THE BUTCH BRUSH

Wide as an oar
and black as asphalt,
it twines with hair 
on the backseat
of my car. 

Some of my best friends
are poems, and some
of my friends are poems too. 

My busted backyard grill
is a Connecticut winter
in the summer heat.  
I am a kid coming home
from a few months at school. 

The older I get, the fewer things
I keep in my car. 

IF THE COLONEL EVER CALLS

If late at night there is a ringing

and it's the Colonel, don't be frightened.

Remember that the funny twists 

of the heron's neck are posture too.

Perhaps the hair on your cheeks

is bristling?  But the Colonel was clean-shaven.

The Colonel's prayers were more communication 

than supplication; the old phone

is more of an appliance than a relic.

 If the Colonel asks for a report, tell him

everyone's fine; the rocky island in the bay

is white with birds.  

MY FIRST WORDS WERE FLOOR IT

From the angle of the sun
through my bedroom window
this morning, I can tell:
it is 1986. The community college
parking lot is bursting with Firebirds;
stereo lights are constellations.
At night, the clouds thicken
into an empty map. They reflect
the light from down town. This morning
is one minute between rains,
and the drops on the leaves
are blinking messages from the future,
and while decoding them, I've forgotten
what year it is.

Now that I've scraped the house,
it is time to decide what color to paint,
but I feel like the work is done.
The house, streaked and ugly, is
what happens now; the house
painted grey-blue with white trim
is in the shady fortune-cookie future.

When I was learning to drive,
my first words were "floor it."
But now, in the future, I know
so many more. My foot eases
the pedal down; I repeat
the grocery list in my head.

Edgar the Crawfish

Ed's armor-like shell
is made of plastic, but
he magnetically points East
toward Chocolate Bayou
and the big Bay, toward
summertime canals
broken by cannonballs,
and toward redfish schooling
beneath the Twilight Princess

Away in New York, we sip
crustacean-colored cocktails
while we wait for hot Friday
night to fall. Follow Kevin's
curses from the back room:
we will lock a cherry beneath
the knuckle of a lemon
and twist up a straw for you.

Nearly to Bay Ridge, a girl in red high heels took one off on the 4th Ave. R platform to put a bandage on her foot, and I was reminded of you. Maybe it WAS you; tired memory could not tell me, but I was momentarily caught between the mystery of our present and a passion in my past, and the sight of your shoe alone on the concrete busted my heart up into a hundred thousand tiny red flowers.

Ancient History

Curious. What we remember
from across an age -- eight years
ago, evening light like marmalade
on a tar-paper roof, and a girl
bent out the back window.

Coins clinking on the concrete
floor of the bar beneath the highway,
but there were no coins, but
there was definitely a bar.
Light the color of a dirty Popsicle
cut up on the floor by the blinds.

But the mornings I remember best,
the light reflecting blue off of your bedspread.
I'd find a dirty shirt for work while, in your sleep,
you pushed yourself against your bed.

The Sticky 'Rickshaw

Your manners are skittery, Mr. Agnes,
are you frightened? The sign of the sine as defined
by this sunguard's line is all we have to go on, how
is your gradeschool geometry? The click of hoof
and wheel on stone will tick a thousand blessings
until: silence, and we are at the embassy, Mr. Agnes,
your reckoning delayed once more.

Between the Grains

What hides down inside
these planks of wood?
Stringy cellulose
on a bed of lignin
or, in softer species,
tracheids. But probably not
my keys.

The Water and the Faucet

From the deepest Adirondacks it comes
through tunnel and town, emerging
cold as a Coors from my tap.

Sloughters Do It Better

and they do it from the Morrissey
concerts of Manhattan to the thoroughbred
sales of Ocala. Sloughters are an inspiration
in their decadence and their eloquence.

You who have explored the empty lots
of Asia. You whose birthday was attended
by Li'l Jon. You are the hard-chiseled soul
of our beloved Montechillo.

Come Back Brontosaurus

because I am as useless as a fire hydrant
in the backyard. Come over hand, and
meet this other hand. From the dirty
sands of memory and apathy, release
from your long necks and from your big mouths
a sound as big as a meteor and as bright
as a volcano. This is where our hearts began.

While An April Storm The Cat

While another April storm
rolls in, the cat is acting weird
again. He sits in the bathroom
staring at the wall like a depressed
teenager, but (like me)
he is approximately middle-aged.


I try to remind myself that his walnut brain
cannot stand up to my pathetic fallacies,
but still here I am on the bathroom floor
staring at the cat, trying to divine
my own ideas by imagining his.

finding fine things in dirty tides

Dear friends, freaks, and bigger fishes,

The brave among us will wade through a rare Wednesday reading when the abundantly talented and attractive Dora Malech and Kristin Jane Kelly will join us for a reading in the back room of the famous Face. This will be an unusually good reading, even by our high standards.

6:30 PM on April 6th at the fabulous Four-Faced Liar. Bios below.

See you there!

Shafey


*

Dora Malech grew up in Maryland, earned a BA in Fine Arts from Yale in 2003, and earned an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2005. She is the author of Shore Ordered Ocean (Waywiser, 2010), and Say So (CSUPC). She has taught writing at the University of Iowa; Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington, New Zealand; Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois; and Saint Mary’s College of California in Moraga, California. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

Kristin Kelly, a native Kansan, received a BA from University of Oregon and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the author of Cargo (Elixir Press), and currently lives in Northampton, MA, where she owns a women's boutique, ODE.

Shunts, Crampons, and Dongles

slipping on ice, snow, etc.
we passed a whole winter

a spiked iron plate worn
down with wear

a device for grasping and lifting
heavy loads, usually consisting
of a pair of hooks; opposable thumbs
and fingers menacing as claws

boots or shoes aid in climbing
or to prevent sores all over our feet

suspended from a chain or cable,
upward pull of our funny little jobs and needs:
tension for the hooks to grip the load

the act of shunting; shift

bridged across a circuit or a portion of a circuit,
establishing a current path auxiliary to the main circuit,
as a resistor placed across the terminals of (I am)
or increasing the range of the device

(a railroad switch.)

blood or other bodily fluid is diverted
from its normal path; my mind is buzzing
with my own medical misunderstanding

a hardware device is attached without which particulars
will not run: used to prevent us from staring for hours
at a single word; three words annihilate an entire morning

Is every Billy in history
a lovable, troublesome heartbreaker,
or does it just seem that way right now?

Bryan the Punk Rock Butcher (Senior!)

a miniature Punk Rock Butcher
is delivered unto the Catskills today

let the snowy hills ring with a fuzzy G
chord, for the world now has another
really cool dad

happy birthday Miss Punk Rock
Butcher Junior,

& don't buy the expensive knives
they'll just wear out anyway

That comfortable feeling is upon me
of a single finger slipped into
an undergarment's elasticity.
Maybe it's the cold Gulf Coast
humidity; maybe it's uncertainty,
or maybe it's just stupidity.
It seems like anything is almost
possible, but when I'm here,
nothing is also fine with me.

Bitch...Just Joshing!

Just rode the L train with a gaggle of NY teenagers, all of whom seemed cooler and more fully-realized than I've ever felt in my life. One of them asked what "joshing" means. Another said "that's what you say when you're kidding; like, "bitch... just joshing!"" Then two of the guys demonstrated it. One said "bitch...just joshing," and then the two of them hugged.

A NIGHT ON THE TOWN

Times Square burned daylight down
onto the avenue long after
the sunset's leftovers disappeared.

I moved from tavern to tavern
talking about girls and commas,
commas and girls.

My companion for the evening
was a tough guy from Cleveland,
and when a particular bouncer
decided he'd have enough of us,
my friend showed me the truth
behind his short stories.

We were the terrors of the Square
until his honey called, and the night
was over.

Back home, I am trying to tell
my story to a word processor,
but I picked up some faint scent
of yours in my hair, and now
my tired brain thinks only of you.

AN IMAGINARY TRIP AROUND THE WORLD WITH LORI BURKE

The Tarmac sighed at JFK, relieved of the weight
of another jet plane, and we were off: the air so deep blue
I was sure we were astronauts in space.

We splashed down in the wet streets of London;
the fog found us in a fine embrace, and the damp air masked
the sweat of my hands. The world was quickly getting older.

In Paris I blinked and you were gone; it was a mystery.
Unfortunately, so was my French. But I found you
at the Louvre, and I helped pitch your tent
so you could stay as long as you liked. And you did.

Horus and Anubis awaited us in Egypt,
but an Anatolian tide drifted us East across the Mediterranean,
where we got sidetracked while swimming with the Cypriots.

We sheepishly snuck through the Suez,
and the crocodiles of the Nile clapped their jaws together
in recognition of your beauty.

Up through the former Republics we pushed,
from Copts to gypsies and Cossacks to Jews,
then you donned a burkha (and I did too!)
and we were anonymous sisters
as we snuck through the cradle of civilization.

We bumped toward the Orient on elephant-back in India,
shedding clothing as the subcontinent became increasingly tropical.

Then Angkor Wat, where our eyes widened,
and our tongues forked,
and you said "we're Western no more"
in a language we'd never heard,
but that we both somehow understood.

Hong Kong was all catamarans and baccarat
with my brother's fiancée's family.
Also: the sun reflected off the waters of the Pearl River Delta
and onto your naked feet.

South America was a blur unequalled;
suffice to say that Bogota will never be the same.

We smuggled ourselves across the border
in the back of a snowbird's motor home;
we both had changed beyond the recognition
of our US Customs Dept.

Our ancestral homeland the Gulf Coast would not forget us,
from mom and dad to the snakes and possums and pelicans,
but no one was as happy and as proud to see us
as our own private Brooklyn apartments.
Let's meet again next Tuesday to hatch our plan
to do it all over once more.