Three Poems

Instruction: Children’s Ward 


Dig your ring, middle, index 
fingers in, scratch for all the times 
it scratched you — 
age six, age nine, yesterday two
in the morning. Leave
a rough gouge
across its stemmy legs
that will itch and will sting
in the new summer rain. Show it
you’re the boss
you mean business
you are nobody’s catch dog. 
Lastly, and this last part
is important: as you walk away
don’t look back, don’t
suggest you are game
for another go round, not with a coffin
shaped row of hawthorn. 

 

 
Remission


Before you told me,
it was me singing
up the Garden State

Parkway, “Roxanne
you don’t have to put on
the red light.”

It was me
saying to a girlfriend
over green tea

“odds are, I must
know a man
who has done it

with a whore.”
I wasn’t thinking
it’d turn out

to be you.
That it was you
in the hours

the chemicals took
to drip into my
marrow, before

that nauseous ride
home, you more
buoyant than ever.

Never thought
it’d turn out
that she

for the money
almost helped us
get through it. 

 

 
Escape


I’ve been reading poems 
from prison. Or I should say

from prisoners. Not that they sent them 
to me. I mean they were written by men

doing time and still are or by men who did time 
and no longer are and in one poem 

an inmate is making a woman 
out of sheets and rags and towels. 

An anatomical mound to hump. 
The average woman in this country 

weighs one sixty-five. That’s a lot of towels. 
That would be too much him plus her 

for his spring-shot bunk, the average man 
weighing one ninety-four, but they are not the average couple. 

They are hopeful and trim, dry-eyed
and unfailing. After he breaks 

a sweat, after he gets something 
like laid, only then do I remember

he’s alone in a cell. Only then
do I remember the wrong I’ve done you.