ghazal: results 1–13 of 13

If it wasn't for the windows, it would all be so different.

The light forced to choose sides, shadows grow different.

A house of glass with wooden gaps wrapped by trees,

gray inside when it rains, at dawn no different.

Porches hold what's too nice for closets. Reminders.

Rackets and bats, balls that you're taught to throw different.

She watched my arm's arc as I heaved the stick.

I plumbed her eyes for something, and the dog retrieved the stick.

At the abandoned mine she put her hand on mine

To guide me first to second; awkwardly, I learned to drive stick.

Scallop of the top lip crowned in points, full pout

of the lower lip, teeth even ivories, an aristocratic mouth.

Before alar and DDT and GMO's, she was a red stone

in a cling peach whose stem was an aromatic mouth.

Gone grazin'. You Boch-drunk. Clink of spoons on sunglasses—

Me, girl gone glisterlight. Whitehot malaise in the grasses

Gone soft aspen slantlight that blisters, then passes—

Gone your kisses, O my Clearing! Wildwooded ways in the grasses…

This one goes out to all the wedding guests

who got sloshed on free booze then pissed on their cell phones.

Land-lines are for chumps who don't mind getting tapped;

pimps, cons, and dealers subsist on their cell phones.

Auguries interpreted incorrectly caused a fever.

Dry heat leathers skin, embeds bread in bones that know there's more.

Gift the thunderegg, teethe on junipers, drive to the white dove.

One one-thousand, two…, lightning and strike unwed—wait there's more.

First, dependence is our only enterprise.

The dirt-nuzzle. Sunlight's rough tongue-lick of the body.

First, change happens only to the sky.

Lost in up-gaze, we grow down. How cryptic of the body.

Unlike the dress her mother wore, with long lace

sleeves and buttoned to the neck, a polite dress,

hers has a scoop neck not too low, filmy

fabric swaying with each step, a not too tight dress…

The teacher's assignment: Stop making sense.

No problem; all along, we've only been half-baking sense.

Wrinkled new red body, startling in the empty air, once blanketed

by mother flesh, now swaddled tight in an imitating blanket.

Might some young Einstein not re-fuse this bleak-appointed nucleus,

Retool its quarks, by Bunsen's blue-tongued flame, into Florida?

When I opened the front door the moon erupted.

I called to the crows and was answered by feathers.

And what hope does an average girl have when the gossip's

already turned her into a cold-blooded pariah, a bitch deluxe?

A spurned lover here, a few premenstrual days there and I'm

gorgonizing men in their tracks like some monster from the lochs.