THREE POEMS BY MICHELLE GREENBLATT
Letter
dear aidan,
at the hospital, a man asked my name. or did he ask me,
who did this to you? bruises crisscrossed
my breasts. I guess I can’t really remember
which he asked me. but I remember the letter
on his hat, "m" like my name, michelle. red as rivulets
of lava, aa flow, spiny and jagged.
you always laughed
when I said that letters had properties, like the letter "c" especially when
it’s capitalized—looks like pale yellow roses. or "i," the sloppy
inside of a cucumber. something breaking down. "i" makes
my fingers slimy. slimy as that night you left
me with the man holding the gun in the back of that alley.
when I cried it took little chinks out of me. I stood on my small red-Michelle
shadow, hurting it, but I stood there, waiting for the skin to grow
back and fill up the chinks, but the chinks didn’t go away. at
the hospital, it was blankwhite. not the walls, which were also
blankwhite, but rather, going there
was.
no one asked about the teeth
marks. no one said, "why are there bite-marks
on your body?" they only asked, "what color
is a hospital?" or was that
me, asking myself, rocking in the cold waiting
room, making noises like
a wounded seal. feeling the cold like a noose
of ice around my neck.
I kept looking at my wristwatch, and at the clocks
on the walls. they were all horribly wrong. the cesium
133 isotope is the one most commonly used
to make atomic clocks. 133 is a white-blue-blue which makes it sort
of the color of the frosted blue roses on sheet cakes but very volatile.
when I came out of the hospital, my anger was total. there were no colors, no letters, no
numbers, no poems. I was still young enough to taste young in my own mouth.
12.7-8.2005
Keloids of Stars
We return to the field, where the sky knits keloids of stars in our hair. He pulls at my light
with his teeth. These visions are the final sign which bloats the circumstantially
comfortable. Scissors flash between your thighs. You are edged with the patchwork of
stone wheels. I have a grey welt on my forehead where you struck me last, then the frost
comes. The cumulous pose you struck after you popped out of that trash can was enough
to make my summer muscles go dark, marbleized.
2.28-3.7.2006
Thoughtground
To sea we bring our blood and we kill the last of the mammoths. We teeter on the razor’s
edge where windows are made up of just the ledge
and we all live on unapproachable islands. The soot dampens; the night thickens. You
flick your forked tongue
out at me. The purists repeat their message until they’re sure I can’t forget it. But I’ve
forgotten it already; likely I don’t learn
by repetition or the forcible quickening of my pulse. Isolation continues. Ambulatory
futures creak by on passive
limbs, last-seen drops of water beads echo latex bribery, lurch forward with a certain
truancy inherent to high-school children. A ductile place of a brighter
grey exists where someone wants to play, I think, and I swim downstream towards the
mesmerized muscle
of foundation. Pestered by defecating birds, the movement of static sound releases little
droplets of energy that scratch and probe
at the wall-less movement-maker howling death into live holes before it relaxes the
helpless into arterial song and delays the royalty
while it forces them towards the center of consciousness that orbits native thoughtground:
transitive beaches of Hell (penumbral consequence
of rumination). This summer is wind-honed, in the locust-drip silence. Moth-molten
bottomless cry for merge of icon and subject, PLUNGE
into padded patient living-quarters. The granite-top foams its sinuous riptide vagaries as
if we’d stumbled into the aquatic center
for living life backwards. Lines converge the way people to underpin the dance of circles
of once
erupting tombs where form asserts itself as form and skyscrapers forbid a moon’s full
phases.
*
Where treading water in the shallow end becomes dangerous because he watches, because
he forbids it. Because his needle is adamant. And he dubs you
part of his vigorous protocol.
*
The verbal tread I run across makes sequencing easy. S P R E A D S growth between two
hands and secretion across all
ten fingers. Her radiant hair made me frantic. Vein-secretions indicate that no slit wrist
could endure
more tragedy than had already been leveraged upon it. Her face reflects every seizure she
has ever caused/ me to have. You had to strip
off the moon before you realized her hard rock body, the unscratchable diamonds her eyes
were, her ghost fangs for teeth, worm
lips for smiles. To breathe: systole diastole systole diastole. Her godhead is hardly the
problem. Blood cannot glut her, say the survivors, of which there are few.
3.15-17.2006
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Michelle Greenblatt is the co-editor of the upcoming magazine,
The New Hallucinogen. Her first book brain:storm, went to press this January
(anabasis Press) She has been published or will be published in these magazines:
can we have our ball back?, Coconut Poetry,
eratio, Dusie,
Xerolage, Otholiths,
moria,
Blackbox,
Peek Review, Naked Sunfish,
Fire, Shampoo, Word for/ Word,
The Argotist Online,
Big Bridge,
Free Verse, Hamilton Stone Review,
The Anemone Sidecar & many others.
Her second book, Ashes and Seeds is forthcoming from BlazeVOX.
Michelle can be reached at michelle.greenblatt@gmail.com
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