Poems by Jules

First Born Brother

(forthcoming in Salamander magazine, spring/summer 2008 issue)

Dad scrapes out the overgrown grass around your grave

with a butter knife,

plants marigolds around our last name.

Mom quit her job for your arrival,

delivered you into the ground.

I was not the eldest, after all.

We sit on the couch,

your baby ink footprints in my lap,

our feet unable to touch the floor.

Horizons

for my grandmother

I dreamed you cut your hair. Your neck, white and smooth, says the new life will be easier. The necklace would have been best kept under glass. Now the turquoise stones circle your neck. Your travel brochure mentions silence three times. You ask the devil for a new type of bondage.

The tortoise encounters her hidden grave. Why does she see it now, hidden from view for over sixty years? The church prayed for her. Carpenters kept hammering. She closes her eyes. A man climbs up on the roof. A woman disappears into thin air. She says a spell upon waking. Horizons keep rising every twenty-four hours.

Your exposed skin can be touched only in circles. The tortoise buries herself in the sand. Don’t feel pity, name the stones on your neck instead, touch them in the dark. What do I say when I show you her empty shell on the beach? I squeeze your hand. They've made her into a bowl, turned her upside down, hung her on the wall.

Run, Perro, Run

(Run, Dog, Run)

On a Mexican Easter Sunday, love

will torture Veronica. She is

chained to the bed like a dog,

pregnant and blindfolded from

her own memory. Wild perro

circle her star, a room from inferno.

Why does a stranger run through hell

to save a half-faced baby dog

born on the beach in low tide? Is

it a piece of broken pottery, loved

only by its mother, running from

the children? Run, perro

run. Run across history. Run, perro

run. Veronica hides her love

in seawater, believes it is

safe to swallow salt. Hell

is losing herself to the wild dog-

faced priest who enters her from

his own lost place, from

the way he tries to take her with him. Isolation is

a mannequin with a doll's face. One blind dog

leads her, but beware the perro

that will nip at her heels and bite her neck. Hell

is remembering fragments of love,

and why he once loved

her, before the unborn baby became an inferno

between them. When it is midnight, flying perro

bats circle around her and the priest in bed. Veronica is

not afraid, she is calm from

their silent wings, their gray dogged

dives. Her priest is full of his own dogma

as he climbs out of bed and cannot love

her anymore. The Pacific pulls her under. She is

swimming with her clothes on. Half a doll's head appears from

under a wave and she sees her own face. An inferno

of laughing children swim beside her. Wild perro

dogs release her from his illicit love. The priest is in his own hell.

Tomorrow his face will plaster the Mexican papers and her body

will be found, cut into pieces. Run, perro run!

Sestina for Veronica Andrade Salinas, the victim of the Easter killing in Toluca, Mexico by Cesar Torres, a Catholic priest. She died April 16, 2006. (from "Toys in Bed")

Monarchs For Laura

for L. Barnes 1962-2005

Monarchs for Laura

for L. Barnes 1962-2005

When the planet seems small and you write about a man sleeping under a bridge, you ask me: is it good? I will help you with the words under water, the ocean I sought in Santa Barbara Bay. You ask me to bring Prince in my luggage and your students in the playground ask where Minnesota is, so you take me out dancing and the guys say do you feel the beat of monarch butterfly wings landing on your outstretched hands, migrating to the trees filled with hanging moss. Tom Petty sings "Free Falling." Your husband heads out to Ventura and you take me to your stable so I can watch you ride horses. Your tan jodhpurs rub against their flesh and the weight of the mountains and I haven't seen you in fifteen years, but the letters keep coming, piling up in my closet shoebox, unclassified. An email arrives with your name as the subject, from your husband. I knew before I opened you up that you had left me here, you woke up in the trees.

Sex in Church

She leads him up to the third floor Sunday School room and closes the door. Clears off the table filled with paper cut-outs of the Holy Land. Pulls the drapes. It's Monday morning, the Pastor's day off. The man isn't her husband. She's broken one of the Ten Commandments. She'll be banished to Purgatory. Except she's not Catholic. She's Methodist. What the hell do they believe? They ordain women. She wonders if he goes to church. She doesn't think so. He kneels before her. Where is the steeple? This church doesn't have one. He is her salvation. Don't scream.

Published in "5 AM" Issue #22

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On Walking Upright

On the 47th floor

Bob crawls along on hands and knees,

underneath the desks among computer cables.

He fondles polished shoes on stockinged feet,

and searches for open toes.

In the stale air

of the typing pool, the males bond and rise

with striped ties to seduce thin females

with low-cut necklines and plaid slacks;

their high heels clicking along with their keyboards.

On Fridays,

Jane wears leather below her waist.

She scolds the circles on the carpet into staying on the floor,

blows kisses at the goldfish in the bowl on her desk,

surfs for porn.

In the lunchroom

freezer there is complimentary vodka

and frozen TV dinners. The clock ticks

ten minutes slow and the framed mission statement

includes the word ‘mirth.'

On the boss’ desk

Bob finds the luster in Jane’s unleashed hair,

and walks upright to place his hands where they belong.

He loses his security badge to his own falling pockets and

blurry vision.

On the bus

with the nightfall Bob crawls along, enters into the

news, sinks into the threads of flowers on his sofa and

eats up the whole day from his sandwich in the

paper bag.

performed at Fret, Frame & Chatter #19 - Acadia Cafe, Minneapolis

October 28, 2004 (thanks to Cindra Halm & Justin Johnson)

Summer Walks

When you salt your eggs in the morning

you will want to remember summer,

how it walks on pavement with old shoes,

melting rubber soles. Eggs fry on the sidewalk

into hard-boiled sandwiches as you send your

kid to the corner store on the bike for mayo.

Sorry, they’re out of fresh tomatoes,

the junk store next door is closed, grass

dried up, kiddie pool cracked. You walk

to the liquor store two blocks away.

What’s that Russian beer special?

$1.99 a bottle gets you a buzz, only takes

one. The block is strangely quiet except

for the hum of air conditioners, the ring

of the ice cream truck driving too fast.

Blackouts. No gas. No batteries. Sheet

music waits. You lift up the air conditioner

all by yourself, throw it out the window,

take another shower, basement TV is dark

Someone put all the salt back in the shaker.

You drink tequila in cut-offs while the cats

stay cool on bare floors. At four a.m.you must

leave your body because it’s walking around

the house. First you kiss your own thighs,

taste your own sweat. You wake up

on the kitchen counter with the inside

of your legs still flexing. Go on salting

your wrist then, suck on it. Go on salting

your sweet corn, elbows leaning,

butter running down your arms.

Snow Conservatory

There is a place where you can go where it is always winter. Leave behind the green, step into a clarity of cold, smell the ice. Whitness is caged now, you can see your breath. Prepare to be instructed in the fine art of hibernation and silence. Parkas hang on hooks by the door for tourists, but you already have the same heavy coat that never left your car, remember when you wore it open to warm breezes, out of habit in spring you forgot to take it off. In the center is the ice palace with blinking lights and recorded music, food vendors sell hot brandy cider, couples line up for horse-drawn sleigh rides, but you are not afraid of solitude. See them? They are the ones that won’t leave, forced out on the street every night by the volunteer greeters when the building closes. They wear leather pants all year, sunglasses to block the light that isn’t right. Motorized shades come down to cover the glass at five pm. How long will you stay? Hide in a corner under the evergreens. Dig a tunnel in the snowbank. Study dirty sidewalk ice. You have three more months to write about unrequited love and frozen locks.

Published in "Spout" Issue #30 www.spoutpress.com

Forming Poems

In between the constant rumble of purring cats and folds of sheets, skin to skin again you ask me if I’m writing anything this week. I say no, I’m in no state of mind for that, but you’re reading that Indian writer and he no longer makes you angry with his sloppiness of craft and well-known name. A poem is forming in your head but later there is no evidence except circles on my back, spaces of lone highway calling the space between one place of entry where we can’t tell ourselves apart, leaving no evidence in the morning of anything on paper or on sheets except for the beer caps on the counter and the fan still rattling.

forthcoming in "5 AM" spring 2008

***************

con

considering you’ve always felt this way

congress assembled

conjunction balanced with another star

convertible topless

conifer bearing cones

conglomerate of wildly diversified sources

conjure draw towards the other

consent from the darkest parts of your body

convex outward curves

converse that place where woman and man

can’t tell the difference

convey transfer complete

controvert deny all

consecrate to declare sacred

**********************

Breath

Breath

is the sky sighing between them.

Breath

descends the steps toward

altered states,

opens the heavy wooden door

to a man on his horse,

a woman staring at her moccasins.

Breath

is the sky sharing their loneliness,

exhaled words, stolen from other poets,

tobacco

winding around his throat

like the sky after it rains,

describing the

smoky haze

of the bar, where they discover they both miss

seeing stars in the city,

seeing a sky so big and fearful

they’d have to stare into the campfire all night

to make any sense of it at all.

Two breaths

held underwater

at midnight

skinny-dipping

until

they drop

under the dock

making waves

where a little girl still sits,

feet in the water,

counting stars.

***************

Magnolia

for Cindra

You dream and magnolia blossoms

appear on the boulevard.

Fragrant and thick,

openings turn to white.

Tarot in the bar

with the blue impossible.

Take a chance with a difficult answer.

We drive seven hundred miles

to meet Sylvia Plath

in the card catalog,

read Moby Dick in Eureka Springs.

In several thousand years

it will happen, the impossible.

*************

At the Union

At the Union Grill & Bar,

the beers are flowing at 11 am.

CNN replays trails of white plumage

across the Texas sky.

Seven astronauts perished the same week

17 years ago.

What was I doing then?

Same as the country,

not paying attention.

Then the explosions came,

nameless faces

all too real after a short encounter

and my gut rumbled

every time I saw their image.

As a little girl, I thought someday I’d get to outer space

Figured out how old I’d be in

the year 2000.

Back at the Union it’s almost noon.

Gravity keeps me hostage

to another beer,

another blind date

with a stranger in my own country.

published in "5 AM" Issue #22