Four Poems (July 20, 2009. Issue 7.)

Edging the Given Garden

Dumping bodies is nothing new,
countryside littered with human landfills,
crumpled marionettes slinking toward
the core: sometimes people just disappear.

There were fewer killings this month;
business is a slow puzzle—low
on carrion, high on concealment:
bodies and heads buried in separate holes.

For five hundred dollars I will find your
uncle, your brother, your father. My contacts
are gravediggers, doctors, and dog-weary
prison guards: uncles and brothers and fathers.

And on weekends, I volunteer at the morgue,
burying unidentified corpses, taking
detailed notes: heights and weights, haircuts
and scars. Research unearths profits.

Dumping bodies is nothing new:
remains in trivial graves and city sewers
for we body contractors to recover,
shadows to salvage until this city is pure.

The Glass House

Hearing the lock clack
behind him—deadbolt, single

cylinder—he slump-spun,
slowly, the balls of his feet
grinding off cerulean leaves

drawn in chalk, and watched
her walk away, extinguishing

light as she went, until
their house swallowed her
whole and the windows

were black mirrors. Goodnight,
he hissed, as the wind stripped

his breath, and he leaned in,
eyelids lolling, the cold
stroking the space between

his shirt collar and the back
of his outstretched neck. Head

tilted just so, he pressed
his blood-caked lips to the glass.

To Investigate

is to tease sin in vignettes:
in negatives, titian stains, vanities

is to invite to sing

is to stage a siege, a sting:
get set, get in, get at

is the tiniest gains

is titans, a stage

is a tin-eating vest

is to envisage a tan, naïve ten
in a vintage setting

is gin, neat.

Yes, Invisibility!

There’s still time (relax, dude)
for natural selection to correct your inefficiencies
(hardened arteries and hiccups after imported beer,
beast-felling foot odor), your clunky evolution.
They’ve found the missing link in the Canadian Arctic

(don’t lick the archipelagos): a three hundred and
seventy-five million year-old fossil of a fish with neck
and hands, primitive elbows; as long as a compact car.
Your hands (lizard-like, you need lotion) descended
from these fish fingers. So did mine (ultra-soft)

and all the other mutants’: your uncle with the brain full
of obscure Bogart trivia; your ex with the soccer ball breasts.
If we evolved from the fishes, our bodies
should look more convoluted than sensible (your ex
with the soccer ball breasts). That’s what they tell us,

the scientists (Poindexters), as our genes perform one
about-face after another, perplexed soldier-cells unsure
of what general process they’re saluting or where
the battlefield lies. They’re snapping to attention
(Yes, sergeant! Yes, telekinesis! Yes, flight!) faster

than ever before, locked and loaded for adaptation
(Yes, adamantium skeleton!) to new environments,
new violent weather patterns and disease-bearing spinach.
What the next epoch of monsters will look like
is anybody’s guess (Yes, X-ray vision!)

as history textbooks become more like science-fiction novels,
one group outplaying the next with drugs and crops,
with swords and stealth bombers (Yes, invisibility!)
and bigger balls. Are you following me (Don’t; I stop fast),
friend? We are evolving away from one another.