PLENTY
The goats were swollen with wheat,
bass overflowing the banks. Too many
potatoes. Monstrous zucchini. The sheep,
hustling across Wyoming shoulder to shoulder,
became a great blanket fevering the Midwest.
News crews from Florida showed children
paddling helplessly among the oranges,
looking for a place to stand.
We called to the scientists but
they were busy watching as Petri dishes
grew into Petri pools, Petri lakes.
They had no cure for the multiplicative.
We called the firemen but they were
up in trees, tossing down cat after cat.
We called to Jesus and He came
in a set of a thousand, robed and sandaled;
every city got a Jesus and ours stood
on the street corner like Santa Claus,
waving his tin bell. You have been
blessed by plenty, he told us. We begged
for less. We wanted one slice left
in the pan, one measure left in the song.
We wanted the ramen, the penny jar, coupons
cut and saved. Impoverish us, we prayed,
our voices forming a faithful din
so great that no one could decipher it.
JAPANESE WATER BOMB
How she reaches to eat off the man’s plate just
as he says So I’ve been meaning to say this—
How she swerves the fork back to her own bowl,
the way a woman who fails to hail a taxi will act
as if she meant to tuck some hair behind her ear.
How he’s doing this in a cheap tea house.
How he tells her I don’t know how to do this.
End this? How she is wary. No, he says, how
to make space inside this thing without destroying it.
How a Japanese water bomb is thirty-two useless
folds of paper until the maker gives it breath.
How the difference between an igloo and a block
of ice is only the body sheltered beneath it.
How she parses scallions from the pile of salmon
before declaring Tea-cured? It’s fucking raw.
How she leans her head to his shoulder. How he
wants to flinch and doesn’t. How the moment splits,
a mitosis of love and chronology: how he is
her present. How she has become his past.
How a man can’t go about selling a bridge, even if
a bridge is the one good thing he has to sell.
LOVE POEM FOR OXIDATION
You are ascendant valence; you are
reactant loss. You are da Vinci’s aerial screw
lifting up and up, the puny genius
waving from inside like an oblivious
god. The spoon, tarnished.
The tarnation of apple. Antsy Juliet
and the balcony breaking beneath you.
Love, let me count the waves as they wash
over the sump wall, iron loosening to rust,
flaking away. You are the sunburn
where there is no sun, a canary nested
in the ribcage of a miner. All clear, sings
his skeleton. All mine, sings the canary.
Romeo, if you think I am losing it,
of course I am losing it. This is all about
the losing of it, blood ache, a slow
striptease of protein. You are the simplest
mathematics, rounding off to the nearest
dying. Be mine, says the skeleton, flashing
a smile that could seduce flesh from bone.
Sandra Beasley is the author of Made to Explode; Count the Waves; I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize; and Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a disability memoir. She also edited Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Photo by Laker from Pexels.