Two Poems

Finale

At our dinner party we only thought the dark-haired mime was putting on a very special performance. Every other mime’s face contorted into envy. Whadda commitment to craft. . . Even after he knocked over his water glass and stuck his thumb in the tuna tartare, we didn’t consider the color seeping under his white mask. A face in full bloom. Pinching their chalked cheeks, the other mimes chewed over white verse red as a trickle of blood drooled out the corner of a mouth. But that was last Wednesday, by now every mummer has added a death riff to their gag.

The Thyroid, a litany

Consider your thyroid,
the second brain of your human body.
Consider this organ healthy,
delicate butterflied vessel nestled
at the base of your throat.
Consider how it cocoons at the base of your throat.
Consider your thyroid as a caterpillar.
How it crowns collarbones,
how it kings clavicles.
Think how your thyroid queens.
Consider cookie cutter shapes like your thyroid.
Asymmetry considered, wings act
as indictors of disease or malnutrition.
Meditate on the marshmallow thyroids
along Appalachia. Consider speech
strangulation and how ambrosia
like broth, like mash, slips
past tracheas, past lobes pumping blood
to the dunce organ, brain-dead
in reverse. Consider how your thyroid put
your larynx in a box, put your voice
in a hat-box, put a feather in your
cap, put a dunce-cap on your larynx, told your larynx
to shut its pie-hole.
Consider lime jello, starched sheets,
your thyroid in a hospital gown.
Your thyroid with a fever.
Your fever, with a thyroid, sick in bed.
Consider your thyroid remembers.
It generates a list.
Consider your thyroid is hermetic,
like an emerald tablet, like a soft-shell
crab, like a groundhog,
like a groundhog’s
shadow.