Suite for the Possessed

Let’s say we didn’t, tragically, in the elevator
at the airport Hilton, between floors, the numbers

stacked like a poker hand seen but not raised.
The kiss, if not gasoline, then turpentine,

or two red peonies in a cardboard tube
with the poster, its hidden message, the moon’s

“bald eye staring back through the drapes.”
We’re two mouths bruised by the ordinary,

the equal but opposite torque and rotation,
artifacts of nightshade, phone calls, time zones,

of concrete and voices we hear in our heads.
I won’t say I’m fire and in it, that his stark white vest

conjured old world royalty, an earl
sent to make peace with a rival country.

When the doors open at 16, he pulls back (mal occhio),
the bright heart a passage (jettatura),

then dread. I know the lateral and play it, that hand:
first felony, last flight, no fold, this floor.

From chapbook Obscene Rhetoric (Philadelphia, Pa.: Archangel Press, 2002)

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