National Poetry Month
From 2017: A pop culture poem every day in April
I love the way Téa Leoni chugs
that martini—shaky, the news
she knows is bad and now believes.
Ryu, bro, what the hell happened
to the dragon punch tag team? My plane
pinballed the globe trailing you, I waltzed
in US airshows & seedy Barcelona nightclubs,
You guess and you guess wrong but Vanna White unzips her gown anyway and from the breach Annie Oakley steps out/she too slipping off her embroidered blouse and from inside her Maud…
Down in engineering you can’t even see
the stars.
Dad was so proud when I was reassigned—
the heart
of the ship, the heart
of the ship,
draw him up in fish netting,
bruise his bloated skin.
silence the green.
He made good on his promise to leave if there were rainbows. So she took off her pink stage wig and transformed to blonde. I cannot wash the Manic Panic out of my hair with even the cheapest shampoo.
I have over three thousand, you know—
brass and crystal, palm-sized, designed
to turn. You can always hear me coming.
The thunk and chime that sounds like
Why are the children in trouble? Darkness
demonstrated far better parenting
than who’s behind these baritone bleatings.
Whispering miserable things, such regress
with my unibrow
& elevated testosterone
& my strange obsession
My agent told me I would win a Grammy
if I wrote a spoken word poem, it would
be the easiest way to do it. You just write
Because I accept human fallibility
a man explains, voice like Telly Savalas
behind me. Voice of bald, of wide collar splayed, chain
With siren and flashes I was
trying to raise flames—
I couldn’t spread heat, flying isolated
and dead in this part of town.
Come on: I make more sense
than that bimbo with the part
down the middle. If the future
is run by machines, let them be
Post-doomsday & anti-
cowgirl, you are both raging
& repentant for the swollen levee
“If you win, you lose.
Add some butter.
I’ll either convince you
that you can be happy
I want to talk about the last time
crows talked to you from
the dying maple in the front yard.
Let's talk about new-old romance, the kind that only comes along
when your husband and your youngest son
are killed by sharks and you're just trying to get by as a widow,
a set of shoulderpads and a frothy perm,
You were the first
But you weren’t for real
In it Courtney Stodden spends a lot of time in skimpy outfits
Around some fading English people
The sun came out at night, and sang to me. Obviously. Isn’t that just like the cargo ships you find rusting in the desert these days. Those lonely characters we chase right off-screen.
Cut yourself and you'll get lockjaw,
our mothers warned. Scowl and your face
It’s unfair that I’ve projected my disposition onto the crabs of the earth.
My grandma fed me
things no proper mother would:
Tombstone pizza, Campbell’s soup, nachos,
cookies, and instant coffee.
When great slivers began to slough off the sun, Frog knew he’d have to break the news to Toad. Toad was in the house luxuriating in his breathing.
It's all relative. My father had a mustache, but not the rapier. My mother had a face, but not the cinch, not the selective lighting. Every cousin, a mop.
RESCUING BOBBY BRADY FROM A DISASTER MOVIE
The Towering Inferno (1974)
It wasn’t like
bright lights, a gurney.
There were no