dinosaur sex

next poem subject, ladies and germs.

Zoned

Our streetscapes display our obsolescence
empty parking lots like punched out teeth, in our city
library an Ivy league architect tells us we’ve betrayed our bustle.
He is not talking about the death of the corset industry, he is talking about
the way we have split our waterfront from our downtown with a thick and tender highway.

This architect breaks my heart
with his architect’s glasses and his white hair
with his passion and his broad intellect and his readiness to prostelytize
about the fatness of our nation. Let us blame it on urban design for cars! Let us blame
no one but ourselves. In the library we a joined by a mayor and developers
a former economic development director and urban proponents who parked
their saabs on the streets of this city hungry for their commerce. Nothing but saabs for new urbanists!
I alone am heartened by the architect's trolley promotion, I alone have a space in my heart
for those abandoned tracks lying beside the cobblestones, nestled like steel arms under the pavement.
I alone have trouble growing passionate about zoning re-writes, though I know they matter. I want only to fetch the nearest jackhammer so I might liberate our nation from the tyranny of car transportation.
I can’t find a soul in the place who will join me.

Yes we can

Hold babies and report that America is a nation where abe was offered chairs for the train ride home, the man was so popular. Abolition was like fever, fried oysters were heavenly? And Abe, what to make of the lock of your hair in the collection? And Abe, what to make of the theatre actress who stole the bloody flag, and Abe, what to make of our man OBAMA who made me cry with the photographs of his American experience, complete with the residency in Hawaii and Indonesia. I want so much for us to embrace him like we embraced you, Abe, but without assassinations, Abe, and this discussion is nearly a party joke these days, Abe. Look at the VPs--that's who will be running the nation. Who do you vote for, Abe? Are you WIDE AWAKE? Will my great-granddaughter visit a historical collection that houses Barack's basketball and please let it be the basketball he used after his successful presidency, Abe, please let this be a nation that can support a candidate who doesn't talk down to me. And please let it be a president who chooses, in fact, to NOT invade Afganistan.Please let it be a president who can hold babies joyously and who can navigate us out of the waters of oil and into the waters of trolley traffic. That is my dream, Abe. Can you let me in on yours?

Zoning

Zoning

The sky, with its pimped up lights, is zoned

for serendipitous crossings with moon.

Please—zone it in a little closer.

Please stranger—I’m pretending not to like you.

Like you know the difference between a good duct-cleaning

and a bad bottle of wine—

like you’re trying to house a horse

in an RS-12 zone—

in a perfect storm of limiting factors.

Mixed-use urban renewal is out by the pond

killing flies instead of fishing. My neighbor’s purple C-cup,

dangling above the dirt, is zoned in a historic overlay district,

custody of the Historic Preservation Review Board.

Please—let me cry and learn to self-zone.

Bring in the BB gun—and later the welts.

mush mush

According to Wikipedia:

Mushing also can be used to describe the kneading behavior of domestic cats when they are content or are preparing to settle for a nap.

Can you write a poem about mushing? Or the Paris Review?

VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW LOVES CLICHES

From here

"This was supposed to be a blog entry about how authors submit poetry to us covering clichéd topics that there’s just no way we’re going to print. But then I did the math, calculating the percentage of our submissions and published work that contain any of a dozen mainstays of poetic terminology, and found that precisely the opposite is true.

submitted published
water 19.9% 24.8%
death 14.1% 15.2%
blood 11.7% 13.8%
stone 11.1% 16.0%
bone 9.1% 7.8%
poetry 7.6% 10.3%
heart 7.5% 6.7%
fish 7.0% 5.3%
birth 5.5% 7.4%
darkness 3.9% 17.0%
rust 3.3% 2.5%
cat 2.3% 2.8%

As it turns out, our editor is all about those dreaded paeans to cats. The moral of the story is that talent transcends topic, I suppose; in the hands of a skilled poet, even stone/bone can be made a vital couplet again."

It's Interactive!

Snow Blowing with Dennis

Crack open our walk, Dennis.

Blow snow on Rainbow Fish

two doors down. The shack

of Chicken Chest or is it Dizzle Dazzle.

Careful Twinkle Star, protect your name, your ceramic

goose head poking through the snow.

Do our walk, please Dennis.

Preserve the harmless fractals, those florets of broccoli,

each the same and smaller than the last.

When Snowflake is in an unmanageable pile

her bulldozers and dump trucks will come

for some serious snow removal.

Dennis, tell them to hold their horses,

we need to work up to that. A little kissing

and making out might lead to foreplay,

but I’m not going all the way

until I know it’s right between us and will last forever.