monkey

White Man Dancing

The crazy monkey in your skin

jumps up for attention.

Your biceps bulge,

fever spreads through your freckles,

constellations browning

your shoulders.

You say you don’t dance,

but when you see me here,

Converse staining the pub floor,

you reach for a banana.

On Flirting

  1. you know my name

  1. you sat next to me in class (two times)

  1. you initiated a conversation with me (of your own free will)

  1. you will soon forget

  1. probably already have

  1. shouldn’t have brought up Viagra

Body Map

Thighs

According to Seventeen magazine:

You should present your thighs like filet mignon

in a miniskirt standing under the lamppost

just after midnight.

Barbeque sauce would help

if it had less carbs.

Eyes

Who says your soul rents space in your forehead?

Why doesn’t it linger behind your knees

or drive up the interstate of your vertebrae?

Nostrils

Sierra Visher told you in fourth grade

that you had a pancake nose and

it flattened when you laughed.

So you stopped laughing in elementary school.

Sometimes if you flare them in front of the mirror

you can look up your nasal passages

right into your brain.

Your brother will later tell you

that those are just boogers.

Hips

Your hips are Darwinian and luscious.

Get dark red lipstick and a pencil skirt.

Keep all your notes in a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper.

When you get unwanted attention,

just swing your hips surreptitiously to the side,

and bounce your opponents to the moon.

Ribcage

Oxygen pulls you in and out,

A deflating balloon.

What else do you keep inside?

Phone numbers, candy canes,

Second hand smoke?

Waiting

Waiting

When she thinks,

she opens up her mind with a grapefruit spoon,

slices it into happy triangles of citrus flesh,

then drinks what’s left in the bowl.

When she lives,

she tills the concrete with a John Deere tractor,

unearths fossils from the asphalt world,

scoops up the ash remains, and burns them for fuel.

When she loves,

she picks apart the seam of her hairline,

unzips limbs from fabric patterns of skin and hair,

stands in a field during a sandstorm

to watch as her insides slowly unravel,

waits for her dust to settle on the reddened earth,

waits for a person with a mind like a grapefruit

and a soul like a tractor

to sculpt her into a sandcastle.

For Amy

Ledge

Amy and I joked about eyebrows

in eighth grade because once you noticed one pair,

you saw them all: finely plucked,

fuzz spilling on foreheads,

monobrows like Frida,

usually on boys with glasses.

Suddenly our peers were reduced

to the bridges between their eyes.

Ballerina Amy was the first to date.

Zach would sweep her long red hair

out from under backpack straps, carry her flute,

and furrow his behemoth eyebrows.

I don’t know if Zach was in the room

when Mrs. Weetman read us the news

that final day of ninth grade:

“girl rescued from herself.”

Amy once wrote a poem

paraphrasing a Third Eye Blind song

Why don’t you step back from that ledge my friend

Hers was the first elegy I wrote,

Thursday before Christmas six years later.

The church was full.

I sat in the first pew with my best friends

from junior high and our geography teacher.

The pastor nodded toward us,

our backs as wooden as the seats.

At the podium the light poured

through stained glass.

Standing in the half glow,

I talked to Amy about eyebrows.

In Honor of Isla Vista

A Spiritual Poem in Five Minutes

When I think of spirit I think of Pirate

drinking on Pardal accepting a plate of Shabbat

dinner salmon on Friday night when he tells jokes

You kind of have to step back away from his face

so the spirits don’t get in the way.

One night his friend Abraham approaches us

offers to explain our Hebrew names.

“Ah, Shoshana,” he says to Shauna.

“Light.” “David—Strength.”

He peers at me through monocle eyes, says:

“Julia—from the English: Jewel.”

Pirate laughs so hearty from his perch,

clutching salmon to his chest,

coughing up spirits.

Blossom

Blossom

I didn’t recognize his voice at first.

“Happy birthday,” he said.

I heard Jerusalem in his throat,

felt the cobbles beneath our

feet the one day we held hands.

My birthday is one week exactly

from the anniversary of his dad’s death.

Every time he speaks I have synesthesia—

see the Feather River in late May,

smell sunburn and sweet sweat of late afternoon,

hear Dave Matthews, oar slap on water,

feel finger on s pine. The day we kissed

he planted a seed in my chest. I’ve tried but

I’ve never managed to block the sun.

My Parents

The Biggest Piece of the Pot

One time

I broke your favorite pot

the kitchen was brightly lit
Steve Miller skipped on the record player
I’m a joker, I’m a smoker, I’m a

midnight and I was lying on Mom’s side of the bed
wondering how two people could fall in love again
after things break.

And then the university brought in a wrecking ball,
tore down Stroove Hall,
the dormitory where you met.

Mom was selling watermelons.
Dad had a broken toe
and a car with a flowered roof.

Outside Vietnam murmured.
Tomatoes tossed in their sleep.
You and you were hardly we.

On Dad’s side of the bed
I felt indebted to that hall
those tomatoes
that year he lived in Iraq
the record player
that sunburned jet boat
those pinochle games at the lake.

How easily can things be broken?
Are they ever stronger afterward?

Mom and Dad crisscrossed tiles in the kitchen
discussing imperfection in a minor key.
I laid on Mom’s side of the bed
having snuck off with the biggest piece

of the clay pot.

I wanted to be the biggest piece
the one that kept them in that kitchen,
in that house on that shady road
just a mile from the wrecking ball.

Then the night flew in the kitchen window
and blew out the lights.
Tempers simmered with the Shabbat candles
still burning on the stove.
Steve Miller lowered his voice
the record player shut its eyes
the grapevines whispered against the pane.

I heard feet patting up the stairs
first one pair, then another.
You with your fortysomething ponytail
you with your swaying beaded earrings.

You were surprised to find me there
torn between Mom’s and Dad’s sides of the bed
holding the biggest piece of the pot.

"It’s prettier that way,” You said.
“It’s just a pot,” said You. “We can fix it.”

You, and You, and me, us three, laid there
becoming we.

First-Rate First Grade

First-Rate First Grade

Welcome to the Seaside Café

Try the macaroni

Necklaces spiced special today

Your maitre-d Tony

Will candlelight your card table

Tulips arranged as stars

Harmonize fairy tale fable

Of skyscrapers and cars

Today’s appetizers goldfish

Oscar Meyer wiener

Bologna catsup and relish

Watch out for Mabel-she’s meaner

Than an ungreased George Foreman grill

Sizzling fat through fractions

Monopoly dough on the till

Do we have your satisfaction?

Ignore Susie the sobbing chef

Step over the spilled juice

Hank serenades though he’s tone-deaf

Teacher towers like Zeus

Sit back, relax, put up your feet

Eat up before it’s cold

For service that cannot be beat

Just ask a six year old.

For My Father

On Your Thirty-Ninth Birthday

We walk on woodchips in October

while he sings the Beatles.

His hands are so large, calloused:

my baseball mitts.

Those same hands that place a waterski in my own,

that knead seven-year-old spines

whisper of sparrows

and gold nuggets every night.

This is the same man who illegally weights

our blue Weeblo race cars (we win)

and ferries birthday parties of six-year-olds

around in the green go-cart he built himself.

In winter he becomes Chanukah Harry

with a long martial artist’s braid.

Every summer he is the River King,

flanked by egrets and swallows,

a rooster tail pluming out behind him

as his body skids just inches above the water.

He tows cousins, endures every “one last time,”

follows teen rowers carving oar in eddy.

He sings the Beatles one rainy day in February,

injecting oranges with insulin.

He always leaves the sprinklers on too long

so we can sprint after leprechauns.

Hands so rough yet perfect for shaking.

Ocean child with windy hair, he sings.

Gentle Pop with holiday eyes, she sings back.

Happy birthday,

she loves you all across the universe.

Saralee's Waltz

Saralee’s Waltz

Every morning she resumes her love affair

with the piano lounging on the sleeping rug

as the light slips in beyond the highest stair

one arthritic palm dangles mid air

the piano holds its breath as flesh meets key

skating along the surface to an internal melody

Fingers play hopscotch across the piano

rewinding jump ropes from a Cleveland house

ten siblings crowded one bathroom in 1929

twelve dollar piano paid in monthly installments

She got a scholarship to Julliard in World War Two

The only musician with long hair and eyelashes

Raised two daughters and a farm read Marx Hallelu

Jah to the god she never believed existed after all

Where was he when her brothers were black listed

Morning rises on Sixteenth Street fifty years later

Her eyes decode the piano’s DNA, see beyond it,

Forgets McCarthy, forgets McNamara,

Sees below the bass, exposes the music raw

Filleting it, splaying its flesh on ivory.

Her fingers bleed on the keys and

She grows younger with every chord.

Tiffany

Tiffany

She was mummifying Barbies

the day I met her,

singing softly to herself,

burying platinum bodies in earth.

I sat under the crabapple tree,

crabapples falling in an uneven halo.

The first time she invited me to her house,

we dressed up like Laura Ingalls Wilder

in petticoats and tiaras.

One summer we found a cocoon in anise wood.

Budding biologists, we beat the sunset home,

emptied a liter of Coca-Cola,

inserted the leafy branch inside,

constructed the caterpillar’s castle,

our ship frozen inside a glass jug.

Embalmed dolls brushed aside,

we moved instead to fill the inanimate with life.

The orange butterfly cast off her coat days later.

We took her out to the anise field and watched

in awe as she flew out to Laura’s prairie.

Crabapples fell but did not crush the glowing halo.

Spinning

Spinning*

Michelle and I are playing tornado

in the backyard when Dad comes home early,

before Mom calls set the table,

and Dad pulls us into his lap.

We giggle because Dad has foxtails stuck

in his socks and a flower pinned under one ear

and Dad is an engineer.

None of this matters once he flips open

his vintage lunchbox,

and inside we don’t see this morning’s

turkey-avocado but a black rabbit

the size of two five-year-old hands.

It eyes four wagging ponytails

and four invading palms

as the tornados are forgotten.

Late afternoon light highlights only

what is still green and what is black,

we race around yelping because

we’ve got new overalls and a

brand new bunny to parade around like

we drew him ourselves,

wishing Teacher would pin him up on the

chalkboard so everyone would know

that he is ours, the world is green,

and still unshaken from our dizzy young orbit.



* published on firstwriter.com, summer 2006

For the Sun

For the Sun

every night as a child I would stand on the

splinter-strewn balcony and squint my eyes

in search of you

I longed to unhook your yellow curtain

that tied you to the distant hills,

let your precious golds and reds and magentas

pour down enriching color

onto the quilt-stitched fields,

building-studded city streets,

onto each bald and hairy head

every night as a child I was startled

when you eased down that slippery horizon,

locking yourself into the abyss

leaving me alone in the blue-blackness

to discover the moon