Belladonna

You may come to a place where nothing grows
Where all you can see for miles is desert terrain
Cracked edges of earth, splitting at its own themes
The dust is palpable, in your throat and in your eyes
Black skies and bruised clouds stretch on endlessly 
But in the corner there is a yellow cactus flower
Electric, alive, alone

It sways in the windless moment
Grows despite constant carnage

 Like sweet wine born from the bitterest grapes
its bouquet opens in the broken glass,
flavor ripening with every sip
It grows like those at the bottom of the ocean
without light, without oxygen, without sound
it glows

Like nightshades, solanaceae, the flowering plants
that bloom under the moon: potatoes, paprika, peppers
and pomodori 
The only edibles from a list of poison
filled with alkaloids and lectins and night air
They tell me not to eat them
quod me nutrit, me destruit 

God in Parentheses

Every morning I pass the bank display window on 17th street and
staring at my own wind-blown reflection I always think I see someone staring back
and (every time) I realize it’s just a tall, wooden lighthouse painted red and white,
used for marketing or decoration or who knows what.
Maybe that is what we are to one another:
decorative wooden lighthouses in display windows, guiding one another
through black waters, and misty mornings, and sidewalks filled with strangers moving in differing directions and discordant speeds.
Further down the man selling falafel and fried eggs from his food truck hands
people their change through the steel window and I stare at the Tropicana orange juice bottles on shaved ice pebbles.
(I don’t know why this matters
But somehow it does)
They smile as they walk away, clutching breakfast sandwiches in brown paper bags
Inside they are wrapped in foil
The way my dad used to do for my brother on Sunday mornings
He left the sandwich in the warm toaster oven
To stay heated until my brother woke up
(I don’t why this matters
But somehow it does)

Aplomb

There is not much to say about plums

that William Carlos Williams did not already cover

but I can say that they (and blackberries too) have a sweet

so startling deep that it hits you between your eyeballs

tingling in your brain and back jawbone.

The flavor emerges slowly, like blood clusters in a bruise

or the way it falls in water like backwards smoke.

Is it too biblical to associate fruit with death?

And sex? 

But Adam ate it too. The serpent spoke to them both.

What is forbidden always has flesh.

What is allowed always has breath.
What has teeth always fights back.

She ate it because he cared to ask.  

Opposites

When a union of opposites makes a ceremonious entrance
I stand at the doorway, flinching
I have asked a million times for a map of this place
Where is the crevice wheremy voice will echo? When I whisper in between the beams?
Staring at gilded gold cherubs and overflowed toilets in the basement, crusted in sediment
The children singing in the choir
His blue eyes crying in between weak chains of laughter
He just buried his best friend, his mom makes a dry joke
Pulling back the heavy maroon velvet curtain, peering into the penance box
Dust shifts and I feel a thousand people crying. Their guilt as palpable as the cool, oily holy water I dip my finger into
scratching the bottom of the stone basin at the exit. I feel it like a sigh on my neck.
Do I belong here?
Looking up, crosses, pain, paint stains and light filtering through the diamond slices of windows
I do
I do?
This is my favorite part: the pews. The hard wood against my back and sits bones. You have to sit a certain way.
You have to remember we will all be pinned to a tree someday.
Outside, the sun is hazy behind clouds though you have to squint to see the green gingko tree leaves turning yellow at the edges. “There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground,” Rumi said
There are a hundred, thousand ways for your ego to die. Look up, look up. 

Looking Out, Looking In

“The moon was an orange!” the little girl said –
“like someone took a bite out of it while flying in the sky.”
Without glasses everything was grey and bright, low light
gleaming off of skyscrapers above us. Shadows falling in strange places.
With glasses, a marigold circle in and out of black clouds.
This is what we came to see. To watch one another look up at stars
mid-day
and wonder why we are all here. Carrying cereal boxes and cell phones
saying things like, “wow” and “did you see it?” and “we should get back to work.”
As if.
As if the work was never out here, with one another, gazing at each other,
gazing at the stars, knowing it was all the same.

We begin tapping our fingers at the same time to some esoteric beat
in tune with the music that hides behind the veil of the universe, the sound behind the sound,
silently and not so silently guiding the waves and tides, the migration patterns of humpback whales,
or the timing of a seagull’s white wing turning as the sunlight hits it above the bridge on the water.
It could be the thrum of the Iroquois water drum, crickets in the thick of summer,
the first solitary notes of Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2,
or the wind in the dogwood trees at the edge of the trail,
Maybe it is the sound of church bells, an organ at dawn,
a child crying in the subway,
the goat laughing.
Likely it is the flute,
and the way your voice lingers on vowels in “I love you.”