Cherry Cola XVI

I remember the forgotten rooms:
the crawl spaces,
attics

chambers for squirrel bones, baby hair
and broken Christmas
ornaments,

the loom under the stairs still
clinging to its half-
formed

placemat, the stormtrooper whose tooth
marks told the story of a
rebel

alliance dog.

It’s the house that we live in now
that gets fuzzy.
Once,

I knew where to untie my shoes,
where to hide the
postcards

of French women smoking long cigarettes
in imaginary places.
Now,

their labored breathing leads me
to my sister’s
room

where she says she needs nothing
as her television says
otherwise.

Cherry Cola LXVIII

If I long for anything, I long
for holes in fences, an
eye

framed where the knot rotted away.
All circles, interchangeable,
think

of themselves as eyes anyway.
I say these
things

as if words are circles that I
can peep through.
Circuses

are at once the worst
and best kept
secrets.

They think of themselves as yesterday
while arriving tomorrow
night.

Sister hears the trailers that unfold
into wonders, hears the
elephant

dreaming.

Cherry Cola CI

Sister likes to shop for bread and socks,
puzzle books and irregular
Christmas

trees.

Each flaw has its beauty.
We all fall
down

as we’d practiced years ago with rosies
in the front yard.
It’s

neither a plague song nor a bowing
to a pagan queen.
It’s

a mishearing, a mistake, a rehearsal
for our shopping trip
performed

by younger bodies.

We steady ourselves near the shelves
of Diet Pepsi.
We

wonder why our feet are on fire.

Cherry Cola CXLIV

The inside is empty, and the outside
pretends that it
isn’t

by raising peacocks, staging funerals,
catching landslides on
videotape.

There is too much paper.
There are so many
places

to hide.

Appliances still arrive in giant
cardboard boxes.
Sister

shines like a sailor’s button,
calms the minds of
fireflies.

I hear a hungry mouse gnaw the walls
and pretend that it’s
my

new favorite song.