i send my assembly-line boy back:
reset his factory settings, my hands remember how he likes it
wipe his rosy cheeks, flick his pink nipples one last time
commit his little moans to memory, his blue eyes glowing with promise
take his box out of storage, a hasbro grave,
geoffrey’s gone like god & good fortune
admire his bulging cow eyes & long lean legs, achingly beautiful smoothness
straighten his white shirt, lower him into the abyss
lay packing peanuts on him (there’s a penis joke here),
make sure the plastic isn’t suffocating
i’ll miss him, i’m sure
but summer’s coming,
& doesn’t it just eat at you when a boy is too perfect?
– Michael Chang…
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and mangoes on the counter
silently ooze sweetness, anyone
arrives through the door warmly,
and sweat seals our skin together
in cheek-kisses. A nimble infant,
the bright sun hangs on us,
while, in front yards, banana spiders
spin pearly filaments, and catch
the devil’s red at the thorny edges
of themselves. In the storms of June,
the waves break from the teal sea,
like a seventh seal, and pass
ominously through the patched-
labyrinth of parks, and children
revel in it, the mud and mangroves;
But, they have seen the little perditions
of the periwinkle: To endless displace
each grain of sand, all for the waves’s
moon-cadence, and the white froth that spills
against the sand into the declensions
of another language and is wiped clean.…
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I try not to forget those days at home,
Though I would not like to live them again,
Alone with the chores and a currycomb
I used to groom Gray among the chickens
That ran out in the barnyard and mule-lot,
For telling you these details, I’m afraid,
Only makes any point I sharpen rot
Before it’s ripe or, on arrival, dead.
Reveries under the shed’s overhang
Close in on truths unbeholden to me,
Scrunched against the wall, sun sweet as sea tang,
The dew, too, dripping from the tin a spree
I cannot sing except to say it’s so.
Childhood, the goose-pimples, moments of bliss
I sense from decades back, gains my long row
I keep on hoeing while I reminisce.
It all comes to not knowing who I am.…
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Long before desire benched the boy
I was and took the field, we escaped
baking in our old brick oven
those summer nights, when Pops
ran a cord to the porch window,
so we could sit listening to katydid shrieks
compete with buzzing ballpark fans peppered
by vendors’ hawking cold beer and peanuts,
as fireflies signaled heater, deuce.…
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On my grandma’s last birthday, I brought her a scoop of vanilla ice cream. She told me to come back the next day with more ice cream, as I had forgotten her real birthday and celebrated a day too early. I knew for a fact that her birthday that year was on Christmas Day, as it had been every year since 1926. I blamed this episode on her worsening dementia. Regardless, I decided to try again the next day, with a hopeful scoop of ice cream and an even more hopeful attempt at convincing my geriatric grandmother that it was, in fact, her birthday. Four days later and many more naive scoops of ice cream later, I realized my grandmother’s dementia might have made her a genius.…
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is the title of the book my father
intends to write when he grows up.
It is a hoax, of course;
there will be no other stories
just three hundred and fifty pages
of encounters with the TSA
since 2001
and other, better men.
This is what I tell you
in a coffee shop on Wardour St.
It is one of several things I take for granted
that we already have in common.
You tell me your birthday,
Miami International Airport,
you are as much your father’s son as I am
all daughter.
– Zara Shams…
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shadows
slant our stage
actors
await their cues
the director
weaves
sleights of hand
innuendos
deceptions
lamentations
tales of unrequited loves
wars won lost
brewed with heartbreak
touches of joy
stirred violently
entrance of kings
close
long gray lines
plowing merciless fields
end
empty stage
old folks
sitting
in
sheds
w
a
i
t
i
n
g
– Ron Torrence
…
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