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“Skinny
Legs and All”
Ellen
Cherry found her lost sock.
She
found it in the parking lot of a Pic 'n' Save
Under a half
deflated tire. Sock was tired,
Ratty, losing threads,
unraveling, feeling
Bellicosity against mankind. Really, to
be plucked
From a safe drawer with friends, the
yellow
Panties, the red panties with a bow, the red
panties
Without, her toys and lavender satchels, all
the
Warmth afforded a sock, raised in a comfortable
Air
conditioned apartment without mildew,
Without worrying about
being spilled on,
Run over, pulled apart, befrazzeled by
the
Aforementioned mankind, it was enough to
Convince Sock
that there was no humanity,
No reason to not unthread, to let
oneself be coaxed
Into a world beyond sockdom, where snags,
Odorous feet (Ellen Cherry had nice feet), the loss
Of
one's mate, the rough range of concrete, all these
Exemplify
the properties of caring about one's fate.
All this molded
down to the one answer Sock
Plucked from the bowels of faith,
the cotton mouthed
Moment of absolution, when Sock was ready
to throw
In the towel, and then Ellen Cherry picked him up.
In
Our House
Anxious
regret, a polished moment of silvery
Undoings that threaten to
overflow at any time,
Has
found the key to the backdoor. Again. And
Yet, this time, we
take barely any notice of her
Scurrilous
movements. She became an accoutrement
Long ago, a sort of
right to enter each week anew
And
to pretend that we are both here, in the same
Moment in the
same house with the same set of
Keys
and intentions to do better. Intentions that
Clog up the
pipes, and send raw messages that no
Longer
get read. It is strange to see how far the light
Creeps back
into her own shadow here, and the
Way
the corners of the house no longer hold back
Secrets. We are
beautiful and unmoving, the two
Of
us, bound tightly up into a glare of duplicity.
Hunt
for Sparrows
I
don't know about this brand of happiness
You are offering, as
though I must choose one
Or the other, trying to discern the
risks. I can't
Recall which is bad, so I choose neither,
leaving
Them like bags on the shelves of the store.
I
find comfort in not deciding, in letting
Other influences
deter my own fluctuation of self
Perpetuating myth. I lost
this ability inside to
Love, realizing the breath we share is
not just
For me, not just to belong to this group we call
Love and this megalomaniac need to belong to
A whale pod
in Puget Sound, as they sound off
Each other in a noise we
don't hear unless we are
Surfacing at the right moment
between blindness
And lust. I recall your hands and how they
look
On my breasts and the things that make us intangible
To
others when we speak in silent words, blooming
Beyond the
same old garden flowers. In this disease
It would start to
make sense, the world, things that go
Wrong, the way we are
lied to, the hidden truisms,
The way it hurts to think
of high school, the bruises
On my legs, the way that one
piece of hair always goes
The wrong direction, or how, that
night, I lost a part
Of the sky to you and the lake as you
walked away.
I could see you just as plainly as the
love you wore
On your back was something I could find without
trying to,
And we spend forever committing silence against
each other.
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