April, according to this poet, is the cruelest month.
April, according to these lovers of poetry, is National Poetry Month, and the only cruelty is metaphorical (which isn’t to say T.S. Eliot was being literal except, well…)
In honor of this month, and since I don’t post on my blog as much these days, I’ll (re)share some of my published poetry. And that begs the question, if a poem falls in the Internet and no one reads it, is it still poetry?
Of course it is.
Poems #11-14 (gratitude to Carbon Culture for publishing these four poems in 2018).
My Wife’s Scars
My wife once had a life—
and the pictures to prove it.
She had friends and family
and lovers and fears and…
everything anyone else has,
if they’ve ever lived at all.
My wife has scars.
The kinds I can’t see,
of course, and even though
they once belonged safely
between her body and brain,
(or parents, partners, enemies,
and all the things she’s done
or wished she hadn’t) now
they are mine to share—or else
soothe, discuss, and accept.
Inherited the same way, for better
or worse, we assume things like
past debts and present joys, along
with life’s surprising unrestraint.
My wife has scars
I can never not see.
Especially the ones she can’t
easily assuage or annihilate,
and it’s the inexorable defects
of her once-unblemished body
I honor, and have come to adore.
The lean, indifferent white line
where my wife’s salvaged skin
was once sewn shut—saving her
after her baby stopped breathing—
is everything I struggle to express:
About mothers, karma, or whatever
attracts obstinate hearts, each one heavy
with its own histories and hurts, seeking
to reconcile, if not quite curtail, the past
pains our resolve makes into mementos:
what Fate requites us for abiding our scars.
*****
Night Shift
The sun is done, already
a shadow of doubt, leaving
the sky bloodied but beautiful,
a black eye blocking
all the light, purple then pale,
losing heat before becoming
the absence of itself,
under cover of dark.
*****
Gatlato el rijla
(inspired by an article from The Guardian about illegal sheep fighting in Algeria)
i.
Impassive hopes in humid air, an offering
amidst the dust of heavy lives, expectation
of fates men have the means to secure: blood
sport on forsaken football fields, these players
no longer invested in games or brawls or
wars, or even intentions anymore—good or ill.
False idolatry proffered through sodden fur:
Eid al-Fitr is irrelevant to the present stakes.
Here, horns replace hands that never held
money, made fists, or aimed weapons; sons’
feet not marching toward or from anything
dead or depleted fathers had beaten into brains
washed by an ancient script: seeking justice
or revenge—or at least some kind of relief.
ii.
Naturally, blood’s dear, despite the frivolity
of lives freely exchanged like family recipes,
and at the end of the day, belief is nothing
anybody can buy.
Men abide and die through the beasts
they own or eat or work or sell; after all,
a man is merely a different variety
of animal himself.
iii.
It paws the ground, impatient to escape
or be ignored, to endure: a brute impulse
forever ignored. And so, spent or resigned,
eyes yoked before it expires, submission
before the soiled knife makes it a martyr,
(to men who’ll offer empty supplication
to gods lost in translation, impotent but
able to prosper, no quarter sought or sent)
a grotesque excuse, explanation, or elegy:
Machismo killed him.
*****
Incursion
There’s a housefly detained in my beer.
Drowning its sorrows, I don’t think; buzz lost
(his too),
disgusted, this one’s done and it was my last one
(his too).
He—or she—flails away, not yet resigned to the
downside of winning a battle but losing the war.
Flies, what are they good for? They must be food
for all kinds of bigger bugs, or else
there’s no purpose to them. Pests:
professionals at breaking and entering, the world
their courtyard to infest and infect. If
you take infest & infect it could become insect.
And is there a single word so worth its weight
in the ability to inspire disgust, even fear?
But being birthed from and burrowing inside
debris (or worse) is enough to make any creature
capable of soiling the earth out of spite.
Theirs the alibi of the accursed: Nature calls
and everything must oblige, no questions asked.
As if a fly is capable of inquiring how or why
as wet wings become the weight of its world.
An accidental suicide, or a formal protest:
Do flies know they’re despised or even alive?
Dreaming damply of the drain, down
into darkness (or worse), soon to be born
again as itself, inside a pile of something dead.
