Noelle Kocot
 

the day alyosha died

It wasn't a Friday.
And though I said yes, I really meant no.
It's like when you go for a shoeshine
On your way to Easthampton,
It's like throwing up your dinner
And thinking only of yourself.

I basked in the razor-sharp sun,
Thought of what I could not buy,
The tragedy of being a poet
                          Will haunt me for the rest of my days.
                          Take that to the bank
And shove it, like a song overheard
While a vacuum aspirator sucked out your life.
If I should sway to the music of Verlaine,
If I should say I do
Again after the meeting of a dream's recess
Or ending my life on a certain quandariness,
I will lift the cars from their lanes
And love-torch my broken heart and
Shop for images along the heaps of avenues.
I can only string together and and and and.
There is no carton of milk with your face on it.

I am thinking of
Families moving from spot to spot.
I gave away Damon's piano, among other things,
So that I would never sell it.
It seems everyone and I have stopped breathing,
Even the morning dove dying in front of me
Eleven years to your day.
 

so i can sigh eternally

                                                                                           for Joanna DeMartino


Sprite lover of all things green,
I've seen you.
Institutional washbasin,
I've seen you.
And now you go the way
Of him who I ______
Above all others.
Don't forget your colored
Cross, lady spaceship.
Don't forget to love us,
Green as the alphabet
That spells left behind.
 

Whalen

What I mean is the sea.
What I mean is a pale
Piano filled with rainwater.
What I mean is a box (colored blue)
And an animal of light
And air rushing through these vacant rooms.
What I mean is, I'm sorry
If things are lazy and not the same,
If I travel without my candy soup.
I no longer wish for what I cannot have,
And yet I love you,
Your being and recklessness,
The way the light strands
Itself in tomorrow,
The way that book on dreams
Seeps out dreams onto a plastic couch.
What I mean is man, I don't believe
That oranges are not squares, that you
Are not a paper ghost, that a balloon
Of thought doesn't clap its hands
Lightly, over the frozen summer moon.
 

Violet Populists

After you get hooked up,
You get softened, after softened,
Hernias.  I bang my maracas
Until they break.  Never
A vanguard to the jasmine
Scented Q-Tips, I raise an
Arctic fist at your tippling
Greenhouse.  Different men
Think differently, and I who
Have inherited the world,
Dervish my pinpricks.
Heuristic value is a can of paste,
The length of infinity minus one.