Some New Writing (3 Poems)

Dishpan Gloves

Sometimes I’d imagine you,
scraping the dinner leavings from our
chintzy glass plates, running rubber gloves
through your torn hair and asking about
the cobwebs yet to be cleared. We’d turn
with the clock hands, dead tired at 6
or 7 in the evening. Just like now,
in many ways.

It’s nothing I like much to dwell on,
but, I could see us picking curtain colours;
making my middle school snorts,
you your gripping sighs, signs of embarrassment
we’d hide behind breaking shutters and hastily
slammed doors. Patching wounds over
with half-meant words and half-heard
regrets, sympathies.

Sometimes I think the only sound
with which I could sleep a good night,
is your breathing, its off-kilter bleat,
your cutting little barbs (no damage, all so
harmless), your solitudes and cold hands.

They were as thimbles of rain to a wanderer,
promised an oasis, far off, never found,
and that I will always be.

Reading By Streetlight

The caught ember casts hazy beams,
hovers orange and gold as
lit fossil, a Virginia cliffside.

Bits of ruled black ink, intolerable vowels,
became blurred and more blurred,
casting off their form like dress shirts.

Lit candles of the click-clack switch,
burning out as still flashbulbs,
disturbing the purple half-light and chirps.

The washing rattles about, machines whirring,
humming as they do. I exchange
the damp air of its breeze,

For a sweltered room and dirty blankets.

Soggy Sun

I woke in a spin of dripping faucets,
ice cubes melting on kitchen counters
and pulp mill produce rotting in odour:

I couldn’t have had much to say of it.

The powder blue collar, seeming correct minutes before,
scratched and crawled as aquatic life, flopping about
beneath flesh-sweat and flaking scalp:

Legs alright regretting the slight incline.

We wake, the brown pants and me,
seven hours apart, in separate dazes, feet
bending as shapeless liquid, as cut rubber:

Humid drips, honey from spool reels.

I regret this holding, more than anything,
it is buried feet deep with toy buckets,
tapping on concrete, with a word on screen:

Oh, you, floating, fluttering, above it all.

Today, it is brutish, it is short-of-breath,
I thought of you.