the world’s number one prison pen pal

the world’s number one prison pen pal
is hard at work typing on the laptop with the broken ‘e’
wearing silver stirrup pants and crystals and Vicks vapors
and talking shit about love with a barmy mouthful
of health food and NPR is on and this person
spends all day writing letters to the forgotten men
and women of the busted justice system

the world’s number one prison pen pal
also teaches literacy on Thursday nights
and then once in a while the world’s most
number one prison pen pal writes a poem

it’s a hard day’s job because there are 16,000
Lonelyhearts and that’s just one penitentiary
but the world’s number one prison pen pal has enough
love for every one, only all the envelope licking
and stamp sticking and paper cuts and lazy eye
is making production supply to the slammer slow

but it’s all worth it when an inmate sends a
mall machine snapshot of themselves with braces
and dated hair with a note and a baseball card and
a big wad of baseball card bubble gum
and then no one is alone with the stupid summer
camp sandwiches or broken teeth or
make outs or plain brown shoes with rainbow laces

I envy the world’s number one prison pen pal
I even wish she’d write to me

honeypot of a library book

my Bukowski book is a
man magnet
for flocculent married
middle-aged chick repellers
baking tragic bellies
in the fizzy hot tub
filling up with hair
it’s okay reading
this cocky fuck cause
he cracks me up enough
but the flies on my honeypot
of a library book are buzzing
too close up my bathing suit
begging me to rot on the same
page, so in the sauna,
like the girl Jesus I was
come on to become,
charity bred and burnt into my
blood, I read a poem out loud,
laughing so hearty from the throat,
throwing out bread crumbs
to spa pigeons, ladling out
the gruel of good words
in the soup kitchen of flesh
while we sweat and sweat
then the men leave feeling the best
and I try to read the next, but
the page is too wet

obligatory landscape poem for the man who didn’t like the subject of love

branches in the shape of ghostwriter
wrists, playing only the white keys
on a cobwebby hammond organ
twilighted by dim headlights
that honeycomb the mist
a silent film in which
snowflake rice a roni rains
on the faces of skid row angels
who die pale and unkissed
smushed into tire track graves
like flattened angelfood cakes

compact cars cheeseburgered
by snow slices, silent night
for honeymoon hotels and piano bars
I breathe alone in clean alone air
just petting the land with a mitten
this sweet white no man’s land
powdered snow sugar
sweetening my soft coffee hair
for this wonderbread wonderland
I praise the lady winter with
kind little winks through wet lace

3 haikus on father’s day

santa clause construct
drinking on the job
a hand in the cookie jar

six foot track star
scotch worms for brains
suiciding every day

fragmented prism man
broken like a bottle
indifferent, negligible, over

Voyeur

We were in Central Park.
I was bleeding from my nose for no known reason.
It was all over my hands like exploding grape juice.

They called ‘Red Rover Come Over’
and the Italian and Dutch boys from that private afternoon
in the flesh were running past me with the flag,
taunting me, their pale legs brushing my party dress
just minutes after we were kissing
in a pile of Jamaica leaves.
The older man was watching us from the bushes,
naked with a crown of holly berries,
unable to touch us
except with his sad shellacked eyes,
the years of raping himself
congealed into gumball teeth in a row
that cursed us as he pissed on the innocent clover,
saying, “This is all you’ll ever know.
This is all you’ll ever know.”

by Jill James