Three Works of Poetry

Functionalism

The dog won’t come home.
The trees have been looking for some time now.
It stands in the middle of a frozen lake,
one paw bent into the thaw of its breast,
its nose upturned to the icy wind,
searching.

It shivers the same way the snow falls
along to the clinking of its collar tag;
it won’t come home.

Here, it is no longer a dog.
There, it can’t be anything else.
It doesn’t matter
whether it’s able-bodied
or ripped to bloody shreds
on the stone path home.
Is the dog’s only purpose
to drag its lifeless husk
up the front steps
and beg
for something we’ve outgrown?

Perhaps the dog would have liked you.
The trees used to watch you shake

in the raw summer rain
while you waited for your best friend
to be done with the clouds.
You have the same twitch in your nose.
The prickling in your spine told you to keep watching her sing.
You knew you were never coming home.

Would you have let the dog in?
Would you have shot bee-bees in its tail
and cried behind the shed
if you had known?
It’s in your chemistry, baby,
the trees can hear your heart pounding.
The first dog, the first orator,
both of you stripped dry,
no teeth to feel the bone.

Your Coat on a Hook, Left Behing

To be shivering in the throes of November
your red-blue flannel skin insufficient for the sting;
your breath trying to reach the stars
so far above the naked, vulnerable trees.
You’ve been searching for something, someone
to bring inside
or perhaps to simply cool alongside you
and understand the pure desire
of lack
and stark wanting
of the freeze.

On Begonias and Identity Theft

I keep myself warm with a patchwork quilt
on the coldest winter days
and in the viper-strike heat of the summer sun.
It’s made up of this:
A preoccupation with above and below,
as Mr. Gaiman ponders;
A pensive, blank expression
as my mother and her thoughts;
An unholy desire to shine,
like my best friend when I was twelve.

None of it is me.

I’d choose meager things to make up
the sewn-up crack shoot
of my tiny life,
if I could. I’d choose things that are my own,
unbidden from the giving hands
of others, taken by my own bank-broken fingers.
The winter coat, green with fox fur trimming
bleeds with the avarice of my mother’s mother,
not mine;
the pile of shoes near the front door
only contains one pair of my own.
I got them for my birthday.

I got them for my birthday.