Bodega Girl

The small-handed girl,
hands carved out
from the cliffs-
who stacked the bananas
which came off the
ships
and to her bodega
on the corner.


And each curve of
fruit made its mark
on her body,
the sway of hips brushing
off the sidewalk each morning,
the joggers playing in the
streets.


Above the curtains flew from windows,
and so her hair was caught in breezes,
washing windows and making bouquets
for the sad men whose lives
were falling all ramshackle at
their feet,
olive branches to their partners
uptown.


Alone she was, always and
the windows had bars in the 
night, neon blazing out trails
as a lighthouse for 
the drunken each night,
a light for the basketballers
in the courts across the street,
playing into each night-
as she slept upstairs in a twin 
bed, stained with sweat.


The same girl with black hair
and soft lips that stacked all
the fruits into mountains 
of her home, with hands 
smaller than mices'.


With each jogger jogging
she set out fresh flowers
and apples, mangoes
with sweet tunes 
in a throaty texture-
birds from the jungles.


She was lost,
so small as to get away
with staying here-
to let her neon blaze
and her hips sway-
but she was not
from here,
and we let it go.


To watch her dance,
washing windows.

Photographs

The shutter 
clicked
and into my
hands fell your
soul on a square,
spit from the 
mouth of a 
ravenous beast.


Your indents and 
features aligned
in the light,
already fading
and splotched
where we touched the 
drying ink accidently,
where you shook it
to dry faster.


A miniature of
your body,
I held in it another
piece of you,
had tacked it in there
with a machine
to make you stay forever.


Along the walls of my 
house hung on clotheslines
the bits and pieces
of who I had known,
and your face would surface
and disappear
in the crowd, 
all lined up 
and waiting.


Waiting to
fly off, take wing
out my windows,
as one by one
their counterparts 
faded away
in the fogs.


But always on my 
halls they were captured
in some small way.


And one day
you jumped out my window
and flew across
the seas,
but your soul
didn't stay with me.


The photos
faltered, gave up 
the struggles
of reigning you in,
and as you were
soon to be lost,


I burnt the squares
of you and let the free.

Skinny Dipping

Because the waves
bring me home,
hundreds of miles
inland.


The wakes of boats
in passing, the buoys
orange and dancing.
We are home,
we are home
in my body 
I am home.


Near water I am
overtaken, breathless.
I have never lived
by the sea,
but we all belong to it.
Inherently,
I am its property.


And so with the
urge to go home
and drown in its
love, I am tugging off
my jeans on the sand,
in the light of day,
with children sounds
down the muddy beach.


And I am unhinging 
fabric and letting my
hair down where it
belongs in the breezes.


My legs bare and sanded
I have never felt more comfortable
in the eyes of strangers
and the motherland.
Gazes wash over me
and I am plunging inside
the womb I belonged to,
too long ago to count
anymore.


clothes are tedious things,
and in this embrace they
are lost,
they fall away
and I hesitate to float,
still- my body rising
from the water,
bright white
and fleshy.


But against me
washes the warm hands
of my mother, 
and the bottom of this stretch
is cool and dark on my toes.


Here I lie washing up against
the shores,
a mermaid returned home
after so long.


I sprouted legs once,
on a metal table
fresh with strawberry jam blood,
a tadpole growing up.


And I can't rid myself of
the curse that crowned
me mammal,
without gills,
without sea.


So I get as close as I can
on the mud beach 
too far from the Atlantic.


[This is a mostly true story.]

In Time of Drought and Rain

My dear,
it's your face in
the long-awaited rain,
the smell
of your skin
as the earth 
opens its weary 
lips, cracked
and caked with dust.


And we take in the life,
my hands searching
the droplets
for the future times
of drought,
when the heavens
have mercy
and your hands
find my face.


And the gods are
weeping
our salvation,
the corn sighs
and settles its 
tendrils into the
storm.


Your body
in the glistening
drops
illuminating the
bushes like 
lanterns at sea.
And I reach for
you in the open spaces
in the rain's torrents,
I whisper through
you
on the breeze spurring
on the brief shower.


Soon enough,
the earth surfaces
from dream, 
shivering
in the cold sweat
left behind,
and I am left
stranded in empty sheets.


Your touch- the illusion
of rain.

Melons, Pt. 1

because I want to a woman
not a girl in your
eyes as you stand grasping
melons, asking
"is this one ripe?"

Engineering Fish Scales

Your hand on 
the small of my back
at the fish counter.
The pebbled ice 
trickling down to our
feet,
we are staring 
into the eyes of the dead.


Redfin and grouper
look back without care,
nonchalant in their
gazes. You put your hands out
and grasp their slick bodies,
thin and silver coated,
against the waves
of home.


The man in the apron
stares at you, and the same
look I give you when you
talk to the cupboards
about Mozart. 
But the wandering hands
are not new, and they graze
each fish as you talk to me,
still watching all the iridescent
hues change on their backs.


The lobster boats of home wailing
in your head, the salty ice
of Decembers back East. 
In summer you sang opera
hauling fish from the depths
and you kissed each one for
good luck. 
But it was lost, and you were
shipped for Engineering school.


Compasses your friends,
and your working hands put to paper
to build flat prints of real
structures.


The same hands graze the
bodies, and you grab at
a codfish, hold fish lips
to yours,
a change on the supermarket breeze.

Misha

His hands 
grasped the chilled metal
wrungs of a ladder to the 
December sky. 
The telephone pole
swaying with his weight
and the wind's cries to 
put him down gently. 


His legs shook with climbing
the need to take flight from
up high, a better chance
to catch the current.


The news vans came before
the fire department. Their satellites 
trained on him, their hair never moving
in the wind. The lower-thirds in calm blue
read "Autistic Boy Climbs TV Tower".
It was not a "tune in at 11" story,
our lives never were.


The little bluebird was 
spreading his wings today,
a splash of springtime against
the newfound cold and oncoming
snow storm. The clouds built above his 
lofty head, a palace he was trying to
find.


Across the seas a boy
once had flown with waxen 
wings over the farmers and waves
and sirens, nothing changing
save for his melting feathers.
His father watching the crumpled
form fall into the surf.


Before the ascent he'd 
taken his pills and eaten
a sandwich, put on his socks
by himself. Mittens left
drying on the radiator. 


He knew he could fly,
it was in his hollow bones
to get up up and out of here,
we knew he wouldn't stay
for too long. 


But my mother stood
and stared, prayer on her lips,
adorning her hands with beads.


I licked my lips against the wind
to see the small form still
worming its way up the vertical.


The snow fell fat and wet
sooner than predicted,
first snow of the season
catching on his long eyelashes
and blonde hair,
the little Russian boy
used to this cold.


Found by a dumpster
in the middle of winter
in St. Petersburg,
my mother brought him
home and unwrapped him
before us like 
Christmas. 


With his eyes trained
on something 
not seen by cameras
or policemen,
he took a flying leap
and was gone.

Orange Streets

The streets littered
with orange blossoms
off the sidewalk trees,
they glowed through
the night, nearly brighter
than the constellations combined.


Their bodies drifting
in the empty streets
with our feet scuffing
all along the curbside.
Stopping to sit beneath
the lamp-post we
knew they were vessels
and ships to 
anywhere else.


And anywhere else
was where we were,
3 am streets with neon
fading in the black,
but orange- always a 
possibility of adventure.


They'd come from all
the seas, Red and Pacific,
from 5th, 6th, and 3rd
avenues all down the island,
to rest at our feet at the corner
of Hudson. They were spent,
sweet smelling in the breeze.


We made them into crowns
to wear in triumph,
our home their destination,
our street a flower parade
and homecoming. 


It wasn't spring,
but rebirth was a gracious 
gift here anyways.


We waded deep 
into their harbor,
held them to the sky
and knew their journey
had dropped anchor.
Life ending where ours
always was.


We were anywhere,
anywhere at all,
the vast sky to 
prove it, the night
to seal our words
to our lips with the humidity.


They were home
as we climbed aboard to
go anywhere else.

Fireside Tryst

You'd fallen asleep
this time, teary-eyed
with this longing.
I left the window
open, the streets sang
a lullaby through it,
and the lamps danced
on your face to 
its melody.


I smoked a cheap cigarette,
flicking the ashes out
the same window,
and watched you,
tie still on, not even
askew. Business man,
never off the clock.


The polyester bedspread
had monet-style colors
all watered down,
maybe from the years.
The melting of flowers
or shapes, bleeding
into the edges of your
suit, with its clean angles.


The house had been
ablaze, on the lawn
at age seven I had stood
and let the dew gather
on the hem of my nightgown
as respirating firemen
swam inside the flames.
The air was thick
in the summer night,
and the flames licked
at the sky, thirsty.
A yearning I never
understood.


The shapes of flame made
shadow on the neighboring 
houses, their walls straight 
as soldiers. I'd never seen
better watercolors in 
all my life.


I feel the same
burn in my face,
the glow reflected 
from a childhood 
tragedy. The same
color across the room,
and your crisp angles 
the houses on my
left, right.


I know I'm the fire,
and that black suit is
my sky.
A tryst that
never worked out
for either party
involved that night.

Hunter S. Wycoff

I was not Hunter S. Wycoff,
he did not live on this street,
but the one with
swimming pools and fences.
But his letters came
to my mailbox,
stamped from Russia,
with notes
in foreign tongue on
the back.


Great manilla operations,
taped and sealed
for a man four doors down,
whose body never left 
the front porch swing,
when I was six
I thought he had died there.


And I wasn't a woman 
with expensive jewelry tastes,
tacky collections of gems
on their wrists, martinis
by those damn pools
a street or two over.
Hunter S. Wycoff
was probably her pool boy.


The envelopes 
flowed through the
brass door, flopped
like cold fish into the
foyer. Glistening things,
great treasures I was
forbidden from
opening, 
something like
the Ark of Indiana Jones.


The puttering walk
of the think-lensed mailman
was an agony, the letters poured
through, a stack an inch high
for a man I never met,
between him and his 
possible mail-order bride.
I intercepted so many,
they spoke in vague tongues,
wedged between the jeweler's ads
for the whitest of diamonds,
they were racists uptown.


And the man who put them there,
unawares as he was,
was my executioner for months,
until a new man came,
carrying off the exotic mail.


He told me the old mailman
was dyslexic. 
I had been Hunter S. Wycoff
for months without 
my own consent.

The Bathroom Mirror Can't Lie

[Based upon a vivid dream I had on a new medication, which needed to be expressed in full. It may not be great poem, but I need to flesh out what it means.]


The stormy knot in my belly
as your fingers made maps
of my land. Your touch 
the kind that made 
goosebumps a real occurrence.
My hip in your hand,
quivering. A man's grasp
I couldn't quick fathom.


Our mouths foamy with
toothpaste. The sink, 
still running its mouth.


And the only moment
in my exposed flesh
anyone would say,
I wouldn't mess with
your body,
wouldn't change it,
have nothing to say 
against it.


Except the
missing piece that made
the puzzle list left.


Your hands, voyaging ships
on the icy sea
came to rest on my bones,
curved wrong.


Adam's rib gone missing
from my own side,
my cage leaning
and sorry.


You said,
you're uneven.


I already knew,
some cosmic fate locked in
the physical as you touch 
my broken parts.
I am not good enough
in this way,
but you let
your hands linger anyway.


The sin lingers longer
than even phantom limbs 
can last. You are
the hospital bed to 
my amputation


as you curl into 
the big spoon
to my 
tarnished 
ice tea spoon.

The Sailor

You were great in the 
evenings, on the porch
with sun-tea in our
bellies. Stories erupting
from the fountainhead, 
old sea stories,
the ghosts who wandered
the shoals unmapped. 
You stood waist deep
and challenged them
to dice.


You were too young to 
have gone and incurred
such a brine, you were
full of the sea, it was
in your eyes, the storms
of the cape.
The rain plinked on 
the roof, a symphonic
call from untuned violins,
great timpani's rolled over.
And your snoring
from the other side,
the lowing of the lighthouse.


In your bones I saw
a decay like weathered
decks, barnacle caked 
undersides. Your lungs
swamped with cold air,
the porch was traded
for the sofa
for the bed
all winter long.


It washed over,
loved you more
than my bones could 
weather and bear,
the masts crack in
half in storms like these.
She was rocking your hands,
pulling your breaths
until they turned bloody.


Body battered like
the coastline's jagged edge,
great boulders falling
into her wake. 
She hauled up your blood onto
our sheets,
in the night 
your body quaked in the tides.


Anchored inside you,
there was an unrest I 
couldn't satisfy,
the green waves
toppled over out bodies,
and in the morning


you had returned to her.

That Winter

Please tell me
why you took my
hand nestled in mittens,
and held them inside
your own hands.
A bundle of wet wool
in the falling flakes.


Why you kissed me
Eskimo style at my front door,
our winter walk dwindling
to a close, our noses
redder than Christmas bulbs
on my tree inside the warm house.


It snowed too much that year,
drifted too deep
and the poorly developed
Wal-Mart photos prove it,
taller than your stocking cap,
and you held my hands
until they were always warm.


Your boots crunched to the middle
of the frozen pond in the
woods, behind the old cabin
you slept in on Christmas Eve.
You called me from the ice 
and told me stories about the
stars you said were brighter 
there. 


My red telephone 
on the night table
I got when I was nine,
had been so excited
to make prank calls
on, to endlessly chat with 
my BFF on,
rang every night
that winter,
2 am sharp.


I forgot how to sleep,
but only to listen 
to your sounds and breathing.
The snow forever
illuminated in the street lamps
of Suburbia.


You called me 
each night from
someplace, new
old or cosmic,
I never knew.
Payphone, cell phone,
never mattered.


The snow
melted in a rush,
made the grass stand up
green for St. Patrick's Day,
which approached too quick,
stealing away the snow's 
clean carpet,


the red plastic phone
stopped ringing
in the middle of the night;
stopped ringing at all.
The trees painfully grew
new leaves,
and I carefully grew
without you.