my parents were alive
my mother disoriented
my father bewildered
by my mother
and i brought
the food from
Boston Market
i promised
one more year
no strokes
no heart attacks
and i will make the turkey
today i make turkey
for myself
and my pets
i miss my parents
and 2007
when anything was still possible
klf
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scrubbing of the brain
scraping off of last week’s crap
fresh head for new week
klf
they’re out of egg nog
no holiday drinks tonight
the hipsters are sad
klf
off year election
they want their government back
tea bags in the sink
klf
tony
so many of those little black
dresses came to your funeral
i don’t think they’d known death
in this way before
i thought about
how many of those cocktail dresses
you must have pillaged
and i couldn’t remember
if it was three
or only two women
whom you’d gotten pregnant
within a few months –
of all the young men
driving their jeeps
through the nineties
you were the most
LIVE
rocking back and kicking
both feet against the constraints
of this world –
this priest has no conviction
in the dry gravel of his voice
and i have trouble
believing
that you’re folded in the great mother’s wings
until your father tells us
that he asked for a sign
and on the bridge
he found the laminated picture
of the saint who watches over departed souls –
tony
i can’t imagine
you in heaven
where all the spirits
are quiet and well-behaved
i don’t know
where someone who is two hundred
percent alive
goes
when they leave this place;
maybe you’re on your way back
right now
slipping inside the body forming
of a wild colt
getting ready to kick back up
onto your feet again
wendy shaffer
when i was in graduate school, i taught
the short story. once, while my best student
and i were drinking at howard’s, a bar
downtown, i told him that ‘who’s afraid
of virginia woolf’ was originally
written about homosexuals.
after that, he raised his hand at the
beginning of each class, entertaining
us with some bogus homosexual
fact. when he told us that bartleby
was a homosexual, i said,
“class, the reason john is giving us
all these homosexual facts
is because I am a homosexual.”
that shut him up. after that class, all
the students that had sat up front with their hands
in the air, participating the fuck
out of every story, moved to the back
and never spoke again. and all the silent
malcontents who’d sat in the back doodling
moved to the front and began to talk.
that’s when i decided that i was better
at being a waitress than a teacher.
wendy shaffer
when jesus comes again
she’ll come with gonads
and breasts
she’ll have a tail
in the middle of her back
and will never remove
her shirt in the company
of human beings
her skin will be rich
deep luminous chocolate
that her earth father will love
too strongly
that her earth mother
will spurn
when jesus comes again
she’ll be a bus driver
the chosen people will pull themselves up
onto her bus with chafed palms
and aching feet,
their hamburger weight jiggling to work
beside small round-faced girls with beaded braids
swinging their legs and pressing
their noses against shiny poles
when jesus comes again
she’ll drive to atlantic city
and walk along the night beach in lingerie
no one will see
jesus will know the love
of the dolphins and the city rats
she’ll talk to the pigeons
and bless their struttings
with day old bread
she’ll pray to the saints of masturbation
and she will never desire
to duplicate herself
when the trumpets come
blaring their wide mouths from the clouds
jesus will sigh and step
out of her flesh
the way a beautiful woman lets
a robe fall from her shoulders
as she steps up to the jacuzzi
jesus was not meant for this world
of dolts and assholes
and she never will be
wendy shaffer
latin tyrant sleeps in his christmas recliner
where the baddayatwork no longer punishes
his brood multiplied on the wrapping paper floor
gabriella’s ancient elfin spirit smiles
mischief from green pez lips
she dances as her mother sings
she dances to the chiming clock
oldsoul laughing in her queensized childbody
dancing sparkling red shoes,
the women in the room chant
there’s no place like home
there’s no place like home
every pagan blizzard of toys
it’s the grand mother whose warmth opens
the room into love where adolescent cousins
practice care on babies growing into white shirt & ties
the awkward plaid school pretending mommy evolves
plump with the promise of lipstick sex
the promise of more babies
more barbie doll holidays
spawned from old tyrant seed
engendered in the flesh welcoming
ubiquitous warmth
of the traditional powerless woman
her only strength is love
her only strength is love
it heats up this christmas
as midnight mass bells ring hell’s flaking squall into town
wendy shaffer
i see your hand on the counter
beside me and i know i can’t touch
your hand i only allow my eyes
to linger moments on your fingers, soft
and white, the shape
of my thwarted longing
i look into your eyes
the irises rimmed in black
i sink into the amber
where i don’t want to be
losing myself
and then i talk
i don’t want to want you
if you don’t want me
i don’t want to listen for your
yes like a flat white stone
dropping into the silence
i don’t want to luxuriate
in the ripples around your simple
yes for me yes affirming everything that is
or lean back into the nothing
as it all slides by i don’t
want
and then the phone rings
it’s your voice
your voice with no presumption
or expectation i can’t
say no
just follow
the places your voice leads
i don’t know what
this is i don’t call
it love
wendy shaffer
