Haiku #1

This is so high school

But I go wild for the

Taste of your Chapstick 

used condom

pass it maybe twice a day
since early december
coiled on a barren patch
midway between parking lot and picnic table
at Esopus Meadows
Have u ever watched a condom age?
They have seasonality, turns out
Which u wouldn’t learn from their typical trajectory
Of foil packet
To skin
To wastebasket
but after two heavy snowfalls
And a month-long succession of freeze and thaw
This protective sleeve
Once nearly translucent
is now opaque
And I imagine brittle
In its angular state of disuse
Sometimes I think to pick it up
To dispose of it properly
To complete the standard condom life cycle of
Foil packet to skin to wastebasket
And also to prevent the prophylactic
from being snatched up by a passing dog
or ingested by the resident pileated woodpecker
or great blue heron
Both of whom I am quite fond
But lacking a nearby wastebasket
Or sterile gloves or the memory to bring them
there it lies
Aging rather gracefully
Like the relationship of the folks who left it there,
I hope

YEAR OF THE BODY

for the first time in this life 

I am a scientist

small bearded man outside the cafe

even asks me what I’m studying

I’m just trying to decipher 

this diagram of the body 

with bands around it

like rings of saturn 

trying to determine 

the bands around me

I think I have jaw, throat, pelvis, yes

I think I learned something about 

being sneaky crouching in the spine 

of sticky Garfield books 

instead of playing tetherball

Alexis the other white girl in class

asked me to do macrame 

we tied hemp to the chain link fence 

blushed at everything ate ruffles 

on the roof of her modern metal home 

now she has a baby, jogs by   

I don’t have a baby, don’t jog 

don’t know which I’d rather 

be a baby or have a baby

in this year of so much

microbial determination

we still insist on

explaining ourselves

I can explain that

I’d still like to be babies together

have babies together

especially since we are stuck/blessed 

here in such unimaginable futures 

as if I know what’s been imagined

I don’t know

but maybe I feel

hello year of the body  

dancing to songs like jewels

the thing is now I know/feel

everything will be alright  

because true expulsion lasts 

20 minutes tops, that’s science 

it’s the waiting that’s killer 

I imagine deaths of those within me 

and without me

all day

almost lazily die myself

driving down Rainier Avenue 

thank God who is a mountain

for poets and olive oil  

for armpit hair 

and nipples