Poems
by KJ Hannah Greenberg

 

 

Emptying the Audio Trash Box

 

Sometime after the excursion, when the expatiated lady needed language

To allay copious followers, she shooed her offspring to another clime.

Her kids gawped, mesmerized by the provincial elision’s fricatives.

 

Typically maternal, she sought a soft landing subsequent to chucking

Hometown dialect. When natives posited the desirability of quiet,

She countered, claiming obsequious others orbit calm spaces.

 

Forward-thinking, thereafter, she smoothed a route toward local hoydens,

She’d realized neighborhood intellects focused on numerical fire drills,

Aeonic or otherwise enigmatic quasars, antagonists, but not comets.

 

Resident leaders, too, fled from thunderbolts, failed to embrace cicadas,

Turned their backs on volcanoes, tried to dampen the sound of rockets,

Overall, aborted any decibels beyond silence.

 

So the gal asked her seneschals to record aimless acts of depredation,

Unproductive loving of slipstream fiction, odd albatrosses, candors,

Thermal cloth’s limited protection against copyright infringement.

 

Summarily, having observed too many counterparts to casuistry, ample

Odd persons living in quaint garrets, ersatz bedsits, castoff dumpsters,

Asp-laden, Cleopatra-like, she and her scion vamoosed.

 

 

 

 

 

Burnt Roast

 

Yesterday, before: smoke alarms sounded, the neighbors frenzied

At the firemen’s arrival, the dog got sick from smoke, I weighed

Whether or not we haver when straining to resolve marital strife

(As karsts formed by dissolvable rocks, all dolomite, not granite).

 

No matter legal jurisdiction’s agency, virtually all prompted dialectic,

On “Truth,” elsewise, on the meaning of “family,” resembles sundry

Longitudinal limits—parenting leaves asunder demarcations of need

‘til we rethink talk, in general, or, specifically, spawn fresh chances.

 

Allowing the limitations of over-crisped beef, also of bald questions,

Preliminary arguments, found in “bodies of scholarship,” ostensibly,

Merely raise kindred issues, simply attach coruscations to discourse.

On the other hand, great numbers of cachinnators couldn’t care less.

 

People laughing loudly and immoderately about swaths of genius art,

Can’t quantify, otherwise measure virtuosity, or even graphic novels.

Such folks remain distinct by historical standards, failing to contribute

Since their interpersonal hyphae do nothing, really, to connect publics. 

 

Rather, their words remain unctuous and their status stays stagnate.

(In life’s important districts, crowing’s consistent with agelasts, not

Jokers.) Plus, in the marital realm, where prejudices about “liberal,”

“Conservative” successfully negate, “feminist actions,” are valued.

 

Overcooked meat aside, it doesn’t matter if perspectives are “risible,”

Or, if stealthy aphorisms negate sapience backing ultraviolet-colored

Coryzas, gold-dusted pimples. Boundaries’ humble acknowledgement

Creates self-reference, bridging loved ones greatly needed isthmuses.

 

 

 

 

 

Cardsharper

 

Card sharks, cheaters in violet fedoras, peppered

With good luck charms, cigar ash, random coins,

Perhaps mendicant men, or women whose thighs,

Busts marshal “donations” to their tables’ pockets.

 

Gender’s rarely relevant to mountebanks, to lovers

Of chemin de fer or poker. Rather, charlatans adore

Easy pickings among military folk, tourists, maybe,

Equally, local residents dumb enough to play along.

 

Tricksters, ostensibly, Monsanto Food brands and

Citizen victimizers, infamous living chrysophiles,

Edit many salacious maidens, aroused by danger,

Eyes permanently lambent from prompted dreams.

 

If dido-loving twats could fall asleep for centuries,

In rose bowers, sip potages thick with hypochlorite,

Dance with undines, walk on railroad tracks, choke,

Bungee jump from some relay towers, we’d be fine.

 

Unfortunately, “criminal” is as integral to goings-on

As precipitation is to every single unforgiving clime.

Grasp, piano wire’s still less a solution than: posies,

Song birds, the birth of kittens, rejoicing modestly.

 

 

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