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.