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