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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?

A Game of Chess

He leans back in his chair and gazes at the chessboard between us with a cocky grin on his face. I just made a stupid move that cost me a bishop. I can read his thoughts, crudely smeared across his face in arrogance. Yep, I got her now. After all, she is just a girl. She should have known better than to challenge a guy at chess. He’s floating gloriously on a wave of triumph and all I want to do is wipe that grin off his face.
Just wait.
I will.
Carefully, I move my bishop into position. I’m a piece down, but I’m not really worried about that---I’m thinking with a brain instead of a dick. Yes, this wasn’t exactly his idea of a second date. He’d rather be making out with me in the front, or back, seat (hey, he’s “versatile”) of his 1978 Firebird (fondly named Lucile), but I had insisted that we put a table between us and see if he really has any substance between his ears.
He could keep a hot air balloon floating for hours.
He moves again, this time pulling his queen out of danger. The test--- will he pass? No man ever has. My opponents inevitably disappoint me. In the beginning they seem so strong, so noble, but the veil drops, bishops and rooks fall, and all that remains is a pusillanimous king. I can learn a lot about a guy from his chess game. Arrogance, it’s usually the arrogance that kills him. Or not being aggressive enough. Or just plain being sloppy. His hamartia revealed in one simple, classic game. Piece by piece I tear apart his character, waiting for the one who’s strong enough to mate me.
I glance down at the board and suppress a guffaw of laughter. It takes me a grand total of two seconds to move my knight into a rather advantageous position. I silently give thanks to my father for teaching me that move. Now I’m the one with the grin on my face. Split. Would you like to keep your king, or your queen? Damenopfer: Queen’s sacrifice. His sweet lady bites the dust, but I’ve still got mine, and I actually know how to use her well. Five moves later, he’s mated. In the chess sense, that is. He’ll never get me in bed with him, although he has already offered.

Same table.
Same board.
Next player.
The game, the game, always the game! This guy really is sweet. He’d had a crush on me for the last few months now, but he’s been too shy to make the first move. I told him we’d go out for coffee and a game of chess--- I figured that was a nice way to get to know him without committing myself to an actual date. At the moment I can’t really find anything wrong with him, but the shyness of his character is reflected glaringly in the passivity of his game. He’s been pushing pawns around for the last ten minutes, always on the defensive. I’m looking for someone who’s bold and aggressive, but knows how to play smart. Does he realize that he’s blowing his only chance, that this game is boring, and once I’m bored, I lose interest fast?
It’s intriguing to see where the mind wanders when one’s bored at chess. The pieces are strewn out between us, black and white in opposition, two teams pitted against each other on a battle field of sixty-four squares. Suddenly I’m inside the flat wooden head of the knight I’m planning to move on my next turn. He’s anxious.
Ooh, move me, move me! Right there! I’m ready for the old one-two punch, me and queenie over there in the corner are gonna get this guy. Goody! I get to kill the ki-ing, I get to kill the ki-ing! Hurry up, boy, move your damn piece already so I can get going here!
Eventually he does move, and my knight lets out a victorious whinny before lunging forward, then diagonally right, into position. Horse and lady, in tandem, take down the king.

The next challenger is from Harvard. Genius. He’s piqued my interest, and right now he’s winning. My bishop fell to carelessness in a surprise move. I’m excited and a little nervous, equally torn between the desire to win and the urge to find someone who’s good enough to beat me. I’m going to play my hardest until the end (I would never just let someone win), but still, there’s a little voice in the back of my head that’s cheering him on. There’s got to be someone out there who can pass my test! So far he’s the strongest challenger to come my way--- I have high hopes for him. But I’ve still got my queen, so he doesn’t have a sure victory.
Let me just take this moment to admit that I adore my queen. Some would say that chess is a patriarchal game. The king, of course, is the crux point, the piece that all the others are struggling to defend at all costs. But I see things a little bit differently.
I explained chess to a five year old boy one time. A feminist rendition of chess.
“So there’s the king, and everyone else on the board is trying to kill him. He’s puny and weak and that’s why he can only move one square at a time. Now the queen, on the other hand, is the most powerful piece on the board. She can move in any direction that she wants to for as many squares as she wants, just as long as she has a clear path. She can do anything that the bishops and rooks combined can do, and her mission is to murder the poor, defenseless king.”
The little boy’s lips trembled and tears sprang into his eyes.
“That’s a lie!” he said indignantly. “You’re just saying that because you hate boys! Katie, she’s lying, isn’t she?”
His older sister looked down at him with a wicked grin. “No, Ben, she’s right. That’s really the way the game is played.”
He shot us both desperate looks. “You both are just picking on me!” he said, before running upstairs to his room and slamming the door behind him.
I felt bad, really. I’m not sure what compelled me to say something so charged to such a fragile, innocent little mind. I guess I was just tired of everyone being brainwashed into believing that chess is a man’s game. Yeah, I’ve seen the look before. I walked into a coffee shop one time and this old grey haired man was sitting at a table playing chess by himself. I asked him if he wanted to play and watched as his eyes critically scanned my body up and down, up and down again. Play you, a girl? That’s what he thought, I could tell by the way he looked at me so disdainfully. What he actually said was:
“I think I have twenty minutes to spare.”
Twenty minutes! How dare he underestimate me like that! He beat me, but it was only because, as I found out later, he’s the chess guru of town and he never loses. But it took him fifty minutes to do so, and he couldn’t keep his queen. I won his respect that day.
So he’s the first man to beat me in years, but he’s too old to be eligible for my infamous chess test. It figures. The only guy who passes is a senior citizen. Just my luck.
The great thing about chess is that it’s purely a game of the mind. You can pit a scrawny, nerdy little 120 pound old man against a 250 pound football player, and the outcome mightn’t be the same as that of a wrestling match between them. It’s all in the mind.
That’s why I find it so insulting to be underestimated as a female chess player. True, I cannot bench press as much as my typical opponent, but for a man to assume that my sex gives me an inferior brain? Please! That’s the ultimate insult, a misconception I would love to clear up with every man who automatically assumes he can beat me.
Am I being too hard on men? Perhaps. But I’ve been hurt enough in the past to know to keep my guard up.
And I’m doing that right now.
I’m disappointed to find that the Ivy League student, so sweet and sensitive, has fallen into the same trap that most of my opponents have fallen into. Getting cocky, feeling superior. Realizing that they can and will dominate their opponent, a mere girl.This guy’s been dancing in and out of my life, flirting, dating, a peck on the cheek here and there. In and out, the game continues between us as we shuffle around our power pieces and try to gain the upper hand.
I set him up and he takes the bait. Foolish boy! He loses his queen in the next move and scowls in disbelief. With his confidence shattered, he fights valiantly till the end, but he knows I’ve already won. This will be our last date. He doesn’t have enough pride left to call me again.

And me? I’m just a little pawn aspiring to become a queen. I’ve walked far, but I haven’t reached the end of the board yet. Spaces free up and I proceed step by step with caution, walking the gauntlet, confused by the part I’m playing and all the obstacles in my way. I’ve stayed on the back line for half my life and now I’m tired of being inactive. It’s time for a change.

Eventually a new challenger enters my life. She’s been on the board the entire time, a queen perched in the corner, waiting for the right time to slowly, fluidly, make her advance. I beat her each time we play chess, but soon realize that the game doesn’t matter as much any more. She plays with me because she thinks I like the game, and hey, I used to think so too. We play, and each time I win. But I feel no triumph in doing so. With each opponent before her, I felt like I had to defend myself, that I had been automatically designated the underdog by virtue of my sex. But with her, I have nothing to prove. How can I bear to treat her as my enemy? She and I are already playing for the same team.

We sit Indian style on the soft grey carpet of her bedroom floor, a small magnetic chess board between us. I look into her eyes and suddenly have a difficult time focusing on the game. I have never been this distracted before in all my life. She just captured two of my major pieces and I can’t for the life of me think of what to do next. Helplessly I move a pawn forward, what else is there to do? She grins in understanding, knowingly sensing the predicament I’m in. I gaze at the ringlets of curly brown hair cascading down her neck, eyes roving in adoration across the soft lines of her face, those long brown eyelashes that flutter gently each time she blinks. Her lips, upturned slightly in a smile, become the focus of my complete attention. She’s ready to make her move. Ever so slowly she leans across the board, and I close my eyes as she kisses me softly on the lips.

Mate.

(1999)

Proof 1

Wail!
At the injustice
Of missing someone
Across hours, miles, oceans
Time zones, political embargos
Only to have that person approach-
Five minutes
One floor
An arm’s length
Away.

(Close but no cigar, as they say)

In math, the problem with limits
Is that they can never be reached
What purgatory!
The distance
Halved
Again and again.
But still there is space in between.

But:
Remember that you are never lonely
When you’re alone
Only when you’re with someone
Who cloaks your brightness

And:
Remember that you can feel more close
To someone five hundred miles away
Than to the estranged lover beside you.

Thus loneliness and distance are not proportional.

(Still I want you to touch me with desire in your eyes).