ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

Slow Simmer

Since you left
my hard-boiled eggs are much better,
the yolks are perfect yellow,
would match the swatch in the cooking section
of your mother's Good Enough for My Boy guide.

Long gone are the gray-green rings
around the center, a certain sign of
carelessness, a broken timer,
too much heat.

Even the cracked shell slips off
in large easy pieces,
leaving whole the tender white moon
of underflesh.



Brevity

It lasts only for a moment—
that red-orange burn on the retina
after looking too long at the sun

or elliptic ripples on the surface,
on the surface of a pond
when a stone thrown sideways sinks.

It lingers, then is gone—
the kiss of brandy-soaked lady
finger on lips, on the tongue

and lilac or honeysuckle
cut in clusters, teardrop oil
rubbed between bones.

It rumbles to a dead rest:
thunder after lightning, the ground
when wild horses run through

and you, the aftershock,
before my senses could learn your phrases,
translate you.


Earlobes

I wasn't wearing earrings
when he first spoke to me between
the aisles of the poetry section,
asked how long I've admired H.D.,
how sparely decorated her poetry is.

I would've been wearing studs, the ones
that look like suns or flowers:
pointed silver petals, rays
around black onyx eyes

but I'd forgotten them
so my earlobes hung bare
like soft, fleshy peaches unpicked.

Had he quoted H.D.:
Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air—
Had he said
Believe in your nakedness.
I might have given him my lobes.

Instead he launched into a discourse
about the excesses of Romanticism from which Les Imagistes departed
he was still talking when I left.