Lovemaking with Medusa
My girlfriend wakes up with the head of medusa.
She wakes up with a mouthful of morning,
with breath a mythical wear and tear,
breath of saliva and slumber.
She drools the Red Sea on my neck and scrawls her love
letters in fingernail on my back.

I flip her over to read them back
to her. I summon her images: Praying Mantis, Medusa.
These names as prayers, passwords, keys. My love
unlocks her body coil, uncurls her hair. In the morning
she'd rather use a slumber party for slumber-
not me. I could tear

the sheets open and expose her gold streak of skin. Torn
underwear, I take two fists of her backside
part her ocean of legs, my girlfriend between sweat and slumber
fixes her neck-crane stare till I'm stone in the eye of laughing Medusa.
My body shipwrecked in her gold skin ocean; this morning
I take a praying mantis for a lover.

We rewrite myth in fingernail scrawls, remake primordial love.
When it's over she cries tears
of brine and ocean mist, as if she were in mourning.
My hand searches the terrain of her back
for an answer: What for these tears, Medusa?
Before I can pronounce her name, she feigns slumber.

Because she never sleeps, my girlfriend slumbers.
Like the naked call themselves nude-she loves
to dress things up. She stretches her Medusa
coils straight into hair. She tears
through her closets, won't let me kiss her back
when she's dressing. Dressing is the worst part of our morning.

I sulk the afternoon away, mourning
the loss of my myth: a woman who doesn't sleep but slumbers,
with a head of snakes and nightmares, a back
of golden ocean, and whose love
chants in a chorus of tears.
My heart breaks to see my girlfriend behead her own medusa.

To conjure back our morning,
I lumber up to her ear and intone Mantis, Medusa.
I call to my lover, bondaged in hair and human heart (a stone that sheds no 
     tears for myth).



My mother becomes a washing machine
My mother becomes the spin cycle
a heavy load, she measures herself each morning
detergent, Her waist
softener, make up, her weight
her breakfast, and the telephones 
jangle and din, ringing nonsense.

Uncertain, distracted, the callers might sense
she's speaking in cycles.
The gossip chain: a game of telephone
the callers hear she is in mourning.
All around the house they jangle, call waiting
all waiting to extend sympathies, ears, shoulders, tissues. She wastes

hours washing dishes, emptying waste
baskets of their tissues and dried flowers scented
With Sympathy, neglect and longing. At night, she's up waiting 
for sleep, inhaling our potpourri home. The moon, a death sickle,
a long low arch of hours, but each morning
the treadmill clocks washes dishes flowers and scales, and the telephone.

Not cruel, but imprecise to call her phony
as she gives thanks for the chocolates that went to waste
consumed or discarded or regurgitated each morning.
These gifts! She has no sense
of who sent what or where to put it-trashed, recycled
as the story itself, as his memory, and as weightless.

A recitation. An incantation. Though she tells the story again, she's waiting 
for his ghost to come and make her bed, and for phone
calls from sister, from Florida, from friends-they cycle
their time because, sympathetic, full of love, no one can waste
all day on a widow who has lost her senses,
whose stories go round and round with riddled mourning.

Moans and sighs and tsk. She never tells that each morning
he flipped on the coffee maker while waiting
for her to finish in the bathroom. He was always incensed
how long she took, how her cell phone
rang and rang through dinners, how her waistline
fluctuated with years with moods, how wash cycles

took moons. His mouth of litter and nonsense, he was not kind in the morning.
Their love a cycle of insults, but when waiting
for her to hang up the goddamn phone, (I saw once) he admired her heavier waist. 



The Short List, or spare me from telling this story once more
It blossomed in May:  a vision check-up.
Those spots you saw might mean stroke.
Mom and I waited
all day at the hospital 
till the doctor came, pronouncing all four arteries
stuffed, rotted.

Quadruple bypass-what a rotten
way to learn you were sick after thirty years without a check-up.
Three days later your arteries
fanned out of your body with a few scalpel strokes.
Then intubation, God, they had to strap you the hospital
bed because you sputtered and squirmed and wouldn't wait

to wake up and wish happy birthdays. I waited
at your groaning bedside, Mom and sister overwrought.
They were asked to leave the ICU. Some hospitality.
Mom paced the hall, she checked
her watch, but I couldn't leave, stroking
your hair-a wonder, it went white on the table, changed as your arteries. 

I fretted for my own arteries:
months later, I wheezed in a waiting-room, 
crying (wolf), crying heart attack, crying stroke.
It was just my nerves rotting-
Panic Attack: failure in pathos. My heart (sym)pathetic, not physical. Thank you, 
     Doctor, just checking.
Got some pills, and went back to see you at the hospital.

By then had passed a month or more, another hospital
none of us remembered your arteries.
By then, it was something else: September and your colon in check.
We were all fucked up waiting 
for test results. Turns out the thing was rotted 
through. Bleeding and weakened; you had a minor stroke. 

Now we were heart disease, colon ulcers, and for good measure, a stroke.
We laughed at God's effort on the ride to Mt. Sinai Hospital.
In traffic. What else could fail us? We tried a local route
to avoid the clogged artery
of highway. I failed when I saw the weight
you lost: your body waning under the gown, I lost it at the Gastro-ward check-in. 

Still, it was rotten of you to leave us, dark December. I say it was a stroke- 
a blossom of red brain flowers-but the hospital never checked.
Any renegade artery will do, by then none of us could bear to wait and see what 
     else could fail.