Poetry
Five Poems
By arlene ang
Come Winter
That year he insisted French films were
halves of his former self, how his right arm
edged nightly from the high cliff of bed.
Phones rang in his head, white doors led to a
recital of bangs, the hinges like butterflies
impaled on pins. I'm afraid I never listened:
mulberry bushes along the driveway needed
rigorous trimming, summer grass sprouted
overnight, the mower had to be cleaned. His
symptoms weren't serious, I thought. Some men
employ their days reconstructing heartburns,
strokes at noon, family trees on their palms.
Was there really a time when I could have
entered without clearing my voice? The plastic
roses in his vase were salted with dust, like
evening whispers of nurses through gauze of red.
On the night stand, a musical box tinkled his
version of Swan Lake. Implications in Latin
escaped me like bone metastasis for the same
reason I never noticed primroses in the garden.
The Old Guitarist Confesses
Pablo, she said. I refuse to be your bullring.
Blood is something you'll never shed from me.
He considered her body as nothing less than sheep:
wool to dye blue, food for the palette.
Don't you dare pin that white beard of suicide on me,
she cocked the frying pan to protect her womanhood.
He unzipped his corduroys, swung aside the red
curtain, vacuumed her with incubus kiss
until she hugged his guitar, played blind, brush-ready
to be wigged with age and crucified on canvas.
Rain Bride
May God bedew the lips of her vulva.
-- BeniSnus rogational pray
First rain
and then
the earrings,
their silver
like halos
against my neck.
We follow routine
from four-poster
to high-fenced lawn,
leave diaphragms
sulking in
back drawers;
clouds are
dark chains
that trickle fertility
while grass
opens to receive
the penetration of wetness.
Dangling
from my ears,
little mouths cast holes,
net in fetal souls
from the sky -
manna for my womb.
** first published in Riven (September 2003).
Wing Shots
Mrs Burke unfurls smoke from the wingchair.
Newspaper sounds scale crescendo; her fingers
crush them into balls, feed dying embers.
She warms dark-veined feet on a grizzly rug,
recounts the call of birds in flight,
their fall from sky, how she met James.
Competition was stiff among wing shots:
hunters laid traps indoors, used sex
like cartridges, brandished rifles in bed.
For days they held each other at gun point,
turned physical, the bruises on their skin
like urine stains of male dogs in autumn.
In the end, they swatted away dead leaves
from their hair and left the woods separately.
Once she glimpsed him with a bevy of women.
His cigar puffed a mallard drake grunt while ice
decoyed their cocktails. It struck her how glad
she was to be rid of his company, for he stank.
On the Eighth Month
The brush quivers in mid-stroke.
A surgeon insisted it's the turpentine;
I should stop carrying on
like this.
Later, I learned he lost another
two patients that week. Perhaps it is
best if we stop arguing
about money.
My wife chuckles when I mistake
afternoon for evening. She doesn't know
I've quit joking a long
time ago.
There was a time when
a butterfly was a butterfly and Latin
as abstruse as a needle
on my arm.
Light streams through whispers,
long phone calls between relatives,
a lesion here, a growth
there.
The palette is holed with
ascending tones of sable. I count
the hours it takes before
they clot.
