Five Poems by Damon Hubbs

 

Iceland (ii)

 

 a triolet

 

as if chess & chocolate cake wasn’t enough to cause bad dreams

in the dream Bobby Fischer blunders elf rocks at the puffins,

sky coloured in the luminosity of Harpa’s glass-walled screams

as if chess & chocolate cake wasn’t enough to cause bad dreams

black houses of hanging rock, red planet doors agleam

the tallowed wind, killed twice in the Faroes, tastes of lichens

as if chess & chocolate cake wasn’t enough to cause bad dreams

in the dream Bobby Fischer blunders elf rocks at the puffins

 

Briar Rose

 

the Gen-X sleeping beauty

woke with no chance

of circling back

 

her skin was intensely itchy, and she felt—

watching clouds briar the sky

like Jean-Paul Marat

 

lying dead in the bathtub,

her quill and inkwell 

entombed in tannic puckered hands

 

as stakeholders of low-hanging fruit

skipped stones unspindled

from Empress plums

 

Pretty Mouths

 

the adults are talking, pretty mouths

what’s the time, Mr. Wolf?

the distant din of backyard games

 

goes on and on and the sun’s red-gold

snout sniffs the surface of pretty ponds

darkening hills, blades of blue eyed grass

 

the adults are talking, on and on

the clock counting one, two, three past lunch

until the seed head is blown away

 

us, in the distant din of backyard games

stepping like apples and pears, tic tac

signals bookmaking our countdown

 

to the dark—

what are they playing at

those adults with wolfish mouths?

 

Hutch

 

plink,

plink

plink

 

it’s the rain

 

not a blaze orange

vest man pulling delicate

watercolour from my fur.

 

I’m ear boxed

in this squatter’s doorway,

droppings sweat the floor

 

and my stomach

is filled with balls

of hair.

 

straw girl, straw girl

you adored me, grew bored

of me, neglected

 

me near the root

of a fir tree with no place

to stretch and unbox

 

but the sight

of pink and purple petunias

chinning the old stone wall

 

is a reminder

of Aphrodite’s gift

so I wait for the leader

 

of the Wild Hunt

and a procession of hares

bearing torches

 

to flick

and flitter the straw girl

from her hutch

Sprezzatura! and the Birds of Paradise

 

I wear my wristwatch over my shirt cuff

and my back tie blade longer than my front

when I visit the actress at the community theatre.

I am drowned, I am drowned

 

she says, and I can’t tell if she’s misquoting Shakespeare

or making it sound like she’s misquoting Shakespeare—

her tongue unbuttoned and feigning no effort at all.

She says, honeybear, everything that went wrong in the rehearsal room

 

made its way to the stage. And when I tell her

I didn’t live up to my Dad’s expectations of being involved in sports

she says, that’s your drowned look talking; 

it’s your eyes flashing like off-the-rack jackets

 

pupils rolling like unlocked sets across the rickety stage of your face.

She’s romantic, the actress at the community theatre.

I brought her roses and a parakeet on opening night

and we’ve been lovebirds since her turn as Arkadina in The Seagull.

 

The Figurehead Chair points to the tie dangling

like a single arrow over my crotch and says, sprezzatura! Bravo.

He dreams of having an apartment on Plympton Street

and winning the Boylston Prize for Rhetoric

 

although our love was imperfectly perfect, the dagger comes quick.

The actress at the community theatre leads with a smile

when the Charming Sociopath shows up on a drizzly day

in May, umbrellaless and drowned deeper than a duck

and sings a love song about baking her into a pie

Damon Hubbs: film & art lover / pie bird collector / author of the chapbook "The Day Sharks Walk on Land" (Alien Buddha Press). When not chapbooking about walking sharks, Damon writes poems about 1970s heavy metal, girls who cry at airports, and swimming pools the color of Italian liquors. Recent work featured in Fixator Press, The Beatnik Cowboy and Apocalypse Confidential. @damon_hubbs