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There's a curse on the penny where the nine's rubbed off

Saltwater cleanses, but cannot erase
The taint on her fingers, the strain on her face
An obtuse danger follows her home
No monster awaits
Just a feeling of unrest--
Figure out the pattern
Survive the test.

One eight three
Makes no sense to me.

Search for an answer
In fractals and dates
Numerology and stars
Lining up with the fates

Call a Sag to your doorstep
Let him whisk you away
Caol Ila awaits
On the shores of Islay
Soon to be followed
By sweet Tanqueray,

Search high and low for the truth!
And still it escapes her
The solution will fall
To Occam's Razor

Settle up the tab,
One eight.
Three for the tip
And the
Rest falls to fate.

Laffy Taffy

My heart a lump of sugar
Soft and sweet

Stretched and pulled by a hook
across the map

Cut into pieces
Wrapped in a joke:

Put me in your mouth
And I disappear.

Two Dragons With Tails Arrived in the Mail

This morning I woke
In a bed of my own
With a soft purring cat,
Black and white.

I will sleep tonight,
In a bed across town
With another feline,
black and white.

Does that make me a tramp??

Is it all black and white??

Kitty, come back to my lap!

Doris Duke

A pause
in an empty room
Wooden crossbeams vault the ceiling
Three lanterns hang, glowing,
Accented by a filigree of wrought iron leaves

We begin to set the party
Spread table clothes, damask, green and gold
Lay each setting with the utmost sense of order
Anticipating the night's entropy
Spoons arrayed like synchronized swimmers
Below saucers bearing martini glasses of chocolate mousse
Brimming with sweet potential
Empty wine glasses shine, hopeful
Three lady Dukes gaze sternly at the party about to be
Suspended in oils, forever doomed to watch
The inane chatter of academia

The guests arrive and descend upon the bar
Flanked by herons, forever frozen in steel
The waiter turns the corner with a silver tray
Parroting a word of the utmost importance:
Crabcake? Crabcake?
The call for greedy hands to snatch
And give the dull chatter a chewing reprieve.

Times are tough, even for a private school
Says the dean, apologizing for the buffet
(Instead of the usual plated dinner)
Behold, a table laden with a feast!
Plates of chicken drowned in portobello sauce
Chafing dishes cradling root vegetables
Bread and butter, rice and salad.
Pour the wine, red and white!
It's been a good year for the grape in Willamette.

Is this what we prayed for on the land?
Abundance, yes, but for the wrong hand.

They drink coffee black, destroy the mousse
The singers arrive, cheeks a-glow in youth
Voices rising with so much feeling,
Soaring toward the vaulted ceiling.

Raising no more than an eyebrow from the crowd
Who clap politely,
(But not too loud)

The guests file out

Good bye and good night!
Let's dump the glasses and blow out the lights!

Moving fast, like we would on Lace
We're not in the woods, but we'll leave no trace!

Once a party, now an empty room
With a vaulted ceiling concealing the moon.

Bedecked in a blue sundress she sat on the red
Sarong, spindly limbs blossoming in white
Fingers, five petals delicately clutching a
Scone, looking away, picking at the sweet idly,
Distractedly, the errant morsels that missed her petulant mouth
Fell, and landed on the red, so
wrong.

Jubilant, the ants walked, a fine line
Each fueled by a penchant for sweetness and
One, lifting a crumb above his head
Like Atlas, arms arced, the world
His supper, patiently marching home
tonight to feast on a cornflower’s
Crumbs.

Little ant-
When you carry a prize three times your size
At what point does the feast
Become a burden?

there's a little black spot on the sun today

It's official: my day job might just be making me crazy. Good bye, somewhat-defined sense of reality, it was nice knowing you.

What drives a girl to such a state? Maybe it's the hum of the artificial air conditioning pumped through shiny exposed round drum pipes above my head. Poor lighting tepidly illuminating my dim cubicle where I have no view of windows. Brick behind me, a stainless steel wall. My grey-beige, color-so-bland-it's-not-really-a color cubicle walls are dotted with postcards from the ones I miss, forever. Look, the Brooklyn brownstones I left behind! A painting of a blue damselfly, freshly flown from my left foot. A Peter Sis painting of a man and a cat crossing Charles Bridge. Ljubljana at sunset, where the madness first began. My friend's drawing of a newly budding spring tree with a moon full and pregnant amongst its branches. And, most importantly, a smiling picture of my friend j's one and a half year old baby, because, no matter how frustrated I get, I can never, ever, throw any negativity out into the world while looking at her sweet wise smiling baby face.

Slowly, parts of me start to close off. I surf the web idly in between making phone calls. Trying to help potential students fulfill their dreams, but the vast majority of them are disinterested at best. Tumid apathy, men and bits of paper. That's where I start to crack, you see. While my co workers talk about boys and tanning beds and sales at New York and Company, while they spray fake butter on their food and make popcorn because it's one of the few foods allowed on their diets, while another one eats only popsicles during the day so she can get as drunk as possible at the baseball game that night, parts of me shut down, wink out, one by one like city lights. But the rest can't stop channeling poetry. TS Eliot lines flap around in my brain like laundry on a clothesline, clean and brilliant, snapping in the sunlight that I can't feel here. My coworkers already think it's weird that I bring the Economist to work and read it just for fun. What would they think if they knew that I sat and poured over Tennyson, Thom Gunn, Marilyn Hacker, and Hafiz in between the mundanities of this waking working life.

Something's ready to break open in me. When I do shut off my computer at the end of a work day, eyes shot from staring at the computer screen, legs cramped from remaining immobile behind a desk, I want to shake back into waking and explode into action as soon as possible. Take to the streets, grab my bike, Kid Blue, and go adventuring! Spend an evening in the rock climbing gym, lats and forearms and abs engaged, dangling by a string like a marionette or descending spider, swinging back and forth like Peter Pan, falling and falling over and over and grinning from the exertion and the sweat and the streaks of white chalk across my arms.

I fly back to Prospect Park and a hillside overlooking the lake. White and pink petals fall around me, and inside...peace. Surety. Ferns lick my face like kitten tongues and I hover like a hawk over the acoustic stage, day stage. Looking down from the top of the scaffold that I will help build in a few months, thinking that it can't come quickly enough.

Ma'at

I once knew a Scorpio
With a cat named Ma’at
Tortoiseshell, green eyed, savage
She would endure my touch for a few seconds
Minutes
Leaning into my caress
Then snap
Defiant
Claws ripping through tender flesh
Before running away
To triumphant solitude.
No other barn cat
Was bigger than her there.

When years later
She returned to my hand
I waited, counting, holding my breath
And then-
The purr that rumbled out
Low and strong
From her chest
Resonated in mine
And gave me hope for the feral.

Malice will come
Roll away, lick your wounds
At the end of the road, Ma’at
When you weigh my heart against your feather
Will you devour it again? Or
Send it on to the rushes?