Valise
I am carrying something like a valise
I am red in its snap cricket hinges
I’ve lacquered nails – I represent a bright drop of blood
or an industrious, decorative beetle
I harvest a straw of matter from an inter-stellar moan
snap it tight in my velvet cage. click click!
I could be a whole flight crew!
I indicate sex by stroking objects.
enunciate safety, a floating lounge
(I blow calmly calmly into your boat)
something changes right here.
I teeter into phonograph needle
I must travel back. thru your spiral grooves
to when girls could woo the world
with one flash of ankle
small hallowed dreams
kiss-sucked into
thoracic cavity
the first balled up
love note I hurled at your skull
(poor
mrs.
rolf)
are the wings
damp…unfolding…shy wrinkled fire
only this fragility
(if the air had skin)
enables flight
only this
symmetry captures
the blind-numb hinge
allows the sky’s clapboard jawbone
its tossed and tethered
teeth
hypothetical bob and flesh bob
hypothetical bob and flesh bob are in a dark alley
hypothetical bob has a chip on his shoulder
it’s shaped like hypothetical sex. he’d like to squish
flesh bob’s face in. make it meat. turn it inside out
then outside out again. hose it down. put it on his own head
his hypothetical arms whir like a circular saw
like so many lost digits. flesh bob is smoking reefer
alone
his smoke shapes itself into an inexplicable vortex
he is leaning against a wall. taking his face for granted
if anything his genitals annoy him. up & down. up & down
sweat scratch and shift. hypothetical bob can’t stand it
he closes his eyes. pictures an orchid. is gone
flesh bob’s ears stop buzzing. he puts out his joint,
spit pinch hiss. shifts his package, re-enters the bar.
lights go smack
there would have been
too much beer
pinball
(blurry lights go smack)
finger joints looser
than wings
grubby shorelines
hosting our union
unsuspecting
impact
bald
meteors
hiss
(the cosmos sings
and sings
as it cracks
into ever
smaller
pieces)
Cathleen Daly is a performer and writer. She’s had poetry published in a variety of journals and e-zines including Slow Trains, Poetry Super Highway, Literary Mama (the anthology, Seal Press), Poets Against the War, Kill Poet Press, and others. She’s authored one chapbook Ode to the Unhinged. Her last show How to be a Secret Agent Girl as Seen on American Television and in Movies was produced extensively in San Francisco and won Best of the SF Fringe Festival. She has two children’s books and one teen novel coming out with award winning Roaring Brook Press.
