JEWELRY
I’m dating a kindly forty-three-year-old hospital nurse,
who wears a leash around his throat and sober jeans.
Sometimes he leaps on my lap, like a dog.
And he licks just like one too.
It doesn’t embarrass me when we’re out together.
And I learned to enjoy playing his therapeutic games.
He has great explanations for why some things don’t matter.
I call him Molly and he laughs.
He says no one and nothing has ever pleased him more than I do.
His name for me is the Neon leprechaun.
He’s seen death on the job but he doesn’t let that get to him.
It comes with a promise to give life his undivided attention.
And his piercings are modest and few but each one has a meaning.
One or two even shine in the dark.
Some nights, I flop like a pendant across his bones.
There’s an unspoken intensity to weariness.
.
MORNING AFTER
One morning in a cave of summer sockets,
music glistened lenses, flew up thick as tears.
from the avenue, thick and huge,
a window of tortoise-shell glasses –
a small man I take from you,
a foreigner at night, one hand set down,
beside the vials of a nose, no taller
than morphine, in a car driven by a bull god –
wheels tight to what wasn’t ours, God’s curb
tinged with tracks and lilies, rocking a ditch,
tower of fire invoking Aries, a round pointed roof,
a horned monster, hung over the edge.
Stink Eye Magazine 