POETRY
“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”
Any still figure at mid-late evening, when the long shadows make even crumbs appear arranged like furniture.
You let the yellow glow
from eye sockets. The building up the street
is burning faster and faster.
I imagine that undressing a color, though, would be so much like peeling a memory away from the grey and the white matter of your brain.
Mostly he ate what was put on his plate
snuck coffee grounds or dirt for a snack
Once a zipper Unzipped
I slumped in front of a massive desk, a passive patient corroded with failure and dread.
Do not say anything anybody else has said ever. Things are not “bleached by sun.”
the strands of your hair on the bathroom tiles aren’t sketching defeat. that’s you spitting disease in the face with another day you’ve woken up to.
We found in his suitcase T-shirts, his siddur, gifts he bought for his grandchildren…
and apples, mackintosh mostly, but any kind left in The Pub
at the Assisted Living Place
Ghosts for hire, whispers in her mouth,
cysts to feel, the symmetry of a gift.