lherman:

You tell me I forget everything you’ve told me, but I remember: You said, I used to think anyone who wasn’t hit had no right to complain. You told me too that you didn’t really believe I liked girls, which I thought might be some kind of challenge. It wasn’t that I wasn’t aware of you—the…

lily moon, stay up

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan’s men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you’d return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

Freud counted an egg good

so long as she had the ability to love

and to work.  By his measure, I am

half mad, not rotten but never meant

to be dished out in the morning over

the darker roast, never meant to be had

with the weather reports in the Sunday

paper.  I want a love as constant

as bad news, as craving as famine. 

I want the blood of war to tinge the

creases of my fingerprints and fill-up

the printed pages with futile eulogies

of newly born cadavers, glorifying the

life of someone’s wife, so-and-so’s

daughter, when right there between

the lines lies nothing more than

a dead thing.

When I go, the surgeon will hover

over my blued body, as illuminated as

Gabriel, ripping my organs out of their

little pits: one spleen, a liver, lungs and

heart all resurrected in some eleventh hour

kneelers in spite of their crimes.

And it’s true what they say about old

habits because I am always giving

out my body to people who never could

know me and this feigned sacrifice of

forgoing proper burial is only my

closing act of selfishness, a final

crack at proving that a heart can beat

again long after its war is over.

ramidus:

I thought that you could slink in the backdoor

like we did after dark as wayward teenagers,

certain of nothing except our mothers’ sleep

and the ravenous hunger we had for one

another. I thought that you could slip through

the cavities in my siren-lined sternum

and souse into me…

I look for you in the same

city that we conquered years ago

as heedless crowned heads filled up

with drink and with folly,

too consumed with our own 

good fortune to realize the squalor

ascending with the harbor’s foam

before us.  I look for you

on even blocks of pavement

and staircases with railings where

buoyant boys go to learn new tricks.

I remember when you told me

Lean into it,

Just lean into it,

as though I had never before

surrendered my body to the whims of gravity

and let the greedy beast lure me straight

down a dead-end road. 

We were held together

by bitten, bleeding tongues and

tightly crossed fingers.  Our contorted

figures, bookends bracing the weight

of volumes of history books

each with a slightly different account of

the same tired war.  Not one of them gambling

on who fired first but what’s the initial blow

now that both contenders

have finally crumbled like Hellenic statues,

erected to be revered. 

I still revere your remains.

They have the trappings

of a holy space like stained glass

green eyes that make the chapel captives feel closer

to something they have always wanted

to believe in and it was someone much more

sound than me who suggested that

those who listen for a voice will hear it

just like those who wait for a touch will

feel it

and although I knelt down

in your ornamented chapel there was no

sound, touch or any sense at all to be had by me

in that space — holy or not and

as far as I can tell, prayer

is nothing

but a waiting game for gilded sinners

and those who sleep beside them.

For the first two weeks of excavation

I hunkered down beside a man whose burden

was to teach me the proper way to clean

Iron Age dirt.  His muddled accent made words

like trowel seem as fragile as the two

thousand year old structures half

buried beneath our steel-toed feet.

It’s like a narrative, he tells me while

peeling back a couple pages of silt,

he goes on, Each layer in the stratigraphy

is a new chapter and every found

artifact thins the dirt but

thickens the plot. We did not write

this story but we will be the arbiters

of it.  We will turn it into fiction

and recount it like a soiled

affair, only offering up the parts where

you were sad and he was gone,

omitting all of the outliers,

the bits of Roman relics

that make the site seem less ancient

and more marked by men who won

both the battle and the war.

We won’t speak of what we saw

way down there in the trenches,

but of the bird’s eye Big Picture

seen from up atop the spoil heap

once all the cavities have been cut

and the revelations have gone dry

and there’s nothing left but the ditches

you’ve dug for yourself in order

to uncover something that you

already knew: that men live

and are discovered in spite of

how well they have buried themselves

and in a year or a thousand

some skilled set of hands will come

to peel away their topsoil

inch by inch until the whole is

hollowed out.