A soul heavy as wet July.
Steam rising from the grass
lazily curling and uncurling its come-hither fist
in blue efficiency streetlight.
Windows fog over
in droplet-streaming screens obscuring
the midnight hush-your-mouth in each
of a line of bricked and columned houses.
This is a city morally opposed to sidewalks,
where stoplights go down at eleven.
This is a city whose treacherous shoulders I trudged
for a decade in the dark.
-M.
Stone-heavy, it bows its branch to the black
earth. Oxidized blood brown
hints at a cheering red which might have been.
Striated. Scuffed like shoe leather
worn away from starving children’s toes
clenching and unclenching the kilometers
of an August death march.
-M.
Barren, plodding hours
clip the waxy blossoms
from a spindly
yellow-leaved pomegranate tree.
Only one fruit survives.
It is small
and waterless.
And arsonists
sweat and twitch and ejaculate
as their ill-intentioned campfires
possess the mountains
one thrashing
beetle-eaten tree at a time.
-M.
One sanatorium in particular,
given back to time and riveted
to an island at the seaward head
of a canal in an ancient city,
became a Galapagos of spooks
where all manner and species
of good ghosts were left evolving—
coughing blood and lovers’ names
into collapsing hallways.
-M.
I was unnerved—the way he walked at ease
against the toss, Pacific restlessness
at heel as if he were a natural
at ocean life, though born a desert rat
-M.
An apartment with frescoes on the walls
that lean toward the light, lean toward naughty Roman,
sigh darkly over their birth in the prim pre-Renaissance instead.
They whisper to each other of the hardships of being
mere copies of copies, restored and restored again,
each time by cruder hands.
The apartment, saddled with inaccurate
purple velvet furniture and skinny beds
packed in as if for orphans
is attached to some chi chi hotel with flags out front
that clank against their poles and wave
to the bronzed pickpocket boys in the street
whose clever-eyed discernment is spent mostly on
which girls’ asses are ripe for a pinch.
The pope who built the palace,
now parsed out for foreigners and fornicators,
glides from room to room, to hotel lobby,
to check-in check-out counter, and, disillusioned,
wonders if this torment is the tail end of his
thousand year purgation for loving the woman
who burnt his bread often and shrieked at lesser maids.
-M.
