The Stranger

Consider life's billion anxious
gulps of oxygen, smog porridge
sucked ad nauseam. If a wily

Camus invites us to agree
that Sisyphus is happy, I'm
satisfied to dream Camus'

Algeria: super-heated sands
hemming the Mediterranean,
and a raucous newborn

gleaming with slime, a just-plucked
shell held high into the sun. Her
nomad-father's rutted palms

obliterate all light, his desert-
dimmed eyes squinting to find
stripes, moles, stigma, signs—

imperfections to justify
a drowning. No surprise. Just too few
dried figs, no gods or fires

driving them forward, into the sea,
ancient terrors, shallow waters
heaving salt, fish, history.

originally published in The Brownstone Review No. 5; re-published in P.F.S. Post

Bridge

I know your arms & legs are cold.
In November the river shifts

slowly, silver ghost of its body
barely stirred, ice already forming.

And today, midday, I heard you moan.
Grinding bones of a steel-strapped frame.

As if you had moved, or tried to.
As if the surging light was painful.

originally published by the Toledo Review

Dune Rose

It's the name of a lipstick I wear
most days, proving
poetry's indomitable, ingrained, like the Namer

herself, wrestling thousands of new
untitled tubes- scarlets,
magentas, blue-reds, browns- but none

a gash, none a wound, no blood,
nothing wilted.
Stumbling cylinder to cylinder,

knowing full well what these balms
mean to a woman
dogging beauty.

Then at night, alone, aged skin
phosphorescent & furrowed
as a moon, she tends garden.

Pruning, shaping, watering
roots she planted in sand,
watering the sand.

originally published in New Zoo Poetry Review Volume 5

Freud's Bowery

The artist means to take control: ribboning linen,
preening paint (ochre, ebon, gold!), laying
light in oily waves to an image

he creates: one absurdly out-sized, nude,
hairless man, mounded bellies hung over dancer's gams,
long mauve penis ripening with blood

while eyes once lost in a sea of fat and skin
press forward to command, first the painter,
then those who stand in the gallery gaping.

originally published in Threepenny Review 73