My nonarrival in the city of N.
took place on the dot.
You'd been alerted
in my unmailed letter.
You were able not to be there
at the agreed-upon time.
The train pulled up at Platform 3.
A lot of people got out.
My absence joined the throng
as it made its way toward the exit.
Several women rushed
to take my place
in all that rush.
Somebody ran up to one of them.
I didn't know him,
but she recognized him
immediately.
While they kissed
with not our lips,
a suitcase disappeared,
not mine.
The railroad station in the city of N.
passed its exam
in objective existence
with flying colors.
The whole remained in place.
Particulars scurried
along the designated tracks.
Even a rendezvous
took place as planned.
Beyond the reach
of our presence.
In the paradise lost
of probability.
Somewhere else.
Somewhere else.
How these little words ring.

She is standing on my lids

And her hair is in my hair

She has the color of my eye

She has the body of my hand

In my shade she is engulfed

As a stone against the sky

She will never close her eyes

And she does not let me sleep

And her dreams in the bright day

Make the suns evaporate

And me laugh cry and laugh

Speak when I have nothing to say

Criminal, you took a great piece of my life,
And you took it under false pretenses,
That piece of time
— In the clear muscles of my brain
I have the lens and jug of it!
Books, thoughts, meals, days, and houses,
Half Europe, spent like a coarse banknote,
You took it — leaving mud and cabbage stumps.

And, Criminal, I damn you for it (very softly).
My spirit broke her fast on you. And, Turk,
You fed her with the breath of your neck
— In my brain’s clear retina
I have the stolen love behavior.
Your heart, greedy and tepid, brothel-meat,
Gulped it, like a flunky with erotica.
And very softly, Criminal, I damn you for it.

Rosemary Tonks

by Daphne Gottlieb

You told me you like my mouth.
You want to kiss me.
My mouth is a wound and you
want to kiss me.
But you’re like
that: You want to go
leaping over cliffs—
you want to go
drinking poison
and then write pretty poems about it—
and all I want to do is
fuck you.
You want flowers and sonnets and us
to be together until the end of the world and I’d
just like a blow job, I’d just like
to be friends.
that’s what I’d really like.
Something warm and snuggly like a friendship.
and to fuck you.
The flowers are going to die and the cliffs are
going to erode and we might as well go fuck
since we’re going to anyway.
We’ll fuck and fight and eat and drink and smoke and fuck and smoke and fuck and
get married
And in six months from now
we’ll stop making the world stop
to fuck each other
and one year from now
I’ll get fat and you’ll go bald and
I’ll take prozac and you’ll take viagra
I’ll get obsessed with my biological clock
and my career
and you’ll get obsessed with your hairline
and your career
and two years from now
you’d rather watch reruns than fuck me
and I’d rather be drinking than fuck you
so we’ll drink in separate bars and one night
someone who likes my mouth will buy me a drink
that drink will be attached to a hand
there will be a human holding that drink
the kind with ears
and I will tell whoever it is
all about you
and how we used to forget to eat when we were in bed for three days
and your ears will be burning across town
where you are telling whoever it is how I don’t understand you
and two years from now, that girl with that drink
she will nod that yes that I am nodding at you tonight
that nod, that yes that means you’re not coming home
because just for a second the world has gone away
because just for a second there’s someone who understands you
and that night it will be her pretty mouth you want
and that night I will pass out at home, alone
with a bottle that reminds me of us
because it’ll be empty
because it’ll be gone
I will pass out waiting for you
to come
home
listening to country music—and I hate
country music—
but I’ll be feeling tragic
it’ll be the most romantic moment
I’ve ever had and
I’ll be alone
and you’ll be across town
with that girl who right now is in high school
and right now I just met you
and right now I think you should take me home and fuck me
because it only gets uglier from here
we only get uglier from here
so take me to the edge of that cliff you love
and pour me a shot of your silky poison
you can take this mouth
this wound you want
but you can’t kiss
and make it
better.

from a new short story.

Crabshells: Shoes
Barking Irons : Guns. Pistols, esp. Revolvers.
Dollymop: A prostitute, often an amateur or a part-time street girl; a midinette.
Flying the Blue Pidgeon: Stealing roof lead.
Whistle and Flute: Suit
Bit Faker: A coiner. A counterfeiter of coins.
Buck Cabbie: A dishonest cab driver
Haymarket Hector: Pimp, ponce or whore’s minder; especially around the areas of Haymarket and Leicester Squares.
Newgate Knockers: Heavily greased side whiskers curling back to, or over the ears
Rasher-wagon: Frying pan

Some women love
to wait
for life for a ring
in the June light for a touch
of the sun to heal them for another
woman’s voice to make them whole
to untie their hands
put words in their mouths
form to their passages sound
to their screams for some other sleeper
to remember their future their past.
Some women wait for the right
train in the wrong station
in the alleys of morning
for the noon to holler
the night come down.
Some women wait for love
to rise up
the child of their promise
to gather from earth
what they do not plant
to claim pain for labor
to become
the tip of an arrow to aim
at the heart of now
but it never stays.

Some women wait for visions
that do not return
where they were not welcome
naked
for invitations to places
they always wanted
to visit
to be repeated.
Some women wait for themselves
around the next corner
and call the empty spot peace
but the opposite of living
is only not living
and the stars do not care.
Some women wait for something
to change and nothing
does change
so they change
themselves.

I am not jealous
of what came before me.

Come with a man
on your shoulders,
come with a hundred men in your hair,
come with a thousand men between your breasts and your feet,
come like a river
full of drowned men
which flows down to the wild sea,
to the eternal surf, to Time!

Bring them all
to where I am waiting for you;
we shall always be alone,
we shall always be you and I
alone on earth
to start our life!

I close my eyes and see
a seagull in the desert
high, against unbearably blue sky.

There is hope in the past.

I’m writing to you
all the time, I am writing

with both hands,
day and night.

Theodore I. Rubin