LITMIR.BIZ

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being nothing

      but noise without a pause.

      The hand

      envies the hangnail

      which harms

      without intent.

      Prayer for Paternal Love

      All eight fingers on his right hand refuse

      to be a blessing

      so that even at the dinner table

      he cannot pinch salt from the crowding

      of his digits.

      Days after he was born,

      Only dogs,

      his father had said,

      could ignore them.

      Eight splayed fingers on the back

      yard stump, knuckles

      around the wrist,

      Hold still, his dad says.

      The boy prays the octopus

      of his hand contains

      a secret.

      Bouyancy

      like silt that can storm

      then settle, given time.

      He has loved his father

      less than either of them

      would wish.

      Now give it here,

      his father says, and the boy

      to prove the point

      reaches for their axe.

      Prayer for Happiness

      When your father dies and leaves you

      more money than you anticipated

      can you admit there is not in his death

      some fickle breeze of how easy it is

      to embrace happiness?

      Liquid,

      hard to hold, happiness is an acid

      not long contained, it leaks

      through any trap. Assumes

      any shape:

      Happiness comes to the hand

      holding the knife that slits the throat.

      Happiness in the eye of the kiddie

      porn find online.

      Relief is bedfellows with happiness

      when the car crash fells someone

      else’s daughter, when cancer

      takes down a killer who we breezily

      forget is loved by family.

      Each time we celebrate

      the downfall of a dictator

      we drag happiness through our muck

      by its collar so that happiness

      will not recognize itself.

      Prayer for a Wig

      in memory of Elise Partridge

      In the untidy storage room before a reading,

      she touched a small hand to her cancer wig with a laugh

      at its benefits. Like, my hair is always done;

       no more expensive cuts!

      The irony had an echo, how the more

      people you love the more bad news is had.

      She smiled. We smiled. I described a drag mullet—

      a dear friend’s wig re-gifted, that she’d been given

      with cancer at sixteen (what luck to be born

      to outlive experimental treatments)

      —that I admitted was a joy to wear. Proof

      my dear friend lived.

      Prayer for Promiscuity

      Midnight in Stanley Park,

      the moon is an ally. Night

      breathes a chill into firs.

      Men double as tree trunks,

      appear a darker dark.

      Within, your ears are readied eyes,

      sift animal sounds from human,

      some differences of intent.

      The dark will always see better.

      As though it hides our lovers

      like the dead, dead before we met,

      the night teaches us to miss

      what we never had.

      Across Lost Lagoon, the apartment

      complexes rise, pixelated

      a horizon lonelier than childhood.

      If we’d been children together, perhaps

      we could have saved each other.

      When they lift from the shadows of trees

      what do your palms reach for?

      Have you noticed your fingertips,

      bark peppering the skin? I could lick them

      clean as silence if they rested here

      and here awhile.

      Prayer for Humility

      Here is my father’s leg

      in the incinerator, freed

      from the routine of glass

      sharps, his poor sad dick

      cathetered when Carmen,

      the Phillipina nurse without

      a wedding ring, arrives

      for wound care.

      Prayer for Optimism

      my

      nails mooned

      with filth the

      last three men salting

      my breath I walk further

      the woods dark & owning a

      power I don’t trust the alchemical dark

      transforms us men young handsome as dreams scrubbed

      clean by moonlight we are sick with some kind

      of optimism every man potential nails mooned with filth four

      men salting my breath I walk further the dark woods owning

      Prayer for Gender

      A teacher instructs the students

      to draw their future selves.

      One child draws the outline of a body

      he is not going to be.

      Watch how easily his hand transforms

      the page. A dress where there was no dress.

      Heels where none had been before.

      He senses the future is something more

      than black ink, white paper.

      He draws another line, marking time.

      Dreams of Friends and Family

      I Dream of Good Management

      I’m

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