In Moderation
(after Frank O’Hara)
I am a woman of few excesses.
I am cautious who I talk to.
I buy cheap jeans that I let fade.
I eat small steaks.
But sometimes it’s so great when I
get out of bed late
and drink too much Scotch
and smoke too much pot
and love you too much.
Joanne Cofrancesco
Come To Me Only
With Soft Hands
At times like these, when even the sun
scorches our backs, one must not only ask
but demand tenderness. When you let
a man touch you, tell him to touch you
gently, almost like the feathers of a bird
whose name has not yet found your tongue.
Through the window, the moon—
like a child’s candy wrapped in silver—
shines on his face, and you feel a kind
of love swelling inside. Love
is such a fickle thing—here one minute,
gone the next, like a crow’s shadow
over a pond. Do I remember his name?
You whisper, but resort to not knowing
because you can call him by any name
and know with certainty
that he will answer back.
Ashish Kumar Singh
The Danger of Creating Danger
She was the first to see me
on the floor thrashing
with a wildness she could not imagine
was in my blood.
Her blood.
That same year she started teaching Frankenstein
to her college freshmen.
The danger of creating danger.
A monster who was its own geography
of broken parts stitched together but unable
to connect,
a helter-skelter folly
of odds and ends,
borderlines no map had known,
sewn by a solitary parent
who gave up on it too soon.
Only I understood why she wept
and felt the pain of something she kept unsaid
as, sitting with her head bent, alone in her room,
she faithfully went back to the book each year,
like a pilgrim bound for Lourdes.
At her memorial service,
many of her former students from different falls
and distant springs came up to me
and shared a singular memory,
wondering what it was
that, when she read about the thrashing creature
aloud, made her gentle voice tremor
like a fault line that was suddenly exposed
almost breaking apart but not.
Mark Evan Chimsky
