Today my little sister informed me that since tomorrow is Christmas Eve, today is Christmas Adam. Rhubarb Crisp
Sunny afternoon, end of June.
I walk out onto the porch and sit
on the top step with a bowl in my lap.
I’m trying to mix red and green rhubarb
With sweet oats and brown sugar.
I can smell the cinnamon and butter.
My arms are getting tired.
I bite a raw slice of rhubarb,
its skin a ripe red but tart as a lemon.
My eyes tear up, I swallow quickly and
keep stirring. I remember
picking long stalks for pies from
my grandma’s yard as a kid, the same
summer cousin Ben fed his brother’s shirt
to a neighbor dog. We found the shirt hours later
in a pile of leaves on the side of the road.
After finding the shirt we all traipsed down to the tire
swing in the woods as if nothing had happened.
Underwood Five
I lift the typewriter,
from the top shelf
my arms shaking
from the weight.
I blow off a blanket
of dust and it whispers,
“Make me new again.”
I feed the typewriter a single
white sheet of paper.
the carriage returns
like a doorbell ringing
The letter “o”
sticks.
The keys chattering
self-consciously,
“D n’t f rget me,
L ve me as I am.”
Tri-Met
I’m sitting on the train home from work,
across from a man, his yellowing
beard flecked with tobacco stains
that match the ones on his hands
and face. He’s coated in a layer of
urban grime.
His hands rest on the handle of
a kelly green oxygen tank as if
it where a knotted wooden
walking stick. Vibrant tattoos,
spayed across his old skin
like graffiti on the side of an
abandoned building.
Four right angles hooked together
like a barrel of monkeys, smaller
ones wrap in a chain
from his wrist to his elbow
like Christmas lights wrap a tree.
The points look like legs jutting out
or barbed wire.
What would he think
if he knew that a black man
just gave up that seat?
It’s like the “I Love Lucy” episode,
the one where she works in the chocolate factory,
but instead of chocolates I’m watching golden
flour-dusted potato rolls go by.
Instead of a frilly apron and big white hat
like the one Lucy wears, I have my waist length
hair tucked up into a fluorescent orange hard hat
and I’m wearing a white sweat drenched t-shirt,
jeans that haven’t been washed all week, and scuffed
brown leather boots.
I watch the rolls in groups of twelve—two rows of
six side by side. Like a part of the machine,
I take away extras and throw them
into a white plastic basket and when there aren’t
enough I take rolls out of the basket
and throw them back on the conveyor belt.
I squint, and see some rolls with black and white
machine grease splattered on them.
The manager says it is completely
edible, but no one wants to eat a roll that looks spattered
with pigeon poop.
Sometimes I grab an extra roll and hold it under my
hand, when no one is looking I rip off the top
and let the soft bread dissolve on my tongue.
I wish it were like “I Love Lucy”,
I would fail miserably, shoving rolls
down my shirt and into my mouth.
Everyone would laugh, and the show
would be over.
Bread in a toaster,
you dumped me in a
grove of blueberry bushes,
that summer we jumped in
all the fountains just for fun.
We titled the album
“Business Casual Snow Angels”.
I will never drink the love potion,
no matter how good it tastes.
Why would anyone
want Extra
ordinary?
An ankle is not unlike a
consequence. (Sit! Stay.)
Double your pleasure,
double your fun.
It’s an old cliché that
hope is like a star,
steadily burning
but easily crowded out
by harsh electric lights.
Sometimes the twinkling
icicle lights hanging from
my window seem more
real—closer than the
thousands of weak stars
getting old and tired,
dimming
on their way out.
The frizzy-haired physician
sitting cross-legged on the
examination table while I
sit in a chair, tells me that
women are lunar creatures.
And I imagine women circling
the earth, unable to break away
from its pull. Having no light
of their own, they reflect. . .
And throughout the month their size
fluctuates from full to a slim crescent.
The woman glares and
asks me incredulously,
Just what, exactly, don’t you understand?
We are at the aquarium when she tells me
that the last time she threw up, shoulders hunched over
the porcelain toilet bowl, strands of blonde hair
grazing the seat, her index finger probing her throat,
she threw up tuna fish.
I wanted to stop, and I knew I’d never
Again make myself vomit
Once I’d thrown up tuna fish.
I imagine the miniature tuna swimming
up my throat, trying to force there way out.
Then the salmon I saw on a hike in sixth grade
that died trying to go home.
That salmon stopped eating,
put everything it had
into swimming upstream,
its mouth turning into
a beak. It slowly
began decomposing
but thought about
nothing but the task at hand.
The pressure of the vomit coming up
her throat like that salmon, swimming
against the current. And the smell:
like a dead fish lying on the sand under a hot sun,
frozen in a last gasp, ribs beginning to show through scales.
Blended with the slimy green algae that floats on
