CONJUNCTIONS: A Web Exclusive

Three Poems Dan Rosenberg

Hair I came to, feeling broke about the head, a crown of spoons in my hair. Funny, I hadn’t thought myself thick enough still for all this eating and being eaten. At the party of miraculous drugs I’d been teetotaling my way along: Repeatedly sniffed past, I knew everyone was behind me with fogged spoons hanging from their noses. The rest of the night was a blurry string of stop signs worn like a necklace around the neck of an Italian girl. She posted herself at every corner: Noli me tangere. Spooning the hostess I told her the party of miraculous drugs was behind me, with a nose hanging from its disgusting face. She started feeding spoonfuls of drugs into my hair. She fed the Italian girl into my hair. The stop signs curled like burnt paper, red, they split my ends. I had to lie down under the miraculous bed, my head pressed flat to the floor. I felt her shift above my temples, surreptitiously tickling her own nose. I couldn’t even roll on my side, so heavy was my hair. I thought, I’ll always have her up there, sated and tender in a tangle. At the Cathouse Seven kinds of leopard splayed, and within each leopard a smaller, more subtle ear pressed my pulse. Every you’re the one rebounded its course around my vascular shame. I stayed wholly present; my shame left crying off a clothes-line. The leopards set me awry; they were toothy guideposts with new gravity. Undulation, I passed over you again, and again your sensual maw became a paradigm of weaving with the right and unraveling with the left. Then your lame prey conjured herself in a shroud of mist and I choked, the image of what you want with fingers slender as a wave of knives. From some inner darkroom then the leopards breathed out black light while I turned my eyes to them. I sanctified the leopards, each distinctly barred, each tensile, taut; each palm to head echoing a brush behind the ear, a cupping at the base of the skull like I was fully constituted. If It’s Not Coming It Must Be Going Away Drop the slow winter jacket to the floor. I pray for the cold to stay in it forever. In six months I will still be young and forgetting winter. The new trees will slice my fingers open. Trees will spill out. But for now I have somehow placed my insides on the surface. Every time a train whistles my redbreast collapses. Nobody can see her, but we all hear the whistle. Ice thickens the pond each night. Each day I find a fat rhombus of sun and stay on its edge. Here the sidewalk seems unreasonably happy, and even the mud around the busted hose could birth my children; I’ve been all over this place. I’ve lived here longer than I’ve been alive, so slowly does time leak into this town. In winter I conceive of the trees and am surprised to be a supporter of snow, a center, a core of value. We come so close to absolute zero we nearly stop our atoms in their shivering. Or the reverse: one foggy bowl of soup heating my motion all night on the porch with visible breath. Everything exposed becomes a border full of open doors. Impure. When I leap off the edge of my porch I believe in the ground below to fall to. I believe in the ground below that as well. □