Poems

Purgatorio

I sit, still,
cloven,
In the pew of St. James’
Watching smoke rings dissolve into skin;
I light the votives,
I pace the abbey,

How does

                            a ghost move?


Your poster’s on the wall


                I creak like a floorboard


                                I’m down on my hands and knees


                                                        When the pastor has left I flip through the channels.




Sat ‘neath the altar,
I am like a wedding dress,
The organ plays : my secrets spill

Pavement

More and more these days,
Walking back from the 24-hour
Laundromat in the middle of the night,
The sidewalk looks
Static like a row of televisions in a storefront,
A little chrome creek,
And shocks
run up and down my body.
I have to tread lightly now,
I’m walking on glass panes;
I wince
As I catch myself
In little gray reflections

Times I Have Felt Sick Recently

On the intersection of 6th and 11th
Watching your hands, two spiders

Two mood rings on your index finger,
I was never good at reading faces,
Red and burning like a California mountainside and spreading like two plagues

Sitting on the carpeted stairs in the lobby of your brother’s apartment
Listening to his neighbor’s damp footsteps as she stumbled in with her shopping bags
His laugh was like a gas leak and I was as invisible
Haunting the doorman
Slipping through the postern in the middle of the night

And a few days ago, in the nave of St Thomas Church,
when I was distracted by the quiet hum of the furnace
As you were trying to pray