Where Are the Snows of Yesteryear?
POVERTY
Your finger is the branch from which I hang myself with a blade of grass so sharp sliced skin exposing my Adam’s apple whistles as I breathe, and the ends of your hair feel like feathers on my shoulders when you release me and I fall and you bend over me and whisper in a voice that sounds like a pork chop in a pan and I look at you and see your earrings dangling like light bulbs in a basement and you smell like chewed tinfoil and taste, your lips on mine, like rising bread.
TROUBLE
I hear water bubble soft as tea leaves scattered on my lashes. François Villon, you poet! François de Montcorbier, you thief! François Des Loges, you vagabond! Don’t you leave me here in Paris. If you don’t cut me down I’ll hang myself. Do you remember the photograph I took? The one that caused our fight? I am not sorry. Google image Obamaboobs and it won’t be there anymore, I swear. If you’d asked me to take it down, I wouldn’t have. I did because you never asked.
TRIAL
Pogoshipo Sunny noonah collie pornee ya, my little brother said, the perfect accent of youth…in the next room my sister played the piano and the heels of her palms broke those keys like the tusk of a matriarch snapping lengthwise beneath the full weight of the dead calf whose skeleton emerges from his shadow like a melody raging above the sounds of Mother in the kitchen.
EXILE
I pick you up by your knees and ride your neck to the pond beneath your hand and atop a lily pad we burp like tired toads and dance a sad song. Tadpole was a good girl, you’ll eulogize after I’m found and closed-casket waked. You will go home and tend the groves the way you always have and this is okay, selfish saint.
MISERY
I will not remember you where I’m going but I will take you with me like that poem in my heart. I will carry you in my heart. Rip me apart. I will remember you. Where I am going, I will forget you. I will never forget you.
DEATH
Sarang hae yo. This is the branch from which I hang, the blade of grass that licks behind my ear and shouts, “Po po hae jo.”
HANGING
I will elephant be your tusk and you will tadpole be my lips and we will basement bulbs and rise like lashes breaded beneath a tin foil tent beneath a lily pad noose beneath a pork chop pond beneath clouds of tea leaves beneath a photograph in the sky that never existed and never made us fight and never featherbrushed Mother in a piano where toads will grove this heart from which I whistle eulogies for the Adam’s apple whisper of our past.
