5thAvenue Cocktail Tease
Voice breaks,
altos stepped on,
clumsy tongue
got no ear to drum.
Synchronistic,
sex better in unison,
hazy edges crackling,
pyrotechnics.
Someone water this street.
Three dashes of
The Bitter Truth—
asphalt,
not your fault,
the way you shimmy
in chartreuse,
poured cocktail of a dress,
thick absinthe
of breast.
Lemon bitters—
mouth puckered
in too eager kiss.
I drink you down.
No ice
can cool this mouth.
*
Box within a Box
Schrödinger’s cat is writing a prose poem. It knows about boxes. Understands a paradox. Remembers that black-and-white TVs showed moving pictures in shades of gray. But the box did not move, and the objects were just tricks of light. Light travels so far, the stars we see may have already died. Schrödinger’s cat knows about the possibility of death. And understands uncertainty. Named neither male nor female, Schrödinger’s cat is in a box writing a prose poem that’s defined by what it is not. Like women. Women are defined by boxes and pussies, but the cat writes with a pen and ends with a dangling modifier going nowhere, opening a new paradox.
*
Fallen Is a Sweet Girl
always skinning her knees.
What is a body
but to be spread out
as feast or rug?
Lovelorn is similar to love-lain
to a certain kind of naivety.
Some people call her
an easy lay,
but they don’t see how hard
she tries to lift herself
off the ground.
*
What a Woman Asks for
In the morning, she slips
on a blouse of men’s eyes,
pulls up pants of their hands.
Wherever she goes, she carries
the smudge of fingerprints.
Her heels sound like a gavel
banging on pavement.
They tell her she would be prettier
if she smiled. She knows better
than to open her mouth.