Three Poems

Obsolescence

Some nights, T-Boy leaned on the pay phone,
the last in the neighborhood, and took late
night wrong numbers from Chalmette,

and other places, too,

begging callers to listen
to his yodeling,
these drunken curlicue howls,
with the disconnect tone
like a metronome,
the stars his silent
applause.

Summer Marriage

Howard dreamed he could hitch his generator
to the sky, his fuel a mean brew of curses,
broken bottles, and a heady sweet slew
of Night Train, and with that, he would ignite
the heavens — slow-bruised colors like a summer
peach, and his wife, with curlers like pink buds
in tangly black hair, would lean out the window
of their houseboat and shout,
You’ve gone and done it now, Howard.
You’ve gone and done it now!

Aubade

The television is his rosy-fingered dawn.

Red pulp, a glass turned over.
Voices from the kitchen,
like bellows blowing the forge.

Some morning,
long after his mom
has left this world,
he will hear a lady next door,
hanging her dresses to dry,
her singing brittle,
like a cracked vase
or a chipped tooth —

a voice, like his mom’s,
tempting,
come back.