Selected Poetry

19 Surprising Things Men Have Said To Me

I have electric knees.
If it ain’t jam, it’s jelly.
Don’t you ever wear that top again.
You know you want to.
Get your nose done and come back
Your kids don’t look Mexican, they look Jewish.
I’m strong like bull.
I can’t bring over that picture of my brother, it’s too heavy
My left testicle never descended.
I make women scream.
Just pretend you’re squashing it with your bare feet.
I never thought of you as a girl.
You might be pregnant; I might have done it in my sleep.
I can’t sleep with you; I have to put in a sprinkler system in the morning.
Thanks to you, miss, I get 20 years in jail.
My psychiatrist said you’d be good for me.
You remind me of a giraffe on amphetamines.
Thank you.

The Difference

In front of the Eiffel Tower
the Spanish Steps
and
The Tower of London,
my first husband
opened his fly
to
make sure
his flaccid penis
was
featured
in our vacation photos.

He bragged
he could vomit
straight into
a wine glass
without
spilling
a drop.

My second husband
cut a hole
in the floor
of our rented apartment,
put cardboard
on the dirt,
in the crawl space,
strung up Christmas lights,
hooked up a stereo,
spent a lot of time
down there.

We’re still together.

The House

The house I saw yesterday
was the face
I saw in the mirror this morning:
faded, worn,
partially lovely but
mostly
forgotten.

I saw
the outside paint,
beige,
like endless sand.

Before,
it was a vibrant blue,
proud,
making a grand
proclamation.
The fireplace had been
excised
from the center
of the living room,
it’s absence
screaming.

As I walked through the rooms
I was allowed
to see,
I felt tentative,
intrusive,
embarrassed for them,
for what they’d
become.

Like walking down
the corridor
of a nursing home,
seeing glimpses
of the lonely
and elderly
in their state of humiliating
disintegration.
Only the remodeled
kitchen,
now downstairs,
looked happy to be there.

The memories
of each room
could
barely be conjured up.

Like looking at photos
in the obituaries.
How they looked in their twenties,
how they looked right before
their passing.

I expected
to be moved,
walking on my parents’ property,
seeing their old house.

It was more like reading
a textbook,
dull,
uninviting,
an assignment that
couldn’t end
too quickly.