Cloistered

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These once shallow furrows now fold
into fans across my brow, the spoils
of my lamentations clinging like rust
on blunt tools. I kiss your baby lips,
flaunt you, my starry opal,
as if I were a woman gutted
by a womb in stasis, biology foiled.
These languid days of ours,
playing, eating, drawing scores
of sooty-haired children, you
cloistered in my orbit, throat flexed
with questions; and I, all grasping
needs, plucking with a crone’s bony hand.

City, Suspended

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The city stopped one evening,
avenues a frozen smear
of red one way, white the other

.
Moths flapless, clustered
like fossils in the light-wash
of streetlamps. Commuter

trains already rusting
on their tracks like ancient toys,
the people inside turned to postcard pictures,

their newspapers browning
in front of hat-topped faces,
the conductor halted mid-ticket-punch.

On the streets, vapor
from sidewalk vents hung
un-billowed, shouts from brownstone

windows stretched like taffy
through the air, trench coats
paused, turning to sculptures

in trapeze arcs, their owners mid-
stride, and mouths gaped on every street
and in every building, words waiting

just behind stilled lips and teeth.
Busses exhaled nothing, taxis
four-lanes thick took no fares, not

the man with his arm stretched high,
hand thrust up like petrified wood,
or his girl across town, aching to see him.

The Call

The phone shrilled at 11:39 p.m., someone asking for Ynette. No Ynette! snapped the wife and poked the End button hard with her forefinger. The nerve. She stewed in the bed, rage bubbling like an overbaked tart.

You’re still up! she bellowed toward the open door. Her husband sprawled on the couch downstairs, stewing his brains in Fox News.

Why didn’t you answer the phone! she shrieked at the dark hallway.

Now I’m awake, because of Ynette! she screamed, stirring the dust collected in the corners of each stair.

The voices of pundits floated like a putrid gas up the stairs, down the hall, and into the bedroom. The wife flung the sheet from her body and stomped toward the stairs. The ceiling fixture rang faintly in the hallway below. She’d give that man what-for.

He sprawled on the couch in fishnets and a pink-feathered nightie. He looked up at her with kohled eyes. The phone was for you, Ynette! she snarled, then stomped back to bed.