Merry Christmas

A Life- Sylvia Plath

Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball,
This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.
Here's yesterday, last year ---
Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast
Windless threadwork of a tapestry.

Flick the glass with your fingernail:
It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir
Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.
The inhabitants are light as cork,
Every one of them permanently busy.

At their feet, the sea waves bow in single file.
Never trespassing in bad temper:
Stalling in midair,
Short-reined, pawing like paradeground horses.
Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled and fancy

As Victorian cushions. This family
Of valentine faces might please a collector:
They ring true, like good china.

Elsewhere the landscape is more frank.
The light falls without letup, blindingly.

A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle
About a bald hospital saucer.
It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper
And appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.
She lives quietly

With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle,
The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture
She has one too many dimensions to enter.
Grief and anger, exorcised,
Leave her alone now.

The future is a grey seagull
Tattling in its cat-voice of departure.
Age and terror, like nurses, attend her,
And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold,
Crawls up out of the sea.

Portland

We're digging our names into the basement boards of historic hotels
with revolving doors and etched glass,
and linoleum chrysanthemums, perched on " can i help
you please?" front desks that
the receptionist has left empty and dry like an untreated open
sore,] while she shoos the women and men in too many coats
with too many outstretched hands,
chapped and swollen red like the apples of your cheeks after
crushing snow flakes with your arms and legs, you're
an animated mortar and pestle, smashing beautiful
angels into the backdrop of a gutter squatting winter wonderland.

The moonlight hangs heavily above
but the street lamps guide our way through this
city that brought us together so many times,
zig-zagging though stained sidewalks, pin-up style skirts, and
24-hour donut shops with the strongest, most god-awful coffee
that burnt my tongue, and you made me drink the cold, cold
water out of those water fountains that look like gaudy
18th century replica art, the kind my grandmother promises
to give me when she dies, and I promise you I will never
decorate with when we move into a seventies Victorian on 23rd
street with the teal paneling and too large bay windows that stare
into me like a crystal ball, whispering secrets into my candy-apple ears,
because it's so damn cold here.

But I wonder how the poppies smell and how the heat
waves dance atop the blue and foam slamming
into the golden coast, where iridescent midriffs ripple beneath
our very own celestial body that defines what we call ourselves
when we travel places that don't understand progressive
movements that force the world to think in a direction
it never understood before, while the midriffs desperately grasp
for different shades of brown, smoking neatly rolled mounds of
'tobacco', reading about The Inferno and what it means to be
a sinner, so they drip drop coins to the nickeled-and dimed who piss
behind the Hilton, legs splayed like spindly cartoon frogs,
their hands calloused from steel strings and wrought iron edges
of the boxcars we found when looking for another life.

The Untrustworthy Speaker by Louise Gluck

Don't listen to me; my heart's been broken.
I don't see anything objectively.

I know myself; I've learned to hear like a psychiatrist.
When I speak passionately,
That's when I'm least to be trusted.

It's very sad, really: all my life I've been praised
For my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight-
In the end they're wasted-

I never see myself.
Standing on the front steps. Holding my sisters hand.
That's why I can't account
For the bruises on her arm where the sleeve ends . . .

In my own mind, I'm invisible: that's why I'm dangerous.
People like me, who seem selfless.
We're the cripples, the liars:
We're the ones who should be factored out
In the interest of truth.

When I'm quiet, that's when the truth emerges.
A clear sky, the clouds like white fibers.
Underneath, a little gray house. The azaleas
Red and bright pink.

If you want the truth, you have to close yourself
To the older sister, block her out:
When I living thing is hurt like that
In its deepest workings,
All function is altered.

That's why I'm not to be trusted.
Because a wound to the heart
Is also a wound to the mind.

Green is the new Black

We're forward thinking,
economists of a new millennium,
selling hymns and psalms on
polyester t-shirts, 2-for-1
specials with complimentary
plastic bags, stained
with smiley faced suns
and neon flowers hugging trees.

Roaches

I cracked my head
open, on the kitchen floor
to prove to you
that I had brains.
Like an egg,
I spilled out.
All of me, yolk and
all, crept through
the cracked linoleum
slipping under the refrigerator.
And my last thought
was to clean the floor
in case of roaches.

Ten years old, Visitation

Dad stumbles toward me
arms outstretched like a
windmill, whirling round
and round.
I tumble down,
like a rag doll
flop flopping
to the bottom
of the stairs.

Metal

Her foot taps in a perfect four count,
a beautiful time signature in converse
shoes with headphones the size of
cantaloupes cut in half and suction
cupped to each ear,
bleating like a snowy sheep
dying at the hands of its Shepard.