Two Poems

Sammy Greenspan

Counting on you

Dearest Digiredoo, my darling retroviral wunderkind, a forfeit motherboard shutters the mitochondrial sleigh of runes

Heartland transformer crackles, spits prophesy; skilled artisans flee screaming with skirts hiked high

On every toadstool a lost love, on every porch-step, a boxed encyclopedia set

Under the welcome mat, the neighbor’s key

Testosterone recoil, voluptuous curves excite not the slightest twitch between the legs

All eyes rivet the screen, the daily sylph with floating ribs removed simulates Barbie’s Beautiful Sexless Sleep

Wet dream only, vulva sanded to stipulate no actual copulation

Everywhere the children of men are counting on you, my lonely lunatic lambkins, O once-and-future qualm, to shear the chute clean of every lovely little diseased desire

***

Unveiling

In the valley after the surgery, penchant for ripped shirts.    

By the headstone, little sink-holes. Damp earth strangely listing. Such lonely verbs.

A slow-cycling form not easily diagnosed in verse. Melatonin macchiato, cowboy coffer jiggered. Invitation disinclined.

Demented dust rummages under bed, so many soles desiring. So many lovely lopsided trinkets.

Little stone planchette. LaGuardia flight path. Milk curdle, downspout disrepair, pages guttered. Jazz boy ducks out the kitchen, apron a-flap, too late to spray the blaze.

Stamped-tin ceiling buckled like a knuckle. Rest. A full measure.

Warm pint deferred: coal hymns, phone turned off. Brain surgery. It’s not. Rocket science.

Lather lightly. Slant rotor, clave smooth. All’s well as ends, encumbered. A little lymph for the old man, little whistle of wee hours train passing.  

Slag’s up, already riffled, trees sniftering up shale from the mufti Mohawk.

Sammy Greenspan is director of Pudding House Salon-Cleveland. Her chapbook Step Back from the Closing Doors (Pudding House, 2009) was a Pushcart nominee. Her work appears in Heartlands; Del Sol Review; Fuck Poetry; the anthologies, The Pudding House Gang, Love Poems and Other Messages for Bruce Springsteen and Poetography; and at northcoastpoet.com.

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