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

ELLEN KAUFMAN

WAVES

Permanent should be forever,
hair yielding to desire.

And desire should be this simple,
reshaped with chemicals and water

and smoothed by heated currents.
Florescent mermaids navigate 

helmeted divers, neatly spaced.
Triton shakes his crown

of green plastic cylinders,
drifting between the mirrors

while blow dryers moan.
Combs in sequence stroke

and scissors flash like fish;
rollers fall, releasing flatness.

Incessant music thumps along
without climax or denouement

in the deep sea of self-admiration
which imparts grace to all motion.

BATON

Our legs stirred white pots.
Our tassels waved to brass.

Beside the horned goal posts
cold metal burned

while turning.
The only true spin

was when it left the hand
for two heartbeats.  The rest 

a skirt of thumb and arm,
legs twirling a skirt.

They said the band played Souza. 
You could have fooled me.

We are inside it
without being in it:
the clockwise current,
the societal layers 

of drift and stare
above oblivious coral.
Fish circle to the right,
vanish and reappear.

He finds his favorite:
a purple striated blimp
trailing a feathered streamer,
its ribbed, radial fin

translucent as lettuce.
We can’t find it on
the identification key.
There is just one

that keeps arcing past
like a football lobbed
through a field of butterflies.
It becomes our game

to catch it lapping,
without effort, gangs
of angels and jacks,
triggers and parrots,

its idiosyncratic costume
a grape taste in my mouth,
its name something yet
to come, a kind of future.