Afterglow

If the moon laughed
It would be your voice
Unselfconscious with surrender
And if the crescent questioned me
There would be the slightest hesitation,
A soft breaking,
A promise of everything and nothing.

What carried me a thousand miles away?

You arrange yourself in the same fashion
Looming over the shoulder
Ambivalent, remote,
Sparking with stolen light
Creating the illusion
That you are of this earth.

Your solitary skill
Is catching shards of glass
In sparse beach grass.

I sleepwalk to a 3 a.m. diner.
Your face presses against the greasy window
Through fraying gingham curtains.

Your fingers drum impatiently
On the chess board floor
Angry as God
But not as forgiving
Biting your lip to whisper
Something I could never translate,
Hoping I would somehow absorb it
Just beneath the level of perceptibility

Like the obedient tide
Imagining it has plans of its own.


Business with Pleasure

Don't you send me a sienna scorpion
Postage due.
Don't you ring at 3 a.m.
Ejaculating onto my red running bra.

Don't go to the city
In an egg shell Armani suit.
Don't pass up the live sex show
In the window
For a seat at our old coffee bistro.
Don't have the cinnamon French toast
And Godiva espresso.
I said don't do it.

Don't take the glass elevator to the roof.
Don't point to our old office
Through the telescope of time
To the starlings and blue birds
Before the rats and leeches.

I know and you know
The snakes didn't come
With the broken river.

They were breeding in the phone lines
Where your voice dangerously dangled.
They were writhing through drawers
Of the cherry wood desk
Where my calendar waited
For your 6 o'clock initials.
Don't send me a sienna scorpion
Postage due.

I need not get sentimental
Over you.

^

Biography

Rebecca Lu Kiernan has published in MS. MAGAZINE, ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION, NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW and other magazines and books in the U.S. and Australia. A sample from her book, THE MAN WHO REMEMBERED TOO MUCH, is featured in Canada's YGDRASIL. She edits the controversial magazine, GECKO.