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Thursday Momma

The baby is on the floor
eating Taco Chips
watching Michael Jordan
and Bugs Bunny play basketball.
The dog is walking through here
with his hound-dog sadness
looking for a Barbie to chew.
He drinks out of the toilet
and I'm sucking on a plastic
cigarette, trying to quit.
It's trying to rain outside
and the one fish sits
in his royal blue tank waiting
for his pink pellets.
The dog tore the curtains down
that nail must have been
working its way out of that cheap bracket
for quite a while and now
I'm in the process of threading
the curtains back onto the rod but they catch
on the metal edge each time
and its only later that I hear I'm supposed
to put tape over the ends.
The baby pulls all the movies off the shelf
waddles over to me holding "The Gladiator"
so I slip it into the VCR thinking why not
the kid can't tell the difference but
someday he'll think of that fish and
the dog and me and understand that Thursdays
are almost Friday but not quite
so the tension is still there in the voice
especially standing on the back of a couch
threading eight feet of scratchy curtain back up.



Contemplating a Dangerous Operation

There is no operation to separate us,
no million-dollar miracle
in a room of steel,
room of light.

We've lived like this for years,
joined by twin histories
and our cadenced hearts.

We are mutinous sailors
roped back to back.
With the knife's edge in my teeth
I plot the water's depth.



Mesmerized

I sat on the couch immobile
with a book facedown
while you lay on the bed
waiting for the codeine to kick in.

The door was open.
Your body tangled in such stiff embrace
with sheet and pillow, I prayed
for the unwinding.

I saw your face, eyes closed
so hard I thought the pain
had crawled into some huge site
on the pica-sized tip of a nerve.

It wasn't that I couldn't look away,
I could-- but the sky was turning
dust-blown yellow
and there was nothing I could do.