3 Poems

 

  by Jane Adam

 

 

 

 

 

BLOSSOM

 

 

Blossom, I serve a mouth

Buzzing

 

Picture me, on a Monday

Discharging my lazy, ill-defined duties at

 

My imaginary desk, dim pleasure

Beckoning in pink strapless formal,

Disheveled boy with his

 

Rake coming behind me

Road restless

 

Shiny door, already blistered and sap-sticky, now

Roused, swings itself

closed.

 

I’ll have to stay

to one side of

Whatever really happens

 

 

 

 

 

 

AFTER BACON

  (why I am not a painter)

 

 

you made me cry, Beauty

but

you can’t make me

stay

pretending

you

are all there is.

I smell rain

grey

a breeze to blow everything away

a growling belly

all around the quick little

movements of birds.

 

 

Even if I strip the bark from the peaceful pine tree

Splatter and whiten the shady park bench

I can’t sit. 

 

I can’t make you.

 

I find (or someone

throws me) a paper ladder

A windswept moor wrapped in plastic

A wiped expressive face

Dripping neat verticals

Screaming mouth discreet

as pulled shades try to be

 

I try to be

 

Beauty:

scratch scratch aluminum

claws meet screen door

a little sunset comes in

charcoal, flames, fat meat

hungry

For this light angle, this time of day I love

I love a lot of things

But they are safe.  Safer.  Now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

SUNLIT HOUR

 

 

Dinosaur ribs branches

Grass nestled      long grass

A page or 2 pretend you’re stealing

Quick    quick      pretend

Harvest here he comes

Yellow bucket soap on wheels

Soap that’s it I’ll get some

Tweet tweet tweet

Creak creak creak tree limbs

Pretend you are stealing

Time,       all of it

(just need to

Be using it all the time)

 

It’s

Squeezing something in

a tube or dough or

you squeeze      it      here it

swells       somewhere else like

weakness of       a water hose, inner tube

what do I make that I squeeze with my hands?

Meatloaf.  Balloon animals.

it’s between the l’s you must squeeze.

 

To watch the sunlit hour pass      I

Must squint my eyes.

The gods can’t do anything finer,   Ezra,

 

What would death be then?

I don’t know.

the swelling somewhere else.

Dividing syllables in first grade.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jane Adam teaches English composition at the University at Buffalo.  Her poems have appeared in Shampoo, the-hold, Slipstream, in the Buffalo Vortex series and in E·ratio issue six.