Green Linden Press

Eating Emergency Shelf-Stable Cheese During a Pandemic
and Power Outage with You

is as fun as watching Curb Your Enthusiasm on an iPhone  

or listening to Fetch the Bolt Cutters
in the dark—that queen of self-isolation—

the tepid beam of a Costco flashlight fingering the ceiling
like the lights at the Ryman 
whose velvet pews we sat in once

swaying along with Emmy Lou Harris—
her hair an incantation, gleaming auroral psalm,

back when I thought listening
was a kind of prayer

and now the storm knocks over power lines 
like the ghost of my junky ex-boyfriend 

rummaging for me in the dark
and I am tired of making metaphors.—

tonight our groceries  
will rot in the fridge

and I yet will wake up happy,
I will walk barefoot into the yard

to kiss the leaves of our fig tree
that we planted a month into quarantine. 

I will pour shelf stable milk into my instant coffee
heated over a Coleman stove flame

and know this is a prayer too.

After the Famous Poet Says He Refuses to Read His Contemporaries Because They Write Secular Poems and He Is Only Interested in Sacred Knowledge

I want to ask him, what is sacred knowledge
if not the way my husband peers

between my legs at night
to see if pinworms

have left a fresh dusting of eggs
before deconstructing in my guts—

what is sacred if not the knowledge
that my intestines swirl boozy

with pulsar lint like pale apostrophes
seduced by the moon out of my orifices,

as if they, too, must answer to a greater
calling, dilated and feral in their yearning

to know God. Now the poet is talking about
his wife who he describes as “uneducated

but occasionally capable
of saying something profound, like:

I want you to touch me
like you want to know me”

which is beautiful and I almost
trust him again until he starts yelling:

“I don’t want to arouse my wife!
I want to know my wife!”—

which really doesn’t mean anything
and I want to ask, what is sacred

if not the lazy kind of foreplay
when both of you are too tired

but the kid is asleep, perhaps
an NBA game streaming

from a bootlegged Russian source
in the background and there is nothing

you want more than to pass out.
What is more sacred

than rising toward one another anyway
the way a pinworm possibly rises

inside of me right now,
maybe one who believes he is more holy

than all the other pinworms,
who reads the sacred text

of my body and shimmers
in delight.

My Grown-Out Haircut Looks Like It Wants to Talk to the Manager

at Olive Garden, perhaps complain the breadsticks

were not sufficiently warmed or the Tour of Italy

was subpar, fingernails the color of pesticide roses

pointing at the receipt—

my haircut looks like it hoards toilet paper,

scowls at the backyard birthday party’s

raucous delight,

although haven’t I nourished my own catalogue

of complaints, naming what I dislike

like an incantation, for example (see above)

roses, anemic receptionist of the flower world—

the way they look undercooked 

like a steak eaten alone in Buenos Aires at midday

or a used bookshop’s volumes

of Pizarnick and Borges rippling like ghostly lingerie— 

they are the iambic mouth-breathing 

ruining my orgasm, base note 

lifted from Celine Dion’s throat. I have no use 

for what does not love its own mystery 

whose whorls do not mimic the sea’s whipped tide 

but tubs of I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter— 

Rose, you are the only damn thing that lasted 

after the tornado wrecked our street—

posse of lowbrow gossip and mediocre swag

bloated like a parade float on our neighbor’s front lawn— 

I did not long for you 

in the basement we sheltered in 

as sirens touched the edge of our sleep— 

I did not imagine you crouching in the dark, 

your phosphorescent tongues 

approximating grace. 

We watched Memphis play the Nets 

on a laptop while our daughter slept, 

and tried not to cheer too loudly 

when they won, not because of Tennessee 

but because the point guard  

played like he knew he might snap 

his ankles dunking on the seven-foot defender 

and did it anyway. 

Give me a daisy, chickweed, 

any flower that will bury itself into the earth 

before it multiplies. 

Give me a flower our gun-toting neighbor would want to stifle 

that survives out of spite.

I Saw the Last Waltz for the First Time and All I Can Think About Is Bob Dylan’s Perfectly Moisturized Curls

so well cared for, as if he had deep conditioned the night before,
coils tight and elaborate as morse code or
a rose’s baroque heart, synth solo in “All My Love”
where John Paul Jones ascends, astronomy textbook
with every page ripped out and taped to a teenager’s
bedroom wall, the science tests I failed after studying all night
because I thought to love something meant I understood it—
oh rose, with your poem-less
scent, for those who claim they love pussy but would never eat it—
they end the film with “I Shall Be Released”
and I wonder if these men ever made a woman come
without music, or if when Dylan turns his back
to the crowd he is thinking of his mother
and they should have ended on “The Weight,”
should have stopped after Mavis Staples
finished the verse, let each note spiral upward, 
like an apothecary of bloom and hiss

Ode to American Cheese

I love the preamble 
of cellophane  

opened like Tea for Tillerman
pulled from its dust jacket

on a Sunday morning, 
the oracular and operatic aura

of Orange, what I eat when I’m sad, not actual oranges 
or anything that grew from the earth—

Go-Go dancer-tassels of dander and pollen 
pinwheeling in the heady splendor of spring—no. 

I like my orange clinical as a vasectomy, 
neon testament to the holy

and artificial—the cheese I ate
in high school after smoking

a blunt during 4th period
and collapsing at the altar

of fish sandwiches, Empress in blue paper
rumpled open like a raincoat 

or the Big Mac, hierophant of the Fast Food kingdom
commanding reverence

and when I’d peel back the bun
it was like looking behind the pulpit,

everything I ever wanted
suddenly made so clear

I had to look away.