Category: brunch poem

Brunch Poem Day 4 (mine).

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for Kathryn

Stefano in weekday chinos
waits for the first of three trains
to Queens after a day in an field of work
deemed dying or dead & his partner’s at home
cooking better Italian than Stefano’s own Italian
mother & the train is late & there’s a rat a minute on the tracks
& tomorrow’s not even close to Friday & it’s bloody hot or freezing
in the blue-black tunnel of steel & epiglottal noise & poise appears unfeasible
& everyone around is pissed off or pissing indiscreetly.
And as for the pleasures of the flesh,

you’ll have to forgive me: they remain
unsullied in that midnight slab of brain, where you
and I restrain nothing but the urge to dance, and not even that.
Stefano performs his dance. He taps atop the subway’s thickset platform. And the noise
is like cutlery confessing to cement. And the train
arrives fast, opening all its silver doors
at once.

Brunch Poem Day 3 (mine).

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Between two and three am we go
upside down: his feet flat

on the ground in a splay
of yogic yes as my mismatched

socks slide farther down my ankles,
heels for all to see. From between

my legs, I watch him rise
into a slow headstand, hands

at his ears, elbows two points
of a triangle. It looks like he’s swimming

and he looks straight ahead. The speed
at which he lowers down is like

the pace at which my grandfather,
eighty-six years old, eases himself

into the pool. Later, much later,
near nine am, I dream he gives me

unremarkable objects that hide
inside their seams three hundred gifts,

accompanied by a letter in his capitalized
scrawl. I awake without having read it,

though I trust it is inscribed in the air
between the headstand and the floor.

Brunch Poem Day 2 (mine).

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Mountainlust grows slimmer
halfway through the boulder
dumping ground that giants
put together to block us
from the char of Arizona.

On our first drive through this,
the westward one, we read
the radiator warnings and whet
the car’s interior with whom might
mislead us on the other side.

This time around, we’re safe
with knowledge of whose home
we’re driving  towards, and how long
we’ll linger east of these colossal rocks.
Cockeyed gobs of clothes and tools

are our boulders in the trunk
as the sun takes back its daily gift
of sight. We don’t know it but we drive
through nightlit dunes of sand. We drive
through Gila Bend. We drive

to Arizona at the speed of night,
which names us neither false
nor fast. Yep, California’s just
one big wrinkle and we are wrought
from similar, albeit tasteless, cloth.

Brunch Poem Day 1 (mine).

Published on by taylor mardis katz1 Comment

This is so not our job we hauled in
the Christmas tree dressed
in mom’s boots mom’s jackets

in the New York freeze, Sarah
with the meat cleaver at the trunk
knocking off stumps the both of us

sweating after the sawing second
step and even later still gloved because
This is so not our job! I’m facefirst

in the tree’s underside my hat stolen
by branches Sarah’s sweeping like a housewife
in a hat until at last the thing stands cornered

in its hoop skirt beside the fireplace
and the rug is spiked with scent
and the cat declawed