After my dad’s funeral

After my dad’s funeral, my mother got married to a butcher. I cried until I lost my voice, and then somebody I didn’t know transplanted a flower into my throat. Later, I became a one-eyed cat who could fly from mouth to mouth. I was light like a daydream masking the face of an immigrant child. The butcher coughed savagely, shaking his iron long tail to disturb me. I felt hungry, running toward my mother’s thigh to ask for a new chance. She said: no way, babe. He is our god. Just kneel before him. Just be a good girl.

I crawled into a corner, burying my face into the torn curtains calculating the distance between heaven and my father’s coffin. I wanted to be there. I wished to make a candy from the silky clouds& send it to him. I desired badly to meet his god and ask him if he was real or surreal. My stepfather gets closer. He holds scissors in one hand, and a cactus in the other. His grin swallowed the room.

Ode to my grandmother

My grandmother is an Alzheimer’s patient.
Last year she lost a tooth and memory. She began to confuse laughing with crying.
She started wearing our curtains, dating a late actor, and playing cards with my Shirazi cat.
“I love you, Granny” I always say. But she looks the other way waiting for Azrael.
She tells me how beautiful she used to be when she was my age.
I smile. My grandmother says she had a hoopoe once but couldn’t remember where he went. Maybe he hid in my chest? She wonders
she touches her nipples as if she tries to discover something new about them.
My little hoopoe, I miss you! She says with tears in both eyes.
The moment her last tear kissed the floor, I heard a sudden and strange sound coming from within, and then, just then my grandmother was gone.

The Trail

As usual, Israfil blows the trumpet. I sit on the edge of an animal’s tongue,

Thinking about how many times God massaged my neck.

The sky pours out random rumors about the curse of the Pharos.

I wave at a chimpanzee who looks like my father. We laugh.

I see a familiar face who reminds me of a popular leader.

Now he has turned into a clove flower.

How long were I here weaving more fairy tales over living and dead?

A cherry tree wears a rosary, buzzing like a bumblebee.

I am looking for anything to blame God for. The last hour will come after a few seconds.

When my face becomes a starfish, and when the sun gets smaller to fit the size of my pocket,

When water fills my grassy mouth, I begin to count the scars carved around my belly.

A lot of moons and poems mixed with my blood. Do you know laughter?

I ask God, who hasn’t a throne or golden chairs. He squeezes my hand and whispers into my ears, I am the inventor. Three little angels engrave the first letters of their names on the tree of paradise. I run, wondering how Adam and Eve ate each other.

I still hear the breaking news, although this is my second death.

God was holding a pair of scissors, managing to touch the tip of my nose.

Everything is purple. Another version of me was crucified to a wall.

I kneel on a prayer mat. Butterflies circled around my body.

Now I understand that I am preparing for a new death. Good girl,

Israfil says. I smile, swallowing more stars. God knows how to create entertainment.

The crime

Someone knocked me down& mailed my corpse to a floating cavern.

Each part of my body sings a lullaby.

Sometimes I hear elephants telling a folk tale.

Sometimes I hear frogs drumming out of my ear.

The angel of death boils a banana to feed his young.

I am sweating wondering if the hell was a short joke.

A blind woman shedding her skin. She has a witch’s fingers.

I look into her eyes& it takes me to a tulip garden.

My arm turned into a wise man.it talks to me as if he spent all his life as a philosopher.

I kneel among many little moons.

God is nearby, wearing a grand hat made of milky cloud.

Talk to me, he says pointing his finger to an upper window.

I have a genie inside, I say.

God laughs. This is an old joke.

I try to kill myself, but I remember that I am already dead.

The man who slaughtered me was an artist.

He knows how to squeeze castor oil into my fully open eyes.

Transformation

I dream of cockatoo birds sipping milk from the sky

I fly from corner to corner holding sugar, wine, and more funny jokes.

God is up sitting on his throne watching how the earth dances under my bare feet.

Kisses, wishes and more than that riding silver horses.

Creamy cloud falling down close to my head singing an old song.

My bones covered by the rhythm. My tongue turned into a butterfly. I sway in the air thinking of the worlds I pass dreaming of more honey rivers to have more fun, wondering how many orphan girls still live within me.

I try to raise both hands throwing them to a new universal castle. I feel new again. I sense more than being alive. There is something beyond happiness. There is delicious beyond joy.

Believe me, there is music you have never heard of.

Hallucinations

I had a dream of cows lead some people;

Who were humming an old-fashioned poem.

The sound of the flute was coming out from the teeth of an ancient Oak tree.

In that dream also, there was a moon and a half falling into my mother’s lap

She was stitching a great piece of the sky upon the little heads of three terrified cats.

I had a dream of being a gorilla

The dirt was caked perfectly with my fingers

I was another version of myself

Peeping into another world

Bathing in another water.

My body had billions of rooms

Empty ones without guests.

I was closed to be a river

But the temptation to be something bigger

Made me kneel

Swerving like a verse

Hovers like an angel’s napkin.

Shivers like a love song

In a poet’s chest.

THE WALL

On one side, evil
on one side, good.
But I could not always tell
which side was which of the wall
On one side, Devil.
On one side, God.
Sometimes I couldn’t distinguish
and sometimes not even wish to.
On one side, David,
one side, Ahab;
in their misuse of royal might
didn’t they both behave alike?
On one side Ahab,
on one side David,
putting their passion over prayer
didn’t they take what wasn’t theirs?
On one side God,
on one side Devil.
That wall less wall than saddle
when both sides I did straddle.
On both sides, good.
On both sides, evil.
Since no differences at all
I just demolish the wall.


NIGHT SHIFT

Last night I studied the sky from my porch,
Suddenly an ignited cosmic torch
burned and slashed through Cancer.
Even though I know my constellations
I continue to have doubts and questions,
but I doubt stars have the answers,

You, modeler of phases of my moon,
did you watch that spectacle from your room?
Our sections of the sky don’t quite rhyme,
our eternities look like different
patterns of buckshot in a canvas tent.
Whose Heaven’s bigger, yours or mine?


BARABBAS AND JESUS

Barabbas and Jesus
out walking in the sands
and along comes Pilate
wishing to wash his hands.

“Hey, Boss, why you so cross?”
the good Barabbas said.
And Pilate said “Herod!
John Baptist gave him head!”

“That’s mean!” said Magdalene
“Intruding on my job!”
Pilate: “Please understand”
(rehearsing for the mob)

“Someone must take the brunt,
it’s me or one of you.”
Barabbas thought and said
“Will nailing two thieves do?”

And Pilate said “My guy!
Indeed, that may suffice.”
But then they heard Peter’s
cock. It crowed only twice.

And Jesus wept. “The jig
is up. I’ll see you soon.
But first I’ll meet Judas
at the Last Chance Saloon.”

 
HIGH COUP

O moon, so distant….
I’m not smokin’ in Tokyo,
my poem will not fire.

“Revolution bursts
sunlight on stained stainless steel:
your yolkcolored hair.”

Night’s vaunted Shakespeare:
just flaccid Little Willie,
cold to geisha stars.

“Nestraw hair – egg’s eye
blue – honeyed limbs; trunkhugging
bearcubMe:     climbing.”

Sake enflames verse
(you say), arouses rhythm,
kindles rhymes sublime –

mine (old drunken whore) 
fires up unsuccessfully,
sucks relentlessly,

till we fall asleep.
And Basho a monk remains,
red raw poem limp, still.


LOVES I BEAR TO YOU

Addressing my allgirls class in Seoul 
(a sea of knees and eyes) – 
just whom do I cast my verbal net unto?


Miss J in her vast lostness of late adolescence


The mirthlessness of Miss O’s mercenary matrimonialism


The practiced spontaneity of Miss U’s blushes


Miss E’s patient burden of passionate virtue


The ancient futures of grown middleschool dreams



And then,
in midOthello,
the lights go




out




and in the sudden night
all that I can make out
are the pale fluorescent coral
of fingertips,



lips….

From Slim to Slimmer

When she

Walked out

On him

He knew

That his chances

Of becoming

A father

Had gone

From slim

To slimmer.

Taylor Dibbert is a writer, journalist, and poet in Washington, DC. “Rescue Dog,” his fifth book, was published in May.

Colleagues and Buddies                                                                  

Jim and I certainly weren’t colleagues. He finished a pharmacy degree, and I was an art school dropout – and couldn’t afford Kenyon. I drove a twenty-year-old Ford. He had a flashy new sportscar. He counted pills. I stocked shelves. He said, “That’s a pretty big word you’ve got there” when I used “pharmaceutical” in a sentence. Soon after he lost his ride, his job, and his life to cocaine, I signed up for classes and quit the drugstore. Despite his condescension, I was always willing to be Jim’s buddy.

Chuck turned my colleagues against me less than a year after his arrival. Got me fired. All to move up in seniority and likely simply for-the-hell-of-it. I thought we were going to be buddies. I was counting on it. After I was gone, he was reprimanded for sexual harassment – for calling my replacement at all hours just after her first interview. He got tenure. She signed an NDA. I was the lucky one.

Andy wore aluminum painted shoes and rumpled thrift store jackets and hung vintage Soviet era posters in his office when he taught freshman English composition part-time. We invited him and his wife over for dinner – my chicken tortellini soup. (During the meal he made us aware he was a former sous-chef.) And he drove me to the ER once. Andy and I might have been great colleagues but never buddies. Sometime after he became dean, he began wearing crisp suits, unimaginative striped ties and expensive, polished loafers. That’s when he learned to equivocate, evade, and obfuscate. He exhibited a talent for exquisite prevarications. Now no longer dean, he’s back to teaching freshman English composition. Andy didn’t have buddies.

Jolene and I shared our passion for Thomas Hardy, but after listening to a vicious castigation of her husband over the phone in her office (I offered to come back later), I knew we wouldn’t be buddies. But Kate and I were meant to be buddies. We traded info on the best therapists and latest OCD meds. She tended my son when my daughter was born. But she proved to be an incompetent and sanctimonious administrator – the sanctimony a camouflage for the incompetence. Impossible to ignore. Out of spite over a slight, she destroyed my program in one swift stroke. Stress caused her to retire early.

John was a heck-of-a-nice-guy. We ate many breakfasts together before class, eggs over-easy for me, oatmeal and fruit for him. As our sons were the same age, we compared parenting styles and over-tipped Ellen, our waitress, because we talked too long. I gave him a tour of the art museum, showed him my father’s grave and the stained-glass windows at St. Vincent de Paul. When my budget came up in committee, he merely sat there saying nothing and doing nothing while our vindictive peers slashed away. John was a lousy colleague. But I forgave him. His son was sent to prison for five to ten for theft and drugs, over-dosed when released, and chose to die rather than see his legs amputated. John and I couldn’t remain buddies.

Todd and I never needed to think about how or why we were buddies. Todd was a good husband, good father, good colleague, an honorable man. Little kids wanted to sit on his lap. Our families gathered for New Year’s Eve and watched parades and fireworks together. He put a six pack on my doorstep after I pulled down the poison ivy in his trees while they were at church. (He was highly allergic.) He saved a very pregnant student during class with quick-thinking CPR. His only flaw was dying in the shower of a heart attack at forty-three. No notice whatsoever. It was difficult to forgive Todd for that, but I could not help but love him.

David Sapp, writer, artist, and professor, lives along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. A Pushcart nominee, he was awarded Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants for poetry and the visual arts. His poetry and prose appear widely in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. His publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior, chapbooks Close to Home and Two Buddha, a novel Flying Over Erie, and a book of poems and drawings titled Drawing Nirvana.