poems by arlene ang
So What If You Love Your Migraine Like a Second Coming
You have an altar, too. For lost objects.
And the 2:35 bus. Downpour steams the lake
a corpse song. Do you still believe
in chalcedony knives and how they pass
through metal detectors like a pair of gloves?
You fill your head with regrets:
doggy bags, keychains, window views
you never sketched on paper because you couldn’t
calculate happiness after 9/11.
The ice thins under the ice pick,
and you could’ve lost your fingers while
going through another history of self-abuse.
The photographs under your brassiere are there
because that’s where you
need to feel the people around you.
If you look closer, you’ll see that
the trees are x-rays of bone.
Eve
She came, like metal fire.
Where else but in the garden?
We stood around, puffing into our hands.
Alex wondered why she rolled
the window all the way down and forgot
to scream. Eve in her 1974 Fiat Cinquecento,
a red gash in the snow. That night
ice on the roads brought her
nearer to us than God. We stood
as her car skidded through sidewalk.
Matt called the picket fence going down
a paper doll effect. We stood
as the fir tree cracked sideways.
Like a peg leg. Like seven years of bad luck.
A Night in the Suburbs
Richard is reading Confucius. The porch light hops in the wind. His nose casts a shadow, like a wife, over his face. Rabbits on the lawn have defecated a moonlight omelette. In the translation of the French text translated by a certain Commander Jones during WWII, there is a philosophy about rabbits digging up the bones that previous owners thought they had buried well. The dead speaks with a hand grenade or super-intelligent, “Do I know you from somewhere?” He is making notes on his right sleeve for a children’s book which his next-door neighbor, Samantha will end up writing for him. In the end, what does Richard know of rabbits or Confucius? He tries his best to live with them and, oftentimes, brings them close to the fire to observe which of thetwo burns more brightly.
Arlene Ang lives in Spinea, Italy. Her poems have recently appeared in alice blue, Caffeine Destiny, Mimesis and Zygote in my Coffee. She is the recipient of The 2006 Frogmore Poetry Prize and serves as a poetry editor for The Pedestal Magazine and Press 1. Her chapbook, "Secret Love Poems" is available from Rubicon Press. More of her writing may be viewed at www.leafscape.org.