c.a. leibow

Still Life

The morning light
finely dresses

the fruit on my table
but the fruit is immature.

too early my grand-
mother would say

if she
were here.

Longing is hard
to the touch,

a pit in the heart.

I steal away with fruit
anyway, mouth longing
for the sweet wet flesh

of sun

I bite into a
“Peach”

—A mealy,tasteless
noun.

Desire difficult to
extinguish.

I follow the brush
strokes of the still

life painted — Nothing
else to do.

I wait around
all day— long-

ing.

2.50 for a Fuck .50 for Hanging Out
“You wear clothes don’t you.” K.B.

Inverted girl

{Beautiful}

She speaks in oblique sentences,
from around corners
in fits and stops and starts.

She fucks like punctuation – all
dashes and exclamation marks!

She fucks like a freeway—
like a plane crash survivor.

My cock contemplates barometric pressure
wrestles tides—

Sleepless,
I write poems about car crashes
and the full moon.

Air Mail

The correspondence she writes is in the shape of a dog.
Fills them with anecdotes of dressers

and the first two years of her life spent in a drawer.
We meet in Zurich over a nightmare –
(sleep under an argument)–

Travel to Berlin where a priest walks between us.
She promises to write.

Here letters are like a leap year. She writes riddles
about the price of post and serious Marian treaties –

only cursorily mentioning the living.
I read her letters like an eating

disorder. I try to decipher the hermetic meaning
of the word Shvod [1] in all the margins.
Her last line reads,

“I must beat the walls it is March…”

[1] Shvod is an Armenian word referring to the guardian
spirits of the home.