Three Poems
Hungry Poem
The dietitian said peanut
butter not butter,
one egg, be spinach, find a walnut.
Less juice, more lack.
Not my kind of punishment, though.
If she only said green, the color of light
bounced off a leaf
can enter your mouth,
that would have appealed to me.
Mom said Dad, Dad said Mom.
It was almost as if they could stop growing
and be a tree stump.
Later, at the Hare Krishna free vegetarian feast,
I ate insincerely
bowls of BBQ tofu chunks. Avoided eyes
by staring at the chunky menstrual sauce.
I sniffed the old chemical mark.
Nobody had my head in their hands.
This is the oldest song in the world.
It was carved into a clay tablet.
God I was hungry
for mighty is the Lord
in his lack of mindfulness.
The Problem with Language Is Using It
I think I’m made of holes,
so how do they hold hands?
Or am I made of briars and my father
was a scrambling shrub?
“I’m holes, no I’m briars,”
I say aloud from the deck
of a boat while land gets tinier
until I can’t see anything.
So writers want to paint,
painters want to dance, and dancers
want to be balls of light. Ball lightning
is mysterious, explained
by strained theories
like the buoyant plasma hypothesis,
a terrible name for a band
which also does not stand
up to peer review. I know I’m no
ball of light. Now somebody concrete
is reading over my shoulder. She says,
“You are made of very soft parts
layered over harder parts
protecting even softer parts”
—the vagueness and the distance
of her comment reminds me of when
I was run over and knocked out
by a feral dog, then woke
happy to note
an alien rivulet
I slowly came to learn
was my own blood.
Unconscious Self-Regulation
The universe does not have
or need a mind, but it should grow
a mouth, since I would like its voice
to shake the fluid in my cochleae
and ruffle tiny cilia.
Hearing requires trembling, trembling
is sexual, terror, awe,
fatigue, fever, or cold—
and when I’m cold, I shake.
Unconscious self-regulation
isn’t a beautiful phrase.
Today I saw a bee fall.
It feasted on fermented limes
then tottered, drunk, around my palm.
I didn’t feel like a god.
Thank God I don’t feel like a god.
Thank God I feel like a bee
is constantly stinging my brain.