Category: Poetry for mojo 8

This is why Autumn never
smells like rain: The kids lit
the cornfield on fire to hear
kernels unstopping themselves
like corks. The kids had popped
something in their brains, red.
Little. Round. Riddles came spilling
from tightly twisted bottles
the color of pumpkins rotting.
The corn husk dolls weren’t lifting
their skirts for fear of their ankles
igniting as they danced. This is why
Autumn doesn’t listen to anyone,
and the crickets crawl back
to their violin-less homes. The kids
were stoned, stoning, stones staring
up at the stars while waiting for ones
to fall on their faces. They felt that
close. This is why Autumn is lined
with leafy litter and tastes of hollow,
burrowed into, as it were, by worms.
With the corn husk hems already
curling in flame, the dolls had fallen,
like snow, in love with Their Own.
Kids just can’t stay young enough
to keep their skins from becoming
sweaters thrown over bones. This is
why the dolls eventually won’t look
themselves in the husks any more
than a potato can eye the teeth
that will sink it or why an ear
of corn shuts up what it might
have heard the kids whisper behind
a flimsy curtain of silk that’ll burn.

It’s winter: My grandmother strains
yogurt outside. It’s winter: We bathe
in rosewater. The yogurt thickens as the wind
blows in A minor through an ancient synagogue,
built, destroyed and rebuilt again,
as our noses breathe in Havdalah spices.

We leave our bread behind, our cousin imprisoned
for a crime even the guards can’t name.
Death sentence.
Release.
Run.
The wind never saw our people leaving, we who slept
on rooftops with you, we who charred fish on
brushwood fires with you.
Our feet sore, we tell ourselves, from millennia spent
standing still. Funny, how quickly the eye
loses its hand.

Now, in the land of milk and cactus fruit
the yogurt has thickened to leben. Sit under
the olive tree, salt of the Dead
Sea on our lips, let’s talk about the home
we’ll never see again.

A day before turning seventy
I drove to the secondhand store
with my mother’s grandfather clock.
It was antique white with gold scrolls
and a timepiece made in Germany
that no longer chimed nor told time.
Its glass shelves held her collection
of Royal Doulton figurines
my father bought to please her,
though her pleasure never lasted.

I tried to find a place for it
for years after she died. But I can’t
keep forever what someone else possessed,
besides, before she died she had already
forgotten. I’ve kept her boxed figurines,
hand-painted china, her diamond solitaire.

Ghosts of the dead linger above days,
tangled in memories of what they once loved—
their music lifting from children’s
woodwinds and brass; homesickness
weeping through yellowed letters;
a lover’s poem written before I was born.

My mother still tells time. It is
just before dinner when she arrives,
finds her way back to me through
summer tomatoes simmering,
kettle of yellow corn. For a spell
she lingers, seemingly satisfied, always
happy to be here, beyond time.

You can tell a lot about where my brain is
by whether I write the trees are blushing
or the trees are crying skin. Right now,
my brain is about three inches outside of my skull.
A lopsided orbit, it falls
toward me, changing direction just before
kissing my skin. I am sucking my thumb
down to shellbone, shucking my fingernails,
chewing my gloves, a hand always over my mouth.
My to-do list has started to contain items like:
Stand up. Open a door. Take a breath. Eat an apple.
I have been eating mostly apples. They shine at me
like crystallized hearts.
It is cold enough for their juice to chap my lips.
I don’t even know which direction
the frost is coming from anymore.