Fun: For Leonid Telyatnikov

When you showed up, the five roof fires spread quickly and even though your brother was born on that same day years before, you smiled and sprayed.
Suitless and unprotected, you smiled and sprayed. Unlistened madness, ritual behaviors: blow out the candles.

And now I wonder if you would be impressed after releasing a flame, how another strange creature dances in a moonlit and empty countryside.


the lynx
the lynx

keeper of secrets, protector of unlistened secrets
i'm blessed for your presence
i'm blessed by your smile
i'm blessed by your spray

their typical behavior is that of peeing in a hole,
covering the urine, waiting ten years
and taa-daa
a garnet
a gem
a beauty worth an economy

But all of this: the story,the man, the beast, the place --
it pales in what is now the largest reserve of life and green
of new bursts, of natural bursts.

A fire, an arrival, an untruth: thirty-one albino swallows.

Seventy Top Tens of Us

underrated body parts, drinks you regret, diseases that sound like exotic names, placed you've cried, news stories with bad puns, fictional characters you wish were real, opening riffs in Who songs not yet used for opening credits, brands you trust, lighting situations, velvet painting topics, old man hairstyles, cash registers you remember, dustiest places, ways to say no, ways to say yes, buyers remorse, poems you could've written, movies to fall asleep during, worst kisses, quotes attributed to Marilyn Monroe that she never actually said, mullet sightings, things you don't remember, best sauces, people you've touched, places for a bruise, abbreviations, puppy watching spots, worst surprises, cheap shots, people you don't want to sit next to on the train, days you wish you could delete, Dom DeLuise jokes, car hoods that lookk like faces, liver transplants, ways to trip, twist endings you saw coming, projects you should've abandoned, most inopportune times to get the hiccups, street names, things you've endured for a partner, ways to cook fish, Jeapordy! categories, arguments you couldn't remember the reason for starting, excuses for a wedding, household chores, accidents you've passed on the highway, ways to start a fight, nonsensical Beatles' lyrics, brick buildings, non-verbal cues, one word bar names, ways to kill an hour, things not to forget on a road trip, letters you've received, best orgasms, reasons to snap your fingers, things to consider before having children, quotes you know by heart, words you used before you knew how they were defined, trees to climb, inside jokes, worst music murals, reasons not to own a Jeep, guilts, concerts you wish you'd been alive for, worst times to laugh, embarrassing moments you've had in public, cheap dates, pieces of advice you didn't follow, drink specials, advice you didn't follow, worst opening bands at a concert, first impressions that turned ut right, things you should've remembered, television shows you can't turn off, handshakes, memories that can't be separated from the music that was playing, classes you couldn't get in to, thrift store finds, makeshift instruments, five ingredient recipes, ways to look awake when you really aren't, rooms you've slept in, easy excuses, times you didn't know what to say.

Ode to Brighton Beach and a New Friendship

Right now I am sitting in my purple-hued ceilinged room while staring at wooden panels older than the Depression-era house itself.
But I am not here.
I am eight hundred and six miles away, perched above a shoreline full of a people whose age is always visible only in their eyes, whose bodies feel no cold where they are now, whose candies have decorations of lobsters, polar bears, and lovers in recline. This place is a shore, somewhere between solid and liquid, somewhere between where I am now and where I want to be.
This place has food so thick your ribs expand by two inches after every meal, your mouth doesn’t even understand how to comprehend the warmth it can feel, your mind can often lose itself in Baltika and a special type of water known as vodka (only drank when eating so one can drink more).
O, klassno! This mysterious place has a magnetic hold on not only me but those that live there, those little Odessits, who roam the streets as if years did not exist except in the creases of skin on their faces. They seem so sharp, quick, cutting if you can not see past the surface but within the creases slumber memories of lives interrupted by terror, by suffering, by joys, by new and old. Even the young, whose exteriors seem like any other with hair that burns like sulfur and eyes that have known what lies in the older creases; they too have a particular magnetism. Even on the beach, a couple frolics in Siberian temperatures, splashing one another until the young man slings his arms around her from behind, winding his hands around her waist and resting his head along her collarbone only to say, “Let’s go home.”
I only have one concrete reminder of Brighton Beach with me, a small morsel of a memory wound in the lines of a clam shell. Each line holds an image: a set of eyes, bright blonde hair, velour track-suits, a flaky pastry, bins upon bins of various flavors of Turkish delights, hearty meals of soup and bread and that special water, sand under my fingernails, and a cold ocean nibbling at my feet. All of these things are wonderful on their own, that much is true. But honestly, they’re all wonderful because they happened on that day, in that month, and with me and you.

I am stepping on crackers

I.
whole grain crackers laying on my floor after a night
where a morning
blends into a sky
that i can't differentiate from
anything.
see what harold washington did, just a handful of years ago?
(imagine what those years must feel like)
(do they writhe or wiggle)
(dance, slip, sleep, wait)
imagine what those years can do.

II.
In order to be very sure, tomorrow I shall take you
to a room
twice as large.
If you can convert the hay into gold, I shall marry you;
if not,
you will be destroyed.

III.
Take these two dollars and buy me a gift
for her, so she won't be destroyed
so she won't try any funny business
so she won't say no when she should say yes
because i love her.
can't you see that?

IV.
I promise, I won't say no.

Cylinder

Our house is old and new and gray but not too used because if it were, we could not be able to find dust mites under the escutcheon that still run around in a circle if you blow in just the right direction.

Our house is ours because we make sure of it, watering the greens and pulling the yellows - admiring our neighbor for his brash choice of a peach tree(even if it attracts more locals than ever).

Our house isn't here anymore because the foundation had a crack from years before and I could not deal with losing another doorway to lean against so we're outside again but without any fresh lemons.

Your house is new. I wish I could see it.

Isograft

Please tell me how a moon can tap along to a
symphony while you are poking at my toe-nail-polish and claiming how much need
and want
are inside of me.

Please tell me how your skin feels more ideal than an identical pair of eyes in an el car at seven-oh-three in the morning
when i just put away your letter.

Please tell me how to recreate this without harmonizing too much or overcooking this
prime cut of
cavil tendency so that one day i can be proud of calling your face my own.

We started in Tahiti

eating blue crabs shaken loose from a coconut tree
before cascading down the pelagic trail to where a formal sir shook his head to remind us that dinner reservations need to be made at least two to three weeks in advance.
Where to go after that we didn't know so we scratched our faces, popped,and dove back in.

this time the trail took us north back to what we knew: mud, sticks, shallow. We tried to swim but our feet stuck together, turning us into creatures not far from the blue men of the Minch but honestly how many times can I lose myself in this aquatic form of thought?

We keep starting and turning but the mud sticks and keeps us stuck there with our ankles wound together and our feet bare, letting us stay still until i fell left and he felt right. Say it again in polish, the last sound will rhyme and we'll all be fine.

Because without her

I would have never seen the green eyes of a giantess
or the insanity of a Russian beach
or know the simple delicacy that lies between four day old sheets and a frayed phone cord
or how far I am now from who I was when she would still wear black pants.

Because without her these questions wouldn't be asked,
wouldn't be thought, wouldn't be here
but more so because without her, i would still be inside of a small cave
with a gnarled claw as my left hand and a baggie of potpourri for my right.

Because without her, I'm still without him and right now there is nothing aside from
dead words and fake heat, neither of which are right for me.

Gideon

The upstairs has wings for rent
[only if the children say so]
but when they let you be warned that a WWII bomb just exploded
even though they're found all the time.

All I've ever found have been granite leftover landscaping from a picky neighbor
or a leftover mattress from a lazy neighbor.
Not that I'm saying which is better to find
but at least I've got a sense of people leaving and forgetting
the two things they don't need
but didn't make.

Make sure the archangel doesn't see because he'll yell at the children,
he'll yell at me,
he'll take all our leftover decades and put them inside that hydrogen atom.
Not because you asked but because you asked twice while wearing his old golden ephod.