Not-so-clingy Mcguffin

What if losing you

were like nothing so much as

watching a child throw

an erstwhile boomerang

into a once-drowned field?

Even with the approximate knowledge of descent, I pace,

Shift aside the long grace

..shift aside the long grass…with my feet

Look for signs of you-markings like the body of

a coiled snake

Glint of color, perhaps

but you are lost out there

Needle-in-a-hay-field

And I tell them things to tell myself 

You are not a boomerang 

Even a boomerang is not always

a boomerang (when it fails to return across  the field)

Oh darling

Come back to me

in the end.

Missing Juan Cazorla

on the day I tell my daughter it is 

mourning dove with a “u”

I remember you are gone

And count the things I used to say

About your father, your brothers

All named the same

(Like all those George Formans)

I still do not 

Know which fight you lost 

Left to

Cut through the jungle path 

To the sea, to the sea serpent country 

where we were young 

all together.

Break-up Songs (for babies)

in the space of no more than

Half-an-hour

someone steals his little shoes

dear to him/dear to us

Still, just shoes.

At the scene of the crime we

Call their names

Thinking whoever did this has to  love them 

Must have loved them

Oh.  This song I know the words by heart

Sang it all those years ago

With all the other sodden

Unbearable

Break up songs for babies.


To the March

In deep winter

she chooses to suspend 

All the ordinary chores 

Drags a heavy fishing net to the belly

of this man-made stream

Feet first into

cold deep

Swims upstream

where they wait for her

bobbing on the water

snagged by the naked

limbs of winter branches

An old oil can, adorned with red duct tape,

several empty beer bottles,

torn flotational device,

And a veritable tableau of shirts and trousers

Snagged on naked limbs

then animated by the wind

Once carefully extricated

she lines the children up by year, gender, alleged disability

Names them back to life

So they can indeed

Fly, flock of winter birds 

to inauguration.

You and me on the old back porch

 In an already messy old house

I try to find a place to stash my anger

The beat-up old chest?

Grandma’s dresser?

Each place I go I feel your loss

The way a tall boy once held a short girl at arm’s length

As she beat at the air with rage and sorrow

Maybe it is the air that is the problem…

Not enough oxygen?

The matrix of maternal affection somehow dislodged by 

Something?

Something missing.

It is as though the lost girls had become those things-

A trunk, a cup, a worn blanket

Trapped in closets 

…in the minds of monsters

The old childhood nightmare turned on its head-

The child in the closet 

The mother, the monster

Shaking its imaginary head

“Even I could not 

Would not

Do something so unspeakable 

To a human child.”

Already Rome.

I am not much of a pro-sports fan, although I try sometimes for the sake of my partner.

I feel less inclined to try now that the famously laconic Gregg Popovich had words for this recent election and the folk who voted red.

So many things you said worth noting Mr. P, but the one that stuck out the most?  Like if I could only pick one thing you said to comment on–You are afraid we are Rome?

Long been Rome, I would say.

 We have not only tolerated legalized infanticide for the last 43 years through Roe v. Wade, we now allow the concessions which provide the service of salting, vacuuming, dismembering, and dehumanizing small, voiceless humans through the months of their development in the womb both federal funds and deep privacy in order to abort and also harvest the bodies of these exploited children.

If you were to ask an ordinary person, say a woman or a disabled  person–would you rather be verbally belittled or carefully vivisected for spare parts?

Belittled, thanks very much.

The latter-death by legal and medical caveat.  Pretty disenfranchising.

To be clear, very clear–we, the citizens of the United States, have long been Rome.  Infanticide is infanticide is infanticide, Mr. P. 

How many millions of female, minority, Muslim, immigrant, disabled American voters did not vote in this election because we legalized their murder years ago?

No words will bring them back.

Weighted Blanket

in a fit of unease 

she has an out-of-body experience 

Rising above the squalor

Imagining what it would be like

To live inside the perfect house

Instead–she dusts the counters and all the edges

with cinnamon to deter the sugar ants

Beats the air with questions

Washes and re-washes clothes, stones, teeth 

Delays bodily functions  

To search for

-The weighted blanket-

Surrogate mother/synthetic comforter

Lyrics/verses 

of a lullaby sung softly by the

Real One

Hell in a hand-basket?

A basket full of deplorables:

they say love is in the eye of the beholder

Whatever the heck that means

But what about deplorable?

Is that open for interpretation as well?

Or is it etymologically and irrevocably anchored to hell?

To white, doughy, affluent men who use their power and money to force themselves on teenagers?

Or white, doughy, affluent women

Who malign child rape victims to 

Free the perps sooner,

take their campaign donations by the hundred million

Buckets full of baby parts

Littering the sterile field

Capitalizing on

the saline burn, scissor beheading

Of minority

disabled

And female fetuses

Deplorable

Basket 

where there should be babies

Jacob Wetterling 

they say you should not 

look directly 

at the sun

ignoring the real possibility 

that it is the night 

that has already

blinded us

To the scared, cold, 

Ordinary child

In each photograph

Owned by 

This oddball monster

While the dying sun,

Claw-handed scribe, failing light,

Scribbles justicejusticejusticejusticejusticejusticejusticejusticejusticejusticejusticejusticejustice…justicejusticejustice

Into one kind of eternity

Or another