Savants (poem)

Combinations of numbers
slip through our teeth
as we puzzle over
addresses as phone numbers
and birthdays as graduations
We slap hands down
quicker than the draw
to see who knows what
and at the moment before
silver bullets of numeric logic
split skulls
we shrug off
the indecision and talk
about spelling.

There were Flowers and Vines on the Ceiling (poem)

We had a love bigger than Texas
and it flowed through
Tommy Doyle's in Harvard Square.
Upstairs, our friends' band rocked out covers
while downstairs we shared a booth
with strange connecting genes.
We are like the Human Genome Project.
You say you hate the word "like"
and we talk for hours about women
you've slept with and men
I've loved. There's so much in the air
to blend us together and we cozy
in a booth and talk about cum.

Menage a tois (a Boston poem)

I. We polished off sixteen ounces of So-Co 

on a Tuesday night, savoring the last 

few swallows around four a.m. We were watching 

West Side Story and Tom cried 

when Tony fell dead, when Maria stood up 

for nonviolence. Whitney said she didn’t 

like the movie. As always, I was somewhere 

in the middle, content to hum and sing 

about love and rumbles and all things passionate. 

 II. Tom colored the nails on his right hand 

black with Whitney’s good Sharpie 

and drew symbols of anarchy on his wrist. 

While she was in the bathroom, he asked me 

what else he should draw. I said a heart. 

He put an arrow through it. 

III. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever said 

to me -- “You know, honestly, I have to say, any man 

who has even had the chance to touch you 

is the luckiest man...” Oh, that Tom, 

who told me again that I should call 

 the lead singer in his band. I balked. Whitney sat 

 beside the bassist with her arms folded across her chest.

3 AM at the Holiday Inn (an Ohio poem)

I wanted nothing more
than to lay my head on your chest
and listen, listen to the chaotic
pounding of your doorless heart.
Pressed, my cheeks felt your rhythm.
Closed, my eyes saw lifetimes
of streaming consciousness, an ebb
and flow between two people
who are luckless but in love.
Oh, what a lucky curse!
Nothing should have stopped us.
Not with your slow breathing
and my leaded head bedded down.

Musings in the Cab of a Stranger's Truck (poem)

A hand can fit inside
another hand and linger there
as if it always had, as if
it were home, as if it made
sense, pressed near another
grove of flesh. Even if
the bodies are foreign
to each other, two hands
can twist and press
and squeeze with the intimacy
of years hung together, traceable
lifelines linked and teasing.

Reading Into It (narrative poem)

The plaster ceiling dripped white, crusty flakes into her coffee pot, papier-mached her hair, dusted her tables and chairs, fell into the cracks of her skin until she was white, lily white, and packaged for retail sale. The apartment was rented to her as a death trap for plasterphobians. She ignored the constant snow; she couldn’t afford to move. All she could do was dust herself and sit down to write.

“Are you lonely?” he’d asked once over the phone. “Your characters are.”

Just like that, he’d cracked through the plaster-covered marble exterior of her soul and clamped his greedy fingers around her humanity. Was she lonely. She’d laughed when he’d asked the first time, via e-mail, and laughed harder the second time over the phone.

“Fiction,” she’d told him, “is fictional.”

Have you ever heard the songs, she’d asked. Do you know the band? Because these stories come from some other poet’s soul, she said, I just transcribe them.

“Oh,” he’d said. He’d sounded disappointed, like she should have screamed, “Yes oh yes, I’m so lonely... So lonely. With no one to love me but you.” And he’d probably hoped she’d cry a little so he could reach through the phone wires and brush away her tears.

She thought about his mediocre face trying vainly to be as handsome as he really was beneath his self-loathing and wondered if he’d tried that line before and gotten a better response Wondered, as the plaster rained down on her head, if she could have been something better than she was right now. If she’d lied and said she was lonely, lonely, just like him.

“You don’t do the normal things people our age do,” he’d said.

And she’d smiled because, no, she didn’t. She did her own thing her own way and that’s why she was alone. Partially choice, partially not. There’s no way to prepare a dish the same way twice, to twice-bake-potato her life again to fit someone else’s recipe. She was OK with being alone because she wouldn’t have to feel beyond herself. She could flirt with the guy behind the sticky coffee counter, could strap on her tall boots and walk into a bar. Or she could curl up in the graveyard of youthful thought and childish prattle and read a book about the merging of cosmic thoughts or she could stare through those she saw. She could live the ambidextrous life of the “girl who has it all -- except for what everyone else has.”

“I don’t believe in love. It’s all about sex,” he’d said.

She’d said nothing and closed her eyes. Partially because she didn’t agree and partially because she couldn’t agree more. And her lips had started to quake with an “I won’t be your whore” response, but she’d changed the subject to something more abstract than sex or love, and he brought it back.

“I’ve seen a girl naked,” he’d said, and he’d laughed.

“So have my mirror and I,” she’d wanted to say, but her sarcasm was muffled by the stem of technology that connected them. “I know a guy who got a 1600 on his SATs when he was a freshman in high school,” she’d said instead.

“Wow,” he’d said.

The plaster shook loose from the ceiling as a door slammed shut and she stared at her blank piece of paper and thought about turning the page.

Cold July (poem)

I can’t kick this cough
but that’s my usual fare.
I cycle through sickness
with the same drawn out tendencies
aligned with unrequited love:
hot, thick, consuming, spewing,
relentless, inescapable.

I have a cure for the common cold:
twists
in lunges, yoga
is what purifies me.
Well, it can certainly help.
Just as it helps

with unrequited love. Outside it is July
in Boston and people hurry through
punishing rain that has dominated
for the last thirty days – what is our crime
already? All I know is I am thirty
years old for as many days as it’s rained,
a real washout so far.

Where is the sun?
Where is the summer?
When will this cough be requited?