Yun Lan
Part I: The first time I saw you
I met John
without
John,
without introduction.
Cold,
cold,
cold hand.
Part II: Cadaver as Decapod
John was surely a hermit crab, having four small limbs to anchor the body and six long
limbs to advance it. He gathered
Abby Caplin
The chopped apple of her father’s eye,
She tastes the grapes of her mother’s drunken wrath
The barely visible slivers of silver-tongued almond
Needle her intestines as she savors
The seedless watermelon of fruitless friendships,
And endures the hard rind
Of a body gone awry,
To
In this forest of tubes and bottles,
Children wander in sleep.
A dying bird drops
From the corner of my eye.
The night nurse floats through paths
Tending the rooted tubes,
Weighing the pause between breaths.
In the dark, a man’s voice
Your message hung on the phone line
like his striped shirt blowing
in the last wind of his life:
softly and with dignity.
His facial bones,
and body contours
he allowed to be chiseled
to an insubstantial sharpness
by the flow of chemicals
Les Cohen ~
I walk warily,
searching for life
through smoking remains
of a jungle village.
My flashlight beam
slices the black haze
of equatorial darkness.
Was it Suakoko?
Fokwelleh?
No wind, rustle or drum
pierces the silence
I used to talk of fun and games
Now I talk of aches and pains.
I used to paint the town bright red
Now at nine I am in bed.
I used to dream of lovers bold.
Now if truth be told
The only men
She tells me she wants to have a baby,
my daughter who was my baby
so many years ago.
Everything comes back to me–
the waiting, the wanting, the whisking
off to baby-earth, that angelic place,
passing through life
with its normal sounds,
As Caroline was born
the doctor saw
the split
from lip to nose–
purple rimmed,
going down deep–
Deep enough
to hurt
generations.
And the imperfect doctor,
tired of wounds
tired of divisions,
saw the small
wholeness
When I saw dust settling,
the road black and gritty,
and noticed the air
shimmering as it lowered closer to the earth
like a soft blanket suffocating
the damp September
mornings that had morphed seamlessly
into November’s
crowded table
Sugar poisons
ruin your blood,
runs your legs
while you sleep,
revs your irregular
heart beat.
Maple sap, tree ripened
orange, dark chocolate,
honey dripping
from the comb
are not viable substitutes;
only abstinence
and the
He presses the Sawzall to
her chest, slices skin to bone.
This unzipping of skin does
not stop our breaths–we’re used to
invasion of the body,
the way his fingers pinch
into her pockets as though
for a cloth or a quarter.
She tried
To imagine herself dead
As she lay on her bed
Staring at the ceiling
With chemotherapy
Seeping into her veins
But she couldn’t
She could only think
Of her husband
And her children
And how they had laughed
