after Family Matters

“Family Matters” by Alexandra de Kempf

Birth dates sprout from our heads
As lottery numbers. Fill in the holes.
Shrug at losing the upper range.
Luck is luck and winning could be
As easy as family love
And the array of digits
Ancients assigned to days
To mark our arrivals, departures
And fortunes like spirals.

Perhaps the history of humanity
Is ruled by golden ratios
Of hermit shells, phallic risings
Of red flamingo flowers,
Lineages of human bodies spinning outward,
Spaceward, 3-D DNA. Forget ladders.

Are you a ladder?
Has your health been hammered?
Is your sight obscured
By capital’s metastasis, brain blossoming
Cancer’s white words: not enough
Morphing into more, more? What’s eating you?
The writing is on the wall.

We’ve stopped reaching for each other,
Prohibited by policies banning touch
Learned by clicking state screens.
Print your HR certificate, file for proof.

Instead, we point, mouths wide, teeth bared
Not quite laughing, perhaps shocked
Or screaming. Do you know a rich man’s body
From his stack of bloody books?
Or her Universal Perfect Breasts from fruit
Or the font of bottles?

Don’t nurse. He owns you.
Gift your kids strange teddy bears
He sells so they can sleep alone.
Nestle in with Ambien.
Get six hours for work. Hope for eight.
Let them cry it out in the dark.
Soon they’ll need only a phone,
A silken screen, a monthly plan
To stay in touch.

Don’t bother counting years
Before your children go.
They fall away like leaves,
Lost lottery tickets
You forgot to cash in.

Vigil

“They All Slept Here” by Ilenia Pezzaniti

Our bed is not stained with droplets
of old blood. There is no chair on which
to prop an Impressionist print
of two ladies walking away with parasols,
nor antique TV pixels jealous of their stillness.
We have no faux wood headboard.
Our room is no hotel or photo.

A blue, white and green
painting hangs over our heads,
large with trying to be water and air
and the space between,
as though three elements could be
simple color and their memory enough
to soothe me in the dark on clean sheets.

Startled awake, my pulse believes
you are the man on screen
stranded in the middle of a road
walking away from death,
helicopter hovering overhead,
disembodied voice seeing just enough
of size and skin to summarize you.

Any move you make to reach for phone,
I.D., risks your body’s claim
to blue, white and green.
No last text I’m on my way.
From above, at dusk, we don’t know
if the pixelated bloom on your shirt
is black or red.

I blink in the dark.
I can’t see you.
You breathe, refuse screens.
Pressed against your heat,
I let you sleep.

2016
for the family of Terence Crutcher

Off Screen Isocephaly

Ruth Bavetta, Chronicle, oil on linen 48x78 1986

Everyone dressed as passersby,
we wait for the scene, our call,
ignore the orange barricades and cones,
talk of smallish things: Trump, new heat.

The sky is not full of California light
in Iowa, but still we play the polyester parts
assigned to us, squinting, calm as cameras,
relegated to realms of the unseen.

Even the cop whose heavy belt is full
of faux bravado knows: he is but an extra.
The yellow of his close-cropped hair,
his crown of golden bangs, echoes like the sun

across the moment: Charles’ sensible
button-up shirt, Leslie’s too warm
butter golf sweater, Johnny’s thinning part.
In flip flops and short shorts he watches

well-paid leads deliver middle class malaise
too perfectly. Take after take, how earnestly they
chronicle our pale, hedged lives on tiny screens.
We mutely mouth their plastic lines, practicing.

January 2016

Soft Equations of State

IMG_8264

(This erasure/collage poem was written by deleting most of the words in the article, “Soft equations of state for neutron-star matter ruled out by EXO 0748-676,” written by Feryal Özel in Nature, 29 June 2006. The words in this poem were taken from their article in this exact order. No words not found in the article were added. I created the accompanying collage with images from several issues of Nature as well.)

The interior of stars matter.
That the early universe achieved
terrestrial matter appears to rule
out soft equations and unconfined
centres.

The radiation flux,
the stellar surface observed
from a single source is color,
temperature, expressions, yield—
the stellar parameters.

Tighten these constraints,
the slowly spinning stars,
rotational infinity, a fitting function.

The main uncertainty bursts,
dynamically unimportant flash.

Shown are the contours,
the black shaded area.

Uncertainties, uncertainties
limit the actual radius of the star.

Freefall, time scales!

Unknown binary system
affects the X.

I can obtain lower limits
as a strange star.

Only the stiffest equations of state
in a small orbit are negligible.

My method is a direct source,
a globular cluster.

The mass and radius of stars
are excluded by my self-bound,
bare, strange matter.

Stars, I therefore argue,
represent the ground.

2015
with thanks to Debbi Brody for sharing this marvelous writing/collage technique

San Francisco Flowers

Tulip clouds
careful trees
crowds of touring
Japanese

hills of condo
rent control
all surprising
grain silos.

2015
in response to Les Barta’s photoconstruction, exhibited at the CACE Gallery of Fine Art in Spring 2015

Vermillion Flowers

Hearts of flowers may as well be eggs
and wheel hubs—tender yolks.

Before you know it,
eggs grow ears toward cowdom.

A yolk nosed cow
sooner or later makes a sow.

Finally honking cars
with their own pig snouts

are flowers blooming ridge lines
lifting cumulous clouds.

2015
in response to Les Barta’s photoconstruction, exhibited at the CACE Gallery of Fine Art in Spring 2015

Fine Arts Phenomena

The fountain of water is of the Corinthian order.
Fluted drums become acanthus curls,

Like men’s pant legs.

The frieze across our chests is full
of muscular gods facing the ancient harp.

We know the song has changed.

Columns pretend to be trees, whole
forests fluted with bark, crowned with real leaves.

Columns of cloud feed woods and fountains rain.

The stone dome over your bone dome
is no greater or lesser a feat. Face it.

Clouds and arms are the same. A colonnade.

2015
in response to Les Barta’s photoconstruction, exhibited at the CACE Gallery of Fine Art in Spring 2015

Sunflowers

A horse head blooms yellow petals
over four legs not its own in sweats
and white sneakers, a tourist.

Cars bloom, spin leaf wheels.

Even mountain peaks pray
for budding yellow petals
when the sun throws rays overhead.

Does everything long to be something else?

The slow nature of time spreads
out the process and lies:
you are only you. No petals allowed.

2015
in response to Les Barta’s photoconstruction, exhibited at the CACE Gallery of Fine Art in Spring 2015

Golden Gates

The earth loves repetition.
Mountains are pyramids.
The Golden Gate quotes the city
On the hill, rolling up into itself
Like clouds. The bridge
Could be a prison or a barge.
Cars mimic clouds rolling to work
Dreaming of being water, blues
Under the bridge or mountains
Sprouting gentrified houses
For people in the center of the fringe.
Look how earth became steel,
How steel became a road over water,
How water would destroy the bridge
If not for painters, for golden paint
Named International Orange
Ironically the color of rust.

2015
in response to Les Barta’s photoconstruction, exhibited at the CACE Gallery of Fine Art in Spring 2015

Furnace Creek Phenomena

Your face is a ceramic tiled roof.You think I don’t see water roll off you.Some days, your hands and feet hang limplyFrom the windows of your limbs.You walk over stones placed by no hands.Your car, with wheels for feet, aches for grass.2015in response to Les Barta's photoconstruction, exhibited at the CACE Gallery of Fine Art in Spring 2015: