.................................
science and a first time
.................................

it was third grade
i think
when i learned to grow
in cups
tiny wax bellies with
squash that turned
a face slowly
up past the window
and i waited with
the others in our patchwork
uniforms
for the head of the plant
to peel back the dirt and
pound up the wall, mine
wasn't the first but
sometime it came
curled and i couldn't believe
the head it had,
all the blow of
something born but stealth
hardly breathing
at all.

 
.................................
a she
.................................

i loved a she once
not lust love like
now, no nothing so good
as being mopped clean.
i loved a woman
once with a place between her legs,
an image of an image
twin spots of brown rice;
i traced with my tongue
cause i wanted to love
her
like a man loves
that place of sticky sweet tired
come-a-calling. i loved
her in my pocket
a secret sting
like known death but it
wasn't the real crack just a
tease, clouds
with no rain and then all
the memory of no momma,
explains me away
nicely. but now
we sit,
and catch the eye
no fish or tiger meat
but an eye
of the other, not as sacred
we think
but really so
loved by loving too
early and then waking
up with a slap to the world
and all our open mouths
in delinquent pastel
pinks plucking
words like poppies from
a gut or
a grin
or maybe a cockeyed
pillow shaped
like a heart. so we sit
spinning our claws, wriggling
out of new sheets
and wait til the other bleeds first.

 
.................................
when i was old
.................................

enough,
she told me about her stay:
the man who dined on vomit,
the woman with a bed
on her back,
a cotton-tortoise
running sleepily
down a long gray field
of nubbed rug like a salmon
swimming up. my mother
tried to take her
life,
hers to take
but couldn't lynch the vein
so father
hid her there
amidst the other
selves,
the unstitched jaws
of free agents that
mingled dazily in and out
of catatonic whispers
numb as defecting air,
half as blasphemous as kicking
god but gorgeous
from their free eye.
my mother liked their
quiet craziness, their sins
boxed like bouillon,
suitcases of will and
humped diction,
tired rules. i wonder now
if i was ever that old,
as old as to say,
oh, that must have been
hard.

 
.................................
a love poem, my first
.................................

i am laid out for tasting
by a man, so black he's blue
mustache and a deep-fried
groin. peacocked, wily
vision in flannel two-fold
coils, palming fatty oaks by day;
by night, he puffs his wage
from ear to elbow.
he is a body-blossom,
red-thick and shaven,
ambushed by an awful woman,
a blend of bones like dart,
and something stealth as lint.
laid out by a man,
my father, twenty
years younger with a cut
above the eye, half-moon
in a jelly jar-a cell
with ears and a sale on body parts-
cheap thrills for a buck
a lip. we rumple
in bed like peaches, ripe
and rolling over tonic
skins like skeins. and then
he calls me dear
and i cringe like cotton,
crack my hip
and wade. all tones-plum-
and a boy half as sound
as sound clustering like
an acorn causes. love
is no sacrament but a mingling
of sexes at the trough. but there
is always hind-sight. lacerations
through the ear leave me
gill-free,
mammal bound.
breasts are for fondling.
but what about the milk?
between my legs is something
of a sin. gritty girl
and shoelace high but loving
was easier from the womb,
when suffering from silk much
the same as burlap.

 
.................................
irma
.................................

toothy davenport in mules,
slapped make-up in
shallow rivers of gorged pore,
makes her bed with a lean
glassy-orbed charmer-boy
like a pin-eye in salad. once
he sang a song in praise
of her skin, sticky-sweet plum
pots, button-eyes, nose,
bone-white nomad like a linen
sheet, ripened. but a hole,
a crisp falter
for the mouth, such a burnished
brow with a raggedy head
like a top went through.
a match head,
lurid as porcelain
and white but bruised
like a favorite couch, the
one with the blue stain.
and him,
brackish as a tin basin
bumping sweet weeds
in the night of nights.

 
.................................
and my mother told me,
.................................

be good, keep it clean girl
and he'll love your whole thing,
the eye too,
the net that swarms the crotch, the
door to delicacies like smelt
smothering
light for loving, she said, love him
hard and he will come around to being kept
but i can't even when i look through
him the one tall man with carbon whiskers
set like splinters
in a boxed jaw,
and even when we hug the ground together,
walk our waltz like grapes
dangling hard, even then
i can't tell him that i know he's
glued to some other thing,
a still perhaps of grass
the ranging of a father blown,
i can't tell him,
of my little grunts that keep
me sane, keep me slinging lies
like hash.

.................................
Hillary Joyce
.................................

 
Copyright © Hillary Joyce
July 1996

...two poems in this room by Ray Heinrich...
the small moments of your face hover
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