From Journal Poems (“The Playwright”)
Early Thirties

Page 7.

The elephant is so
depressed. He’s hit a wall. 
Still obsessed over his ex
even his therapist has backed off 
“for now”. We meet for lunch.
Something about my play. Really
it’s my catastrophic need
for reassurance.
He looks at me and blinks, all weariness. 
“NO JOY” is stuck 
like a thumbtack to the flat 
area just above his trunk.


Page 63.
I meet Lou as he glues clouds to the back wall.
These are for the writer’s play.

Lou’s body empties itself
into its edges as he confesses

he has become a rodent. It happens
when the night is dead

In the dead of night.
Is this a dream?

No, he says. 
Truly, there is materiality to deal with. 

Sleepless he swims in the depths
of melancholy, a little mouse that squeaks and paddles. 

I watch his set accumulate
& listen with my girlish ears.

Why mouseness? 
He had twin uncles Lou explains. One was evil.

After trauma treatment completes
recovery is expected. 

Lou’s face hangs sweet and blank over the painted sky
a moon on the ladder 

as the stories rise in glittering piles. 
Lou’s father died in his arms 

heart shuddering
Lou felt his spirit pass through his chest 

even as his mother sobbed, We made love just
last night. How beautiful it was!


Page 79.
Slinking into her world premiere the writer sinks 
into the mud of her community spirit
while the wife wears what the writer can’t vocalize:
a fox she strangled with a fork. 

After the curtain, thrust in the limelight
gripping a pink bouquet
the writer’s just an ounce under a pond.
She’ll wind up eaten by the mongrel self.

At home, back in lackadaisical mode, she reads Dennis’ latest 
then finds herself swarming 
out from under her rock. As though 
she were a Satanist. 

But she’s not. She prefers things 
that are cooler, wetter.
Your heart, miss, in my wallet, she gasps
as the writer languishes in the wife’s cool breath. 


Page 101.
I’m crushed emeralds. Green snow. Powder before spring.
I’m year. A god girl in wept & yellow.

What good is this girl?
Vanquished she eats air and holds

the ear of a girlish.
She’s the density of clay. 

In a purple skirt she walks and stops and walks.
Sandals and Joshua. 

She sits through the reading behind Carla
who wakes her up with the sound of eyelids lifting

& dropping. A perfect sound. 
I want something like your bones Carla

as a companion. Walking without strain
into the dissociative void.