are you dreaming, Frederick?

"Under These Circumstances"
When they dig deep for what is considered
the most horrifying adjective,
when they come onto you in the street

when they tell you
(and they will tell you)
that you are a sick cunt
and perverted bitch whose dyke face
they would like to (in so many words)
smash

when they invite you
to suck them off--

it will be important to remember

the night the rain came through the window
and you licked the drops from her shoulder
and they were sweeter than the ripe,
wet pears glowing in the grass

how you woke up longing,
wanting this woman too much;
how she could make you suffer in the dark
whether or not she was there.

Try to recall the way her voice broke
when you touched her just the right way,
how learning to touch her the right way
was all that ever mattered.

Bring back your own nakedness
against her rowdy jeans, her torn
sweatshirt stained red and green,
the way she held your wrists
as you strained to come.

Under these circumstances
it will be an inspiration to recall
her Fuck Off walk, perfected
in cruel streets
and other corridors of ridicule,
all meaningless to you now that you
no longer fear the rain coming through the window:

lick the drops from her shoulder.
--Brenda Brooks


"The Relationship between Lovers and Words"

"Times like these. Someone is writing and we are only words."
--Xai

I. Bergamot
a small tree
there you were beneath it and lifting one arm up,
throwing one arm back,
in a Venetian garden (I think;
the details are unclear now, muted nouns)
and reaching for it, stretching and reaching,
while the strangest nakedness bathed your body,
softened by sunlight.
I thought:
if only I could paint you as you are
in my deepest of dreams,
with sour citrus fruits.

II. Astrolabes
a medieval invention
plotted the course of our stars today; jokingly,
we listen to the fortune teller who says
'You were alchemists in a life past,
but I do not know if you were lovers
or enemies'
as she plotted the course of your hand,
the lines drawn zodiacally
to determine the altitude of the sun.

III. Chrysoprase
an apple-green chalcedony
lay there imagined in the hollow of your neck
where collar-bone met collar-bone,
the smooth white and the gemstone like a beetle
burrowing against you;
like Egypt, your beloved country,
and the distance between us desert after desert,
and the touch of your skin a cool Nile against my skin,
and the flash of your heart like a buried beetle
used as a gemstone.

IV. Marjoram
aromatic plants
each a reminder that I should know how to smell you
how to trace your scent
with my lips, how to touch it
with my breath
how to spread you against me
like a delicacy,
or let you grow without my help,
in a garden I am not the first to imagine
with small bruise-white flowers.

V. Windjammer
a
time ago, a long time ago,
(for you believe in the past lives and inherited lovers,
karmic intervention as opposed to divine intervention,
that I have slept with you before, many times
though we may not sleep with each other
this time around)
we sailed together, you explain, beneath the storm-swirled sky
from Italy to somewhere
(the somewhere did not count;
we drowned the third day)
on a
large sailing ship.

VI. Windlasses
a machine for
every task and every purpose: this is our place,
to design, to machinate,
to mechanize appropriate mechanisms.
And so you too have allowed yourself to be useful,
you have designed this oblique cylinder
and have raised my heart bastioned upon it like
raising weights.

VII. Marten
mammal related to the weasel
I may not be, but still you hunt me,
and each day wear a new piece of me around your neck
with a slender body, bushy tail, soft fur.

VIII. Damoscene
metalwork
in these ancient days:
bowed over books I, transcribing with crying quill,
and you, in the fire of the forges,
dirt upon your cheeks and heat upon your hands.
Somehow despite this I have come to understand
that then you were building me, and I did not know
how intricate the detail,
decorated with patterns of curling inlay.

IX. Estuary
where the sea
is lapping, lapping, lapping,
and you and I are simply napping
my head upon your easy breast,
a storm is brewing in the West.
And one of us is singing, singing
to the water, bringing, bringing,
elsewhere bells are ringing, ringing
the salty water stinging, stinging.
(What comes of this? my lover queried;
time beneath the ocean buried.)
And here our twenty fingers quiver--
twilight comes and
meets the river.

X. Garret
a room
hid us. We were only children.
We were only dirty-faced children.
We were only uninspiring children.
Still, we gathered old coal like buried treasure
and painted our faces black and blacker,
pretended we were chimney sweeps
and with an old broomstick I felt in love with you
thought I forgot not to die three months later
of a cold caught
on the top of the house, typically under a pitched roof.

XI. Haymow
a pile of hay
a clear, cool day--I bring you your dinner,
you eat it slow. Here, we romp and rut
and leave smelling like animals
raised
in a barn.

XII. Belvederes
pavilions or towers on top of a building
where we looked out at the world spread all-ways around us
here there was mist,
there, a rising sunlight and a red sky,
to the left of us the stables,
while to the right of us the hills rolled on and on
like a graveyard. (And, if you followed them long enough,
you would come to the graveyard.)
It is not a clear day, but we can see forever up here,
commanding a wide view.

XIII. Sirocco
a hot
day and an unlucky number. What words you have picked!
you say;
and what fruits you pick as you say it.
Would that we were better with peaches;
still, we are devouring figs.
Such is the landscape. Such is our current predicament.
Almonds, dates, and oil-lamps.
(I will dance for you, I promise,
I will dance for you and when the last veil falls
I will be nothing more than one noun,
your noun.
Such is the fate of man.
Such is the fate of a devoted lover.)
It begins to blow over us all,
this fate,
this
humid southerly wind.
--Jaida Jones