New Plants
She bathes in hibiscus cuttings: I drink young wine from the cellar.
I rub soap bars along her back; the air picks up suds like sawdust.
I am chopping down a tree and I am cleaning her, already clean.
Remember all the times he did that, she says.
I remember all the times you told me, I reply.
Her mother tossed a wedding ring in France, blood dotted
and smeared along walls with enough style to be Seurat or Signac,
chocolate medallions and flowers cut at the stems, European
vacations paid with cash, Egyptian cotton like dollar store ornaments,
too normal for psychiatrists and too smart for therapists.
An awful man with money tells you much about love.
How an awful poet will tell you much about how
and nothing of the art, as if it were all things exchanged with things.
I wash my hands with her bath water and remember
eleven years old dunking my fists in gasoline
and how my knuckles are still dry.
She presses her lips against my ear
and asks if I hear her heartbeat
I want to say no meaning in that artful way
crawl between my organs so I can finally know
where the soul resides
and the music plays.
I knew love in the way ripe eggs of sturgeons
and the gonads of sea urchins are delicacies:
wanting it to last a lifetime
but needing to kill it
and all their children.
Transplant Rejection
There is a map fading into water,
all the empty space and names
dissolving to ink and dissolving
once more. There is no spot
where a girl was five days alone
picking up smashed bricks
like petals to roses. Not the hole
her mother was tossed into.
It will take time understanding wounds
heal and pain retreats to the soul
not from infection, but the surgery
colliding cut stems and cut buds:
and like the wrong organ
there will be failure,
as the tissue remembers
what the suture denies.
As doors close she hears
noises in the correct order:
they are lesser than pages,
wholly disinterested in rhetoric
that explains before it feels:
workshopping a poem,
the jaded professor
says she has a talent
for poetry
and should not listen
when the class speaks.
A Time to Talk
A documentary is playing on the TV,
the bomb bay opens and Fat Man
falls towards Nagasaki, the national
anthem black and white static flicks
to a military parade in DC.
I brought home
the selected poems of Robert Frost
from the scholastic faire,
my father remarks they dropped leaflets
and that everyone had a chance to leave.
I shrug and dollop peanut butter
and jam between thick slices of bread,
he says it is important to learn
about your history
many American men died
storming Iwo Jima.
My white friend who lives
down a block also named Brandon
knocks on the front door
“Is that your Japanese friend?” I hear
from another kid behind him.
“Shut up or else I’ll hit you” he replies
clinking our baseball bats.
Wicker Man
It was after it all-
I ended up alone.
In the zenith of loneliness
absurdity cannot be ignored.
The voices were honest
as sweat under the sun.
Love is love until it is over-
I have seen soulmates
become strangers as different
sounds leave the same window.
It was after it all-
around sticks and ferns
my childhood mingling alone
adulthood caught me in reflections
through dust I emerged lampless
or had I been playing a different game-
finally, shadows entered
and showed the dryness in rain.
I see now: the pagan cat wide-eyed
prints paws on white sycamore:
I ended up alone
pulling linen off the boy.
The Ferns
There is a fern sopping
along water
something bubbles below
then becomes still
as a man wades
over poisonous things
and the ochre felt
it first from below
the reptiles curled
spiders hung
still as toads
while he sat at the slope
the ferns sank
the lake was sundown
bubbling in the center
and he wondered
why the lemongrass
was not always
this fragrant
lying slumped
a few moments later
the orchestra returned
loud as ever.
Brandon Shane is a poet and horticulturist, born in Yokosuka, Japan. You can see his work in Rattle, trampset, Variant Lit, The Chiron Review, Stone Circle Review, IceFloe Press, The Marrow Poetry, One Art Poetry, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, among others. He graduated from Cal State Long Beach with a degree in English. Find him on Twitter @HalfTheLobster
