was painful.

originally published by the Toledo Review