Dinner In Ashland

Lear lost no kingdom. Juliet grieved none.
Hamlet was slain by a plastic rapier. Quince
is on a ten month contract. Halleluiah,
we have arrived: bread is bread.
(And one day we will forget what fire looked like)


































Club Flex

I.

The ancient supplication of a boot lick.
What no accouterments? Is this sex or revenge?
The king gets buzzed in a red leather chair.
Someone’s dyke Mom wears a choke chain collar,
her mid-day jeans bulge off her hips.

II.

He wears a flower headdress and feels my pleather.
I tell him, I purchased these at Biscuit King. They
were lying beside a physics book. I complimented
the proprietor on her Country Ham. I prance down
the runway through eyes more ravenous than spotlights.
Yes, I tell him, she is my husband.

III.

The blood is not real, but the bowie is. So is the man with
the corkscrew teetering through his septum. The buck toothed
bird is not strapped to anything. He pretends to be tied
just to hear the Sirens’ song.

IV.

Napoleon, who Specializes in Military Fantasy, stands above
a green laundry basket. She lifts out a gas mask,
cock ring and child’s toy.

V.

He bought that shirt somewhere that played music.
His eyes are eggshells. You pathetic bottom,
she says. He kicks the table post in loose leather shoes.

VI.

Two shoe horns clasp one another. Pandemonium’s axis. Atlas finds his lover. Biceps and forearms, a decagon folded.
A Rembrandt circular.

VII.

Pimply pink buttocks peek through a black leather window.
Adhesive on a post-it note.

VIII.

The man over the turntables jokes about toilet seat covers,
talks of the tractor beneath him. As he says, This is some kinky country.























A Bigot’s Boots

When I loaded the silver box
that you rented to drive South,
I did not know you would give me
boots, your old boots, brown
and marbled, in high gloss,
with rainbow stitched peacocks,
and flames rising from the soles.

I was pleased to pack your globe,
even took time to locate the Union
of Socialist Soviet Republics,
as you watched, sandbags stacked
beneath your gaze, glasses
of radar, bandage on your foot.

I remember how you laughed
at obituaries, how you ridiculed
compassion’s senility, how you
cheered the bottle tosser, and
ignored the child being pinned.
I invite holidays: you are framed
by the grave, now with one foot
proving my case.

But I have your boots—gifts,
ornate symbols of your past.
They leer like closeted demons.
I look and wonder if they have
banged on a White’s Only barstool,
or kicked the ass of the oddball
in the corner.

Do I burn these haunted, hateful
things? Should I consume your
prejudice in fire? Should I set my
flame to your racist pride?

Or do I let the peacock’s pink eye
remain open when I kiss my men?
Do I tap the soles to blues and
march heels to chants of peace?
Can your history, which is my own,
be cleansed by sage?

Boots are not the wearer, I know:
Just leather and string and wood.
Yet symbols are rare and chosen.
And now, needed. Tonight,
I reach for Sherman’s torch and
Atlanta flickers under my feet.





























Medford Mill

He steers a blight down Crater Lake Highway,
past the Table Rocks, the glistening RV lots,
the yellow fields of star thistle, the thrift
shops. When the pumice approaches, he stops:
Arches of water, signs of smoke. Alarm
clocks beep underground. He starts
to douse his storied corpse; he keeps
a drowned boy dead by heaving air in spurts.
It smells of subdivisions, dog bedding.
A Mt. McLaughlin made of small squares,
surrounded by an oil sea, black machines,
black pyramidal piles of pine and Mulberry.
Behind this scene some cruel act lies:
An earth destroyed, and made tender as it dies.