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Editor's
Note
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SNR's
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No
More Love Songs
You
say "we're lovers,"
as if the force of love in our
face
could take us back to our redoubtable selves,
the
place where you'd write, "I'm looking for you,
I'm
finding daisies in the waste."
It's
that same clarity— your brown hand sifting,
sludge
falling away, petals in the hand—
I
never got,
or got how easy it was—
how on the
beaches of your mind
I was to splay and lie. Get wet.
your
sack of light.
In
taxis with my sick mother,
dead dog, colitic friends,
I, a
penny-pincher: malevolent, paunchy I,
felt the press of that
thing,
your grin for me, the stars in that grin.
In me:
cramps, bad winds.
The
nights get colder.
Snow piles up loud on the roof. Hail.
Perfect you, a tidy memory.
Me? Eyes closed like a truck
with a thrown wheel on the freeway.
The
Obnoxious Die Too
Jut-headed
and heavy, he swivels toward me,
eyes watering on his own
behalf;
arms to the wall beside me, he says
"Put
yourself in my position,"
and, stifling my nostrils,
puts himself too close to mine.
I have a hell of a time
getting away;
his camo zippers bruised my fingers
I've got
convex badges on my skin!
Beautiful naked land, you've got
a mangy
little flab of a defender, I am saying
to the
little protests of my wristbones with every turn of the steering
wheel
as the sun comes up on the forest.
Still: I tune in
every night
and I watch the figures.
He leaped on a
grenade. I attend the funeral
with the wives of those he
saved,
lying in state, his folds improminent,
badges
embossed and bold.
Lips turned up to the pale sunlight.
They
cover him with the flag. Taps.
The
Child: Tophet
I.
Father
sired us, Mum carried us like bags,
all up the hills and down
to Tophet.
I stretched my limbs, blinked fluid from my
eyes.
Through open lips I gave a liquid low.
II.
The
pebbles:
horse-head, horse-head, marble, marble,
veiny,
shiny, black and tender,
flat on the palm, rust-flecked.
We
cupped bird eggs and licked the air,
your foot callused and
specked on the pavement,
my chin up, whistling, the
summer--gauze.
Our teeth jutted.
You had your wrist out,
angled down.
It was always this way:
the clouds over
your head, blue under,
the low float, old timbers,
our
rasping thumbs, sun, mold
on the wood.
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