hobart logo
3 poems photo

GIFTWRAP 

When you come to me 
in our room where every line
wavers
I am gift-wrapped in
black latex to be stripped
the taunt of your breasts  your
fingers spread to my mouth   I 
shiver
because this is not art
but our nature and
nature has no symmetry

·       from Gina Osterloh’s “Pressing Against Looking, Fixed”

 

WHAT REMAINS

this is not Eden or
another youth-burning night
naked by the lake  tangled into
a first name under the trees  before
he cums and talks about how 
the stars above are impossible 
are dead lights   fading memorials
these are our bodies  these are
what is left    to swing from liana vines
bare of myths and the sweetness
of mistakes
lingering

·       from Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s “Landscape at Fehmarn with Nudes”

 

TIKI

I bought an angry god
the size of my hand
From his bookshelf throne he
begs for sacrifices while
the snow drifts wave

When the furnace roars
he flashes his teeth  promises
volcanoes  Tsunamis to drown 
mariners   navies
Continents

Another zombie and
The sleet is white sand
each window an island chain
and Tahiti exists even if
I will never see it

My god is tired-eyed
and so am I   these long
winters without Lava   alone
with plastic gods and postcard
hula girls

drifting like flotsam
bound for shore

 


SHARE