Ethel's Lament (Ethel Rosenberg)

for David Greenglass

'Cover your eyes when lightning flashes'
is what our mother used to say.
Now your pupils are hourglasses
filled with my ashes, as you drag

that sack of mustaches and cash.
We were siblings only in name.
What do you see when lightning flashes?
See how I've decorated your grave.

Fifty years you lived off my ashes.
In terms of history, you left your stain.
In your chest, there's just a beating rash,
an umbrella that dissolves in the rain.

How did it feel to swallow your name?
I am what you see when lightning flashes.
I won't let you sleep till you give back my ashes

poem by Jeffrey McDaniel
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Air Empathy

On the red-eye from Seattle, a two year-old
in the seat behind me screeches

his little guts out. Instead of dreaming
of stuffing a wad of duct tape

into his mouth, I envy him, how he lets
his pain hang out. I wish I too could drill

a pipeline into the fields of ache, tap
a howl. How long would I need to sob

before the lady beside me dropped
her fashion rag, dipped a palm

into the puddle of me? How many
squeals before another passenger

joined in? Soon the stewardess hunched
over the drink cart, the pilot gushing

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poem by Jeffrey McDaniel
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1975

A boy asks his father to spiral a football over a tree
to arch it, so the ball will arrive an instant before the child.

The child dives. tendons extended, heart bucking
hands opening, to clutch what descends from the sky.

Your mother left today for the institution. If the ball
hits ground, she dies.

That December afternoon the boy's mother passed away,
thirty-three times in the first hour.

Each time he grabbed her head from the snow and
ran it back to his father, promised to do better
and he did, he ran hard, focused, dove.

I caught my mother's skull thirteen times in a row
and she's still not coming home.

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The Forgiveness Parade

There's nothing like a full moon reflected in the eyes of a blind man
using a telescope to stir a bowl of Russian alphabet soup
for the cosmonauts who orbited the shadow of Jupiter
and are landing in an ocean of tears
shed by cold blooded murderers who miss their mothers convulsively
in their prison cells being wheeled caravan-style down Oswald Boulevard
as part of the Forgiveness Parade where relatives of the victims
stand quietly holding banners like 'Apology Accepted' as the vandals
stumble past in shackles followed by the hijackers and the pickpockets who
march single file up the fire escape of a skyscraper built by arsonists.

poem by Jeffrey McDaniel
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The Biology Of Numbers

Once I dated a woman I only liked 43%.
So I only listened to 43% of what she said.
Only told the truth 43% of the time.
And only kissed with 43% of my lips.

Some say you can't quantify desire,
attaching a number to passion isn't right,
that the human heart doesn't work like that.
But for me it does-I walk down the street

and numbers appear on the foreheads
of the people I look at. In bars, it's worse.
With each drink, the numbers go up
until every woman in the joint has a blurry

eighty something above her eyebrows,
and the next day I can only remember 17%
of what actually happened. That's the problem
with booze-it screws with your math.

poem by Jeffrey McDaniel
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The Quiet World

In an effort to get people to look
into each other's eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn't respond,
I know she's used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.

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For The Artist Who Paints My Balls Fifty Shades Of Blue

Just when I get some steam built, when I'm feeling
like an architect of steam, ready to vaporize

inside you, you say slow down, which isn't easy.
There are no power brakes in the genitals,

no runaway boner ramps. I flop onto my back.
The blood marches single-file down the long,

winding staircase of my cock, like an emergency
evacuation of the Washington Monument

during the height of tourist season. My testicles
ache like a boxer's punching bag. I wish a bell

would ding, and a bald Italian guy with ice packs
and smelling salts would hop into the ring

of our desire and give me a pep talk, remind me
to work on the clitoris, like the ribs of Apollo Creed.

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Technology

The sinks dishes are the sinks problem
as I ooh and aah at the complexity of balance
implicit to keep the structure: eight glasses, thirteen
bowls, a valley of forks, intact, while I run
hot water over a knife for my onion.

There's a science to the bathtub's archipelago
of grunge colonies that's necessary to America.
My toothbrush is the pin keeping Detroit from collapse.
No, I can't cut my fingernails and risk
re-ordering the universe's distribution of atoms, mass,
stars popping like light bulbs.

And this new, improved imaginary lover - her whiplash
parabola of tongue snaps sandpaper over spine. Yeah,
in thirteen seconds of pure logic I boomerang
to the future and return as a glimpse.

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The Offer

I want to locate a bit of you, cradle it,
say: this, there is no word for this.

But they will. They who name everything
will define our actions
as we auction our bodies off to sleep.

In our single dram we'd compose
a manifesto on the irregularity of scars.

The very idea demands preparation, as if
choosing a school for an angel.

There are no angles. Just those things
blinking like the teeth of jackals
around the moon's significant tremble.

Isolate the idea of shaking our bodies
under the blank comfort of down and tell
me which way will our knuckles face?

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poem by Jeffrey McDaniel
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Survivor's Glee

I strapped on an oxygen tank and dove
into the past, paddling back through the years,

emerging from a manhole on memory lane.
The boondocks were doing just fine without me.

The car dealerships. The trash heaps. The stream
of consciousness where I learned how to skinny-dip

had slowed down to a trickle of amnesia.
All the houses had been gutted, except mine,

where my family was still eating dinner. My parents
welcomed me with open elbows, my brother

looked up to me like a cave drawing on the ceiling.
The night hobbled by, rattling its beggar's cup.

A pipe burst behind my eyes, which brought out
the plumber in everyone. At a loss for words

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poem by Jeffrey McDaniel
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