h o m e........

p a s t   i s s u e s....

s u b m i s s i o n s....

l i n k s

RONNIE YATES

CIGARETTE SMOKE

This is a short happy song for my skinny love.
She sits on top of a telephone pole 
Like a gun turret. She’s a door on a roof 
Propped up like the silhouette of a crime scene. She’s a tree 
With no blouse but a shiny torn skirt. She’s mean 
Enough to eat. She feeds birds traffic sounds
She throws down from her wired glass  
Window. She’s so skinny!
I watch her eat the sky
Like a radio aerial.

I’m a silly rabbit, or so my skinny love assumes.
Actually, I’m a bent stop sign tilted in the yard 
Of a house at the bottom of a cul-de-sac. The only house
Still standing after the birth defects and the protests. A gabled house, 
With post-WW II horizontal windows. Rosettes of brown crab grass 
In the yard. The lasso of an old hose lain out on the cracked dirt
Beneath the single small ash tree. Leaves cling
To the twigs like bits of paper air planes. The house is quiet 
In the quiet of the hot suburban afternoon. A single light
Burns low day and night. There is a scraping sound coming
From the garage. The brown aluminum garage door
Has been raised a few inches. Dark hovers on the smooth
Concrete just visible. How did I get here, 
I wonder? When I sleep in the afternoon,
The sun pinging off my dented red hexagon, I dream
A dog somewhere deep inside the dark cool garage,
Is chewing on a rabbit’s foot. Skinny love, 
Why am I whispering?

HAT TRICK

My skinny love jumps up and down
At the drop of a hat. Thus smashing the hat 
And the head inside which has been dropped to the floor
Along with the hat. Oh how Magritte of you,
My skinny. I always knew 
That you were an assassin, a spy. But I’ve wondered, 
Of those assembled at the menacing, were you the horn 
Of the Victrola, the club, the net,
Or one of the three heads spying 
At the window? I bet you were all three 
Suspicious gentlemen. Or else 
You ruined their hats! I am either the woman 
On the chaise lounge with blood on her mouth,
Or whatever the man leaning over the record is touching
In his pocket. My suitcase is unpacked. My coat has climbed onto its hanger.
I am not so nonchalant
About murder, dread skinny. How I wish I could listen as carefully to music
As my skinny love listens 
To death.

SKINNY LOVE, HOUSTON ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS

Like the horn of a rhino ground up for aspirin.

Like the face paint of the stone-billed stork.

Like a beautiful young father in his immaculate

White tee-shirt, kneeling sad and disgusted to his jabbering, whining 

First born son. A melancholy girl

With long brown hair bends over them. But surely they must have been 

Happy? Like a drinking fountain in the mouth 

Of an old fiberglass cartoon lion, his big tongue and square teeth, now hidden

In a new grove of softly clicking Chinese

Bamboo trees. Like a colonnade of shimmering live oaks

Discarding puzzle pieces of sun onto the surface

Of the hithering, thithering water of the reflection pool below 

Upon which a bronze gnome stands akimbo,

His head tossed back in derisive merriment, almost daring you 

To look over his shoulder at the bronze children playing leapfrog

Behind him. The young girl eternally balanced

Atop the back of the crouching boy, her legs split wide

Open, his golden head hovering small between them as a pushpin

Threatened with a gaping pair of needle-nosed pliers. An egg so white 

So delicious in the jaws of a cottonmouth. A detour thru a carrousel.

The lethal kick of a giraffe, its razor sharp hoof

As big as a dinner plate.