Farsi Love Song

litbomb (Online) April 2013

After a while, even though they’re singing in Arabic or Farsi, he swears he can tell what they’re singing about; swears this song’s about what it’s like when their lips meet in the dark, how it feels watching him walk out the door, off to join the army, not knowing how he’ll get by without her.

He’s had this same experience before, watching an Italian couple arguing in Italian in an Italian subway station: she was telling him he’s a dog—has always been a dog—and she knows there’s going to be some slut at the end of the line, waiting to meet him and let him take her home to her chintzy and flowered walk-up, let him kiss her on the balcony under the April drizzle, then take him inside, let him prove just how much of a dog he truly is.

All of this he understood clearly without a single word of English. Translation, he thought, was unnecessary, superfluous.

Now he sits and listens to the Farsi love song, laments the pace that others set for themselves, a pace that keeeps them from hearing the heartbreak, feeling the loss, sharing the shattered moment we all have to live through, sooner or later, in any language.

Firetower

Northern Cardinal Review (Online) April 2013

Everything under the sun
is lag-bolt and pressure-treated lumber;
everything else is outside, beyond far.
It does not reach.
Here, only the movement of grasses.
Here trees, breathing, rustle and whisper
openly secret secrets
only to nuthatch and thrush.

Not Quite Mud-Luscious Yet

Every Day Poets (Online) April 2013

This latest snow, I hope, will also be
the last.
             I wait for white to fade,
for drifts to drift away, for warmer
nights and longer days.
                                  I pray
for crocuses to come and go,
or an April shower of tulip blooms
and lollipop roses; for anything
that shows us that the sun is less
removed, is less remote.
                                     I hope
these bloomless snowy days are past,
this latest snow will also be —at last—
the last.

Late Snow, By The Numbers

The Orange Room Review (Online) April 2013

I spent the night, head filled with numbers and
dreams of numbers, and in the frozen morning
 --new snow on all the branches--I'm filled with
numbers still: readout on the oil tank, wattage
of the feeble lightbulb, what part of the pound
of coffee remains until I'm drowning in a sea of
numbers too great to reckon.
                                           Five new inches
of snow at the end of April, the month pretending
to be March, going out like a lion on all fours,
temps in the lower double digits. Five new inches
of snow, even though the moon has orbited the
frogpond almost half a dozen times already
since the new year's turn. Five new inches of
snow on the three or four places we'd reserved
for delphinium and columbine, for roses, lilies,
and various summer whatnot.
                                           All the world's awash
in white. April's almost over; I'm counting on May.