Shelterbelt

The pickup clanks its darkened tailgate through the hollow
strip of trees outside of town, any town, a makeshift road worn through
rows of woods and weeds, ruts still muddied from the noontime melt:
hard winter moon, brown ice crackling, spew drying on the window.
The trees were planted a century ago to hold the soil down,
farm down, town too, or perhaps just for relief—from all that land,
the thousand miles of it swooping way off to the Rockies but
stitched tight now with bony threads of cottonwood, box elder, elm.

They wriggle to a halt, he tugs the handbrake on. Let's say his name is Arv
and the other one is Carl. They're high on meth or crack, or just dizzy drunk
from beer. Yes beer, timeless, spilling down Arv's belly to the crankcase oil
smeared across his thigh. A star once in this world of shelterbelts, spring
muck, sweaty nights on the hardwood floor, gleaming. Decades gone,
gym gone, so much gone—just yesterday the Lutheran church got
carted off, thirty-five thousand bucks, another lot of cinderblocks and wood.
Moving on, the always moving on, or squeezing out, like me
lifetimes ago squeezed out as if from a broken blister that leaves
no scar behind, but here it is, this gap-toothed whistle in the wind.

We'd drive the gravel to squaw point for a midnight face we could bribe
or cheat for beer, a few fifths of Everclear, then kick a trail of dirt up
back to town and drink the booze down fast until with the last of the empties
out the window we'd kill the lights and creep along those ruts to where the trees
give out, spill into the night to see who can pee the fastest, the hardest, as someone,
some Arv, would always say It's cold enough to freeze the piss right up your dick,
and Carl no doubt will snort loose a ball of phlegm and launch it through his teeth
out to the wheatfield or simply grunt and nod up at the moon
or perhaps this time this Carl will steal a glance at Arv pumping in his hand
the long brown moonlit limb until he jams it back
where the darkness hugs his skin.

Dreaming Steam

A million years beneath your feet sulfur
vents turn hard water into tongues of steam
in writhing heat bodies teem in a sheen
of soap wet muscle flexed to tug a comb
across his nipple stiff blond hairs wriggling
through black teeth at sundown by Kinnear Park's
urinal red eyes freeze you erect high
on a Village floor finally giving in
he laughs and cleans up afterward at 9th
and Broadway foot propped on cafe window
you spy a man cold at midnight fading
on the street a single plume of city
steam dancing in the heat where a vacant
blast of steel-edged bus smashes it to bits.

Dreaming Steam first appeared in the Summer 2004 issue of Radical Faerie Digest.

Sleeping with Frank O'Hara

The generous sprawl of my right
    hand across the sturdy webbing
       of your spine sets all my penny

words up on their riven
    edges where they rearrange
       themselves between my sleepy

fingertips and this black
    unwinding track that creeps
       right through the blaze of white

thrust up before my eyes
    just where o heart! we join
       with all the lines entwined

deep inside our bones
    burning and so my rare
       creature of woven letters

how we love each tiny crack
    between them letting loose
       that precious glint of sight.