Marya Zilberberg
Sometimes the Rain
Sometimes the rain clings
To the earth and Caresses it with Its rivulets Tonight’s wasn’t like that The torrents collapsed with Such violence that Droplets bounced off The pavement and Scattered like Lighting bugs In my headlights This day
This day whispers to me
Before my eyes are even open It invades my breath Hitches a ride in my blood vessels And diffuses into my organs Tissues and cells Once it gets to my brain It pulls the alarm and My breath invades this day And we inhabit Each other’s molecules And I whisper “love”
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The blessing of a dead battery
As the question sits still
Waiting for me to enter it An answer rushes in Without so much as a knock And flits in my cranium Bouncing off its walls The question awaits The demise of the battery It will still be there When spent again I remember to look At the stars Snake on a rock
You warm my reptilian brain
And for a moment All danger Recedes I slither out of my skin and Press my entire Vertebrate Length Each nerve ending swallows My action and Your equal And opposite Reaction And the sun and the Grass Drench My forked Tongue |
The next scream
You punch me out of a piece of
Cardboard and proceed to Interrogate the corrugated Surrogate in order to Subjugate the real me to Conform to your sliver You turn me this way and that And wonder why I don’t fit Your linear inquiry Why I — a dodecagonic peg – Won’t fit into the shadow Of a ghost-particle And why the next scream you hear May well be yours Nostalgia
Nostalgia sticks in my throat
Like a chained bull charging the red burlap curtain Blood-blind Thwarted in his unapologetic elegance Pendulous testicles the size of a TV pundit’s ego Clanging like the bells of St. Mary’s on Easter Sunday Like a punch in the gut from fifty falls ago A bowling ball still rolling around in my viscera Your love is a steel blade on my tongue It splinters my words I cannot remember a time when it was not so |
