Clock on the wall

says I can remember when she was more loving. So I know it’s there. I found a metal wire coiling from your head while I was braiding your hair. You say mixing perfumes together makes poison/ I used to believe you, keep shocking myself on the wire. I close my eyes and the fireplace is gone.  I close my eyes and all the pictures on the fireplace are gone.

He tells me there might be a North Vietnamese flag buried at the bottom of his sea bag. So don’t go. So stay. Watch the birds with me, watch the flowers all coming back. I found a framed picture of myself at the bottom of his sea bag.  Another on the maple wood table at the foot of his bed.  There was a safety net creeping out from under, so much medicine. So many growing shadows.

One body says jump. One body says stay in bed.  There are a million different angles from which to position a camera, a million ways to watch a tower fall down, a million piles of twigs and of leaves and ways to sew them together/ this isn’t one of them.

Christmas Eve

Stuck on the 7-Eleven on every corner and the skyline,

buttons on the VCR glowing neon green.

You know holes close up when you take earrings out for too long,

when you get washed up in the glass globes and tinsel of the city,

and leave them to tarnish on the wobbly table under his mini-Christmas tree.

Christmas lights are climbing

up the walls to the ceiling.

When one bulb burns out, the whole string dies.

I’ve got the blow-up building he won in the claw machine,

and an entire stretch of skyline.

He sleeps in the bottom bunk and I

steady my  feet on the rungs of the ladder,

ice-skate around the giant tree every Christmas Eve.

We search the sky for a blinking antenna.

Just all the twinkling stars and Mars and VHS, DVD,

all the old movies and they keep making new movies.

Icicles pile up outside his window.

Every time he flips my wedding veil over my face,

a science fair volcano explodes somewhere.

Smoke bellows through the room in rings.

In a model of the galaxy made of wire hanger,

Styrofoam and glitter, a Martian-green moon spins

blinking, a carnival ride around the Sun.