ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

 
FOUR POEMS
by Sage Cohen

Night of the Open Mic

In this corner store of war
men too many for membranes
music makes you manic.
You'd play pool. Drink or smoke or
some ruinous thing, but you are
seven pages deep, all angles.
Were not honest about what you wanted.
A full suitcase to some new place.
What do we say to our smaller sanctions?
How does Brian stay alive?
What happens here happens everywhere.
You sit rimmed in tin, spinning until
the straw hat weakens without its weave.
Everything needs a pattern to keep the idea intact.
You need a room with music and the dancing
brimhatted lady. I'm so wet she says. Yes, she is wet
drenched in the night's darkness
and you are curling up in circles.
You need a band to back you up.
Lean into it and let it leave you.
Faces shushed to booze.
Just look at us. So much crap to wade
through to get to the little loose curls.
The woman laughs and calls you pretty.
The authentic is not easily achieved. The list is long.
Kyra opens the case and proves her point.
You do what you say.
You're here to stay but don't like the music
but don't like the music, but don't like
the sick skinny girls
who see signs when you see patterns.

Both choices involve a sourdough roll

Today my brother who is not dead is 27.
It is a day of stones,
the heavy accumulations of my life.
Eyes rolled back into the place
where language lives while sleeping.
Please, please, I say but nothing changes.

The ocean is itself in the way that our lives
move from idea to punishment.
The mirror stabilizes our looking with reflection.
Looking out, we see how
the picture frame is uneven with the wall,
how a mother slaps her child and calls him stupid.
We all live in temporary shelter
between the fire and the second hand.

Best to have red seeping.
Otherwise, where would red be?
Clumped between the bathroom tiles?
Red is what you find between the cushions of the couch.
The boyfriend leaves it behind
or the baby takes it with her
and then favors a plastic shark instead.

You are susceptible. You are seeds on the wind.
Loosely connected. New, small, afraid
of where the wind might take you
and terribly beautiful.
The world's pain is in your backpack.
You say it's ok when it is not ok.
Both choices involve a sourdough roll.
If you could keep your movement to a minimum,
go along with the plan, let your head roll back into the scenery,
the reasons would appear at your window like birds.

Cross out the inaccurate sentence and let the child wander in.
Give more women to the story. More layers.
Which frayed end leads to something whole?
The wounded walk into the same traps twice.
Circling in search of some small comfort
to fall down upon.



For you, lost in the night

The imprint is what remains.
False, as it must be.
The reverse of shape.
The absence.

It is not the building. Not the love.
But what they represent.
The people they shelter.

I don't know where to call home or who lives there.

Is return ever possible?
Each time the door closes,
the house heals over and starts again.
Crossing its threshold, we become someone else.

The father goes to work and doesn't return.
It is the expectation of continuity that destroys us.

Surely, this is a sickness.
Waiting at the site of the blast
for the illusion to repair itself back into form.

I say I am doing the best I can, but I am not.
I could do nothing. That would be better.
If I could be still, maybe something larger
than what I am trying to create
would emerge. The way a landscape rises up
around the curve in the road.
The way the family sits at the table,
without the father, and eats.

At the Nuyorican Poets Café

I'm waiting for winter to ruin me
so I don't have to do it myself.
The lining of my coat has separated
from the leather. I never finish my
sentences. Cast the line of some hopeful idea
into the dark rush of conversation
then step out of the way and see
what catches. Tonight it's an argument
about erections on nude beaches.
I am not understood.
It's a 7.8 night.
No one is winning.
The waitress brings coffee
in styrofoam cups.
Leaning over our table
her shirt buckles
to include the breasts.
Behind her a painting.
Blue sperm arched upstream
into the bluer blue of an open eye.
The walls retaliate with white.
My mouth tastes like lipstick.
I am on the other side
of the smile I'm smiling.
The woman on stage
discusses her tendencies.
The judges are paying
close attention
to her leather pants
and each other.
Nothing is objective.
I think of the way
the things I love
get lost
in the things I hate.