Category Archives: Poetry

translating wormwood

15 Tuesday Jan 2013

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All the ancient birds heard me say farewell
to the trees, my deep roots, when my shadow
was touched by that egg of dark, that thin shell.
I am now far from the sea, the ghetto,
even the horizon does not recall
my name. I seem to miss those ugly things
that helped anchor me here. I had a doll
once, a lost thing without hair or blessings,
that slept in my arms since no one else would.
We make do with what will love us. Like words,
we love what shows up. Translating wormwood
into poems. I call on all bastards
to show me how to live with this pathos.
Better still, how to master this chaos.

mahdokht: daughter of the moon

14 Monday Jan 2013

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Naked or veiled, you’re not some impotent
man’s wet dream; black kohl of a houri tossed
to a paradise only a merchant
of girl flesh would pander to. When you lost
your milk teeth, you threw them up to the sun,
singing, “take my donkey teeth and bring me
gazelle teeth.” I love how our old heathen
language survived. Now we speak with fairy
tongues. My daughter, you might be a jinneh,
but you’re no reward, no handmaid. Naked
or veiled, I shall love you. I shall love you
chaste and vestal or ribald and risque.
We speak of an agreement, a scared
pact, not spoken in Persian or Hebrew.

][][

Notes:

Houri: in Persian lore, one of the immortal virgins of the Koranic paradise; used to describe a beautiful, but submissive, woman.

Jinneh: a female jinn.

phantasmic comforts: asleep in the city of souls

14 Monday Jan 2013

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Las Vegas literature has been and continues to be a literature of exiles, written mainly by outsiders who arrived from elsewhere, stayed briefly, lingering along the city’s glittering Strip and never once invest the place with any depth, any soul, any idea of what was going on around them.

Las Vegas literature has been and continues to be a literature of exiles, written mainly by outsiders who arrive from elsewhere, stay briefly, linger along the city’s glittering Strip but never once invest the place with any depth, any soul, any idea of what is going on around them.

I had never witnessed so many ghosts
until I lived in Vegas. The desert’s
potter’s field; for, what other city boasts
such a thin veil? What phantasmic comforts
could such a necropolis offer up
to the living? The Valley of Fire called
and the temple of Sekhmet called. Worship
comes in all forms. Can you hear this? Ribald
pleasures are nothing compared to carnal
worship. The ghosts came in throngs. They hungered
to be witnessed. “Hear me, friend, the frightful
veil is not all so frightful,” they murmured.
There is no Emerald City; Vegas
is a way station, nothing more or less.

a dark science

13 Sunday Jan 2013

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There are two scars on the dead woman’s breasts
but when I run my finger over them
she mews, shivers and turns away. Our chests
soon touch and she pushes her need and phlegm,
a stub of a blue tongue, into my mouth.
Love should come with no strings or not at all.
When I move between her thighs, “go down south,
Moses,” I can taste on her clit the gall
of the methanol used in embalming.
There is a science to all this, I know.
A dark science. I treasure that second
when she climaxed, laughing and crying,
when the dead discovered lust once more
and our understanding of love deepened.

leanbh, love

13 Sunday Jan 2013

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“Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
with a faery, hand in hand,
for the world’s more full of weeping
than you can understand.”
–William Butler Yeats (1889)

Why? More than love, more than sex, I want you
as a changeling; leaving behind twine
and kelp — flotsam and jetsam — that I grew
from tide foam. Tonight your parent’s bloodline
ends. Yes. Tonight your heart shall no longer
be this lonely. Leave the hearth fire unlit.
Leave your father who ordered you never
to see me again. You’ve tasted my clit
in the moonlight. You have made this airy
creature cum and cum. Leanbh, love, tonight
all the world sleeps. Let’s leave this misery
for a world of little deaths and moonlight.
This lust, leanbh, is the gods’ true essence.
Leanbh, lust is our true inheritance.

NOTE: “leanbh” is the old Irish word for “babe” or “child,” a term of endearment.

something primal and forbidden

13 Sunday Jan 2013

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One more illicit kiss, Yeva. Ghouleh
Yeva. Curving her lips when I ask her
if she loves me. “Someday,” she says, “someday.”
I love forbidden love. One girl’s monster
might be this cock boy’s passionate love-sighs.
Lust is cunning-simple, but we distrust
all that bring it. Somehow those who despise
lust are considered righteous. It is lust
that my Yeva feeds to me, what I eat.
Ghouleh’s (girl ghouls) tastes run to odd corpses
but once in a while Yeva wants fresh meat.
Once in a while I fill her. It pleases
her that I want her so bad I’d risk heartache,
rabies, longing, exile, all for her sake.

i’ll feed you all

12 Saturday Jan 2013

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“She’s a gumbo cooker and an alligator whipper
make a dead man jump and shout.”
Elkie Brooks, “Mojo Hannah”

 

I mixed the powdered leaves of thyme that grow
on the slopes of Levant, roasted wormwood,
greens and Dead Sea salt into a gumbo
to please you. You were hungry, understood
I was the source of your food. I called on
the dead and their honey-melon cravings.
I’ll feed you all. Eon after eon
you did not forget such pleasant drippings
between your lips. We all have rot, wearied,
endless needs. I pity you poor zombies
and all that you must endure just to feed
down on Canal Street among quiet trees.
Taste this, love, a kitchen witch, ringed, tattooed,
taught me this gumbo; the dead’s favorite food.

flush blush flame

12 Saturday Jan 2013

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You’ve heard this before. Now and then. The soul
springs up alive. Polarized eyes then blink.
Useless limbs quiver. The heart, all charcoal
and ash, resumes. Flies move off and the stink
of your green rot fades and you flush and blush
and flame. Something below your slumbering
belly stirs. Poor Lazarus was all mush-
pulp when he rose. But we are no offspring
of sky gods. Our mothers taught us better.
Insatiable. Orgasms are doorways
to all that’s divine. What sort of sinner
would turn a blind eye on this holy praise?
Lets go together, passing through that door
once more, to see all our mothers once more.

in fog, in cold flesh

11 Friday Jan 2013

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Ghost of an orphan flings wide my windows
at dusk. I can taste tart perfumed evening
on my lips,the way ghosts kiss, as she flows
and glides to my side. The craft of kissing
her is hard but Death will make a pervert
out of me yet. Sometimes she is misty.
Other times I slide my hand up her skirt
and find out just how wet a ghost can be.
She gets laid in fog, in cold flesh, jealous
of all the blood in my veins. The godhead
bursting inside her. Spewing my lewdness
through her and all over our frowzled bed.
At dawn I still taste her urchin grave dust,
a dead waif’s ectoplasm wet with lust.