Cinnamon
Too much will kill you,
the chemist told me,
her pert lips painted nude.
I should have guessed.
Cinnamon, sunshine, love —
even water’s a poison
in too big a dose.
But we still ache
for more than we can handle,
like teenage girls
holding matches between
the anguished-over
lengths of their nails,
finger and thumb, aiming
to drop each smoldering stick
only after the polish —
cherry, caustic, glossy —
starts to curdle and smoke.
* * * * *
I Love Your Teeth
Remember that time I caught a heel
in hotel shag and fell down a flight of stairs?
Out of the dazzling dark I rose into light after light,
the gleam off your teeth — a whole band’s worth
of sheet music, thirty-two freight trains hurtling into town,
pocketful of fun-time pills, heavy floursacks
to hoodwink famine, sailors on parade, Victorian
specimen drawer of catalogued trilobites, shelf
of new notebooks in September, taut laundered sheets
awaiting tourist season, blank checks I could sign my name to,
the pointed picket that guards the yard from which you called me home.