John Grey

BRENDA ON HER LATE SISTER

It must have been the way
she slithered, the way her
hip bones clicked and clacked like castanets.
The eyes had a lot to do with it as well.
They swelled with moon-light
and jumped out of her sockets.
Then they were like hands held out to her.
Yes, she danced with her own eyes.

Down by the swamps, she was
more the swamps than all that
brown, diseased water, those
bowed-head, sucking cypresses.
She was all that croaking and hissing
and grunting and shrieking,
all the noises that never seemed
to come from any one animal
but from the whole rotting morass.
When she writhed and howled
at the edge of that wretched marsh,
she reeked of that same decay,
breathed in and out rabidly
like gators feeding.

And she was the junk-yards too,
the rusting flesh of road-deaths,
the fearsome dogs that licked her,
the rats she patted like cats.
Atop hills of crumpled metal,
she flung her shirt from her body
like unwanted skin,
spun and screamed
while her breasts burst away from her rib-cage
like animals sprung free from traps.

She was every barren place,
every forgotten place,
like in my heart so deep
she was my heart,
became the low cackle of terror
at the bottom of my laughter,
the dark blood that drips out with my tears.



ONE ORDERS FOOD, THE OTHER DOESN'T

She orders nothing
sweeter than anyone I know.
The food is all on my shoulders,
my life sagging from
Chinese ravioli,
chicken and broccoli
heaped across fried rice.
She sips the tea that hovers
between generic and universal,
her tongue leaving her body
like light from a lantern,
licking out my eyes.
I eat quick as a morning razor
but it is still never enough.
She is free to talk
or read horoscopes
from the place-mats
or scan the walls for dragons.
Mouth overloaded,
hands and head on auto-pilot,
I cannot lean over,
kiss those twining lips
or roll my breaking fingers
across the beach of her palms
or even walk tip-toe with my eyes
down the tablecloth,
into the precious air between us
that her thighs hug like planets.
I am slowed down by what I do.
She is already a step ahead of me,
floating about the room,
lighter than her hair,
caressing me in the clanging kitchen,
to the smell of ducks
and the feel of waterfalls,
or undressing me
in the shiny metal mirrors of the soup bowl,
drowning me in a broth of pleasure,
our flesh awash in won-tons.
Her head writes poems.
My stomach has no imagination.

 Current Issue:
October 2007

Melinda Blount
Frank DeCanio
Bobbi Dykema
Taylor Graham
John Grey
Don Kloss
Alicia Matheny
Pam Pignataro
Jeremy Rich
Bill Roberts
Bethany Rountree
Tom Sheehan
Kelsey Upward

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