Amy Gerstler

From "Fourteen Sonnets"

6.

a coffee shop marquee taunts: Spaghetti is Immortal!

the waiter sets down your plate

wracked with homesickness

for an America that never existed

a lot of throbbing reported this winter

maple leaves eerily lit

birds asleep in short bursts               

curses ringing in their ears

I was but a child in those years            

voluptuous, haggard, beautiful

taking theraputic baths

moving beyond known fuckeries

disruptions and alibis

dreaming of joining a great flock of comrades

7.

he sketched a map of the kingdom

with no ungentle hand

preached to the wheat

in grainy-voiced waves

ravished captives

and let eagles feed them

per the suggestion of an ascending friend

whose body thrums like a harp

hurled down a well

the funeral was hell

so tell it to me slowly

how a community of hermits

blinks on and off all night like fireflies

hence these tears

8.

if fingers don't work

find other ways to investigate her breasts

slobber on her dress

force the river to say yes

sip her residual fertility at your desk

or in a bootlegger's basement

its windows bereft

of salvage glass

shattered by lightning

as one minor god after another demands

we destroy what we'd loved:

marble, fieldmice and mud

sickass clouds of insect witnesses

and any shred of eternity we had left