BLOODY MARY
And the poem is a gangster's girl
in the back seat of an American car,
her eyes squinting like a trigger, her hair shot
in blond bullets to her neck.
Let's say we call her Mary, Bloody Mary
and words pour from her mouth like juice from the gut of a tomato
mutilated on a salad plate.
She knows that grammar is a language-cop
and can detect its siren from miles away
with the antennae on her earrings.
The wheels steer her from a question mark
to a period. Soon
she will open the door
and stand on the roadside like a metaphor for
whore.
TR: HENRY ISRAELI
30 SECONDS TO CLIMB THE TIT
We had 30 seconds to climb the tit.
The tit was a hill
at the far end of our boot camp.
The sky's neck above it was ironed behind starched clouds
and, from another vista, its khaki-sand was an image from a nature poem.
But where was poetry and where was nature
when two canteens swung over my crotch,
an Uzi in hand
and a shovel across my spine?
The only thing left to do was stuff our hallucinations with the tits
of the troop secretary who always rode
in the Commander's jeep,
and remember Gaugin's battle over whether to eat a chicken
or to paint it.
There, against the hill, we were starving.
TR: HENRY ISRAELI
SELF-PORTRAIT FROM THE COMMANDO
To commit the perfect crime first you will need a block of ice. A shard
of it will pierce the victim's jugular vein
and fresh blood will melt away the fingerprints.
Thus violence can turn a page of poetry into the neck of a sentry
the moment before your legs hop the barbed wire fence
and dance in the heart of enemy territory.
At age eighteen I chewed nails,
spit rust.
And it was only because of my poor eyesight that I wasn't allowed in the Navy.
The sea was painted in the beautiful recruitment-officer's eyes.
and motor-boats put-putted onto her lips' shores.
She almost said, "get a camera, and take a picture of your life.
If you ever lost it,
at least you'll still have
a copy."
EREZ