CAMEOS
What really does it for me
is the vein hatching of your feet
in sardonyx
with an incomplete chromatic scale
whose purple when I press your nails
turns to white;
and I learn from your hands’ phalanges
the embrasures of other ranges
and their half steps;
I make my tongue lick each degree
from the nail to its chipped black key
practicing
my sensitivity on you
and from your cuticles get the truth,
poetry like:
the sun throbbing the alkali flow
trickling from the carwash hose
chiaroscuro;
when air floats the steeping tea:
its nenuphar coin, its domey
bas relief;
my Cowper’s gland left its okra streaks
in cameos on the toilet seat
impasto!
—
REVEILLE
A blood drop spreads and slightly blooms
on the old tissue in my room
from the floor,
and where it fades around the edge
it blends to white in fjords and sedge
a cartoon sun.
Abating with my tilted chin,
your sprawling comfort soundless dinned
in my entrails;
as if my skin by morning brassed
and the loopy tarnish bed springs cast
couldn’t ripple;
or parchment paper pressing leaves
my veins through skin had softly thieved,
less vividly,
then spread like a tattoo machine
whose static sound was hue on me;
your strike intoned
a plummy tincture with a crest:
your rampant hands across my chest
that morning.
So when I dredged magnetically
my iron lacking memory
I scant recalled
just how my day was to progress,
for bleed and staunch by your impress
took precedence.
—
BREAKFAST
Your nose, which best left undescribed,
its tender pleats to me denied
in profile
across from me with pillow-cinched hair,
in squiggles on your temple where
you sweated most
like how your appetite was pasted;
you slowly ate, sickly sated
on each bite.
Your cereal then studied moisture
in the milk’s meniscus cloister
whose blue
similar to overcast stone
that hued within its walls alone
the light with fog.
Piously peripatetic,
their boons became more sympathetic
stirred by your spoon.
—
Zeke Greenwald’s work is soon to be featured in Prelude magazine. This selection of poetry comes from a short collection entitled Cameos. Zeke currently resides in Brooklyn, NY.
