you might be the girly who shall end all girls.

sick of politics right now - three poems instead.




If I make this new tulip stem the viaduct
or underside of your wrist and lick
the branched artery, I arrive in Rome
on the other side of a season sudden as a kidnap note.

I lean against the famous fountain and watch
the waiter refresh the glass of marigolds precisely
ringed by petals. Isn't this every painting
I've ever studied? (I should be in France) but there

you are, that sip of cappuccino, so delicious
I sketch and title it: Alone on the Terranean Sea. Then
I simply walk over and pick up your cup. You are the coast
of October, my graduate art fellowship above the café,

the technical modeling, windows wide, gauze drapes
puffed. I can't stop breathing when breath is cinnamon, over
and over, lineament, rags, turpentine negligence, afternoon
canvas. The mysteries of light, and later when you said

"Abriera," I did enough for you to lay down
your brush and draw the chiffon scarf across my tongue,
"la lingua," like petals or air, nothing, a glass ring,
the curve of this cup rim, this lace, this froth.

Beth Simon - Taste Is

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Every cricket here has mated.
Hear it in the distant tone and timbre
of a tired, old drone: a chorus
for those who now wear only
white robes over lost bodies—

that chorus which for us rises evenings
in the cancer, neuralgic, and geriatric wards,
where all are far beyond triage.
Each moan, we know, echoes
a voice from that boundless night
preceding the afterlife.

Forget your body. Forget the afterlife.

God, give me back wolverine passion,
ability to dig my way into dirt road
before truck tires crush, before
hunters come with guns.

Bring sky. Settle my mind.
No, fill my veins with red ants.
Never allow my blood to pool or cool
or stand placid as the surgeon's before his work.

Thunder among my muscles. Hail
upon my bleached bones. Raise nations;
raise wind. Bow wheat stalks
in rivers. Scatter my seed
to those only with wings.

Kevin Rabas - Reseed


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Let’s not talk of healing yet
nor making love
nor of ingenious devices
replacing touch.
And this is not theoretical:
A poem with calipers to hold a
heart
so it will want to go on beating.

Adrienne Rich - excerpt from Calibrations