Don’t fucking text your friends when I’m reading a poem I took two years to write

or if you do it then be
right and if you are right be
relentless like this was relentless
when you spoke to that bitch
she was just That Bitch
and you were just A Good Guy
and that was the first time My Lips
wanted to be lips and they were
just the lips that your little movers
loaded in a van that lived in Norway
like you live in a place that is so faraway
my entrenched feelings have a way
of making themselves known
to know me is to know my mother’s bad English
the time I charmed you with not wanting
to not want to not take a shit
in my pants which were yours
the smell was also yours
you gave me the constipated figurine
I washed it like it was my own
and it was your face that gave me the finest idea
the idea of not having any more ideas
was good enough if it meant saving the idea
of you or the time you yanked metal
from your hand which does not leave me
even when my face is no longer a face
and my ideas no longer ideas
just the fine French doors you live inside
like I live inside this promise
like you live inside my dreams
the best ones where you did not yet exist
though I knew this fine universe
would create you eventually
and I would never stop thanking my mother
for creating me too.

 

Burping my friend Igor

In bed the scissored leg is so funny
we come immediately onto wire dolls with paper eyes
that remind us of our mothers
your mother being the mother of mine
I find you intriguing and less so when my father hobbles
on the leg that wasn’t blown into the western poppy fields
where you holed up one summer wanting to be a sailor
you asked if free people feel untidy
I think you think too much about freeing
souls who wriggle into the palms of my little piety
still, I need to tell you about my father
his rotted tooth in a village where everyone’s names were
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15
you come here 1 and get your brothers 2, 3, 4, 5
6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 15 to come here too
this one was too strange not to look at
my father’s tooth was goo by the time anyone
finally looked at it, the dentist was anyone
he put rubber bands around my mouth
to stop me from smiling
I smiled anyway at horrible things
war and villages burning
the time my cousin 9 was lured out of the village
by the promise of candy
the next time I saw him he was a Thai tranny
and I ate pad Thai with relish
the savory filling of my insides ought to be presented
in awards swimming in split seams
I felt scammed when I saw anyone
split my father’s tooth in four
the hammer was small as a broken fishbone
and the sound was so horrific
I burped vomit into my hands
feeling the tin drum inside my ear
begging to be washed like my father washed me
“You’re a cat and I’m a river whose only purpose is to protect you:
when you fall in I run against my own current”
I think I am hearing all of this although each arcanum
I am allowed is as diamond rough as tightening
the skin above my father’s eyelids
which falls down in sleep
keep him from seeing
the eructations which vacate my body
like the ghosts of whoever we may have once been.

 

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