Russell Jaffe

 

 

 

You Are My Couple

 

As it is, there are two to keep it together.

If I read one more story about an urban couple working towards a goal,

       I’ll lose my appetite. I can’t eat a combo meal by myself. I

       ate too much yesterday. We didn’t look up the last time we ate

       together; the table decayed loudly under our plates. A fork and

       knife. Silver things clanked and poked.       

        I read another story about tanks today, and you always hated my

       compliments.

You always hated them. But there have to be two sides to a war, and sometimes there are even more than that; but what do I know?

       Across the length of the field, I see dogs with sticks

and a bunch of bees poking around in flowers. I’m sitting in my car and holding my phone and smoking. There: two more things, each hand on date, moving towards my head.

       There we were: an ice cream shop,

               our hands were sticky with sugar, the road was busy.

       we ate ice cream next to the trash can;

               I looked at you and your mood had brightened

       if I had a tail     

                I’d have wagged it

                       ice cream, concrete, blast marks on buildings which line

                       the walk to work. It’s construction season but I read

                       that it only takes a few years for a city to completely

                       decay.

       You told me water makes everything decay eventually, and I

       laughed

because you had been in the bubble bath

       I haven’t taken a bubble bath since I don’t know when,

and water with nothing in it is just a case of liquid.

                       Water drops building.

I’m finding less and less of something at the bottom of jars

during the summer,

I’m finding more and more blue disposable plates

you throw away in the backyard, I’m finding more empty bags on the floor when it’s getting cold outside,

               I am wondering when you are coming home, when we can lay

               around together and look at patterns, like people would look

               at stars, but we aren’t people.

We are, but it’s different. I want it to be completely different.

© 2009 eMuse-zine

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Author’s Bio

Russell Jaffe holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia College Chicago and teaches English at New York City College of Technology and Borough of Manhattan Community College. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Shampoo*, MiPOesias, Spooky Boyfriend, and others. He is also the founder and editor of O Sweet Flowery Roses poetry journal/blog.

 

A Southern Trick

 

You are lungs that creak like wooden planks

on the porch.

You choose a word from the vernacular as one choose a telescope.

You take it to the window. This is you looking out,

saying something creaky and familiar. Babbling creek-y, or wooden.

               This is the sound of weapons.

Angrily you

exhale a surrender to your knees, then

lying to your side,

       then actually on your side,

and then to bed.           

                Falling leaves hit the house and the window.

Your surrender. To sleep is like sneaking out of the house at night

       and the boards gossiping beneath you.

This is a Southern trick.

Once we ate chicken fried steak in Texas and the waitress told us just that:

               That its preparation was a Southern trick.

This awful seriousness is a Northern kind of cold, a

leafy kind of telescope lens.

       You look through, and the leaves spin when

you turn. Asleep, you turn over.

       You are wooden planks that sloop to meet a floor, creaky

               but your admonition of waking is a trick,

       and I hope that if I look through

       it will be our trick, and we

                       can share it together.

 

Breakfast

 

And I put it on the page because you knew

               I never liked it, but

       I presented it to you

               on mornings foreign like the

       floor was to the ceiling.

You ate bacon and I crushed ants. You

always loved the bacon.

               While it sizzled, I waited. The grease pooled

       while my bedsheets proudly remained a heap.

If anyone else had been around at all,

they would know that the smoke asks for a sweetness

to meet it. Remember? I had to run to the store. But

               I would have run to any store at any length then;

                       I just had to know it was morning and the rest

           was simply built.

The pineapple juice always went in the cup,

                                                                       the pour,

       which made the sound of a glassy pour. No one

       was around but everyone would know, which made it

       sunny. There were a number of sneaky embraces while I

                       cooked…the best were when I had no idea. I held

           a spatula,

egg and cinnamon from the measuring cup dripped down

my wrist. Those reminded me of the moon, which I’ve

       never been to.

But it was floaty and airy cold, like North Dakota,

which I’ve also never been to.

The moon is up there, after breakfast. It always is. That’s the best

       part.

I’ve been eating a lot of frozen pizza, if you must know,

when I get up in the morning now. The other day I

had leftover Chinese food. The Styrofoam made it

easy to slide into the bowl. The point is it needs to be

defrosted, or microwaved.

Greater Gravity

 

It’s a beach

scattered with little things.

Hunks of metal, lone teeth.

Did you know that after thousands of years,

glass becomes sand?

No. Sand may become glass. Regardless,

there are approaching clouds. How severed

arteries drift in to me, looking at

the green hanging ripped off over the dunes.

Lightning leaves a facsimile of its path

when it strikes the sand. I know it becomes

a breakable something.

I am tired on a molecular level.

I want everyone to know

that ships were here,

and that subatomic particles are blame worthy,

blame worthy for subtle differences in the tapestry

of the sea, silt, shore, and Cliffside.

Greater gravity brought those ships in the

burgeoning 1940’s. What’s left are flashes of light

put to crusting paper. The sea had flattened out

like it had been hit with a giant hammer.

What pisses me off is that the gravitational

influence of the moon effects the waves,

the ions in my blood that make me happy or

sad, and the hammer-bottom moon is getting

closer. Ions: scatter! Get out of the way, like

the pills from a bottle into the toilet!

The foamy sea is whirling. Salt, historically NaCl,

on a molecular level is sucked towards the moon.

Is it made saltier by streaks of old blood, rusty dirt colored?

I bet I could find some aluminum shells still

stuck in the cliffs. Our withholding then was our

uniting. The most prevalent metal in the Earth has rudely

intruded back into it, a sloped arc of a day’s protractor

where one thing goes upward into something

secret and more important,

and then comes flooding back down again.

Lightning, blood, and,

what’s more,

ions, all the ions.

The Workaday Patterns

 

The way art has developed is a drink made of boiling water and mixture from a bag.

I fixed myself a powdered hot chocolate.

When blown into, the cup forced the

foamy edges into concentric circles, cuts by a line, not incomparable

to the motion of amoebas splitting,

wherein the service elevator stopped

on the first floor, and women in

billowing short sleeves remarked that

this one was going down.

In

the service elevator in the sub-basement,

the pipes creaked like drops in the

streamlined hissing of the boiler. Different colored

pipes pushes liquids in opposite directions. The rich

companies on the top floor were getting pushed hot water

faster. Their pipes were azure. Something

on wheels was being pushed around a corridor,

and soon moving forward bore into the small

filing room, bag tossed to the floor, and I

sat my hot chocolate on a darkened file inlay. The structural

monochromatics were anything but a forest, but I tried hard to compare them.

In painting a portion of a room, a day, I was perhaps edging myself out.

More poetry

The Train Conductor

 

His black skin is cut like

a diamond, his gaze indirect and substantial,

eyes the color of bone.

I’m ashamed to say he must have quite

a history.

What my girlfriend says is

that the trains have been in

operation here since 1904.

Who will stare out that tiny window

in a hundred years? I’m obviously

asking who will be staring back.