“for Susan Musgrave”, “Prom Dress”, “mimesis”, “pain threshold”, and “performance art”
By Art Moore
for Susan Musgrave
free verse for felons,
his girlfriend, a handgun
poet who answered
hotel room doors
barely dressed, bare
breasted, shoulder
holster, checkered
walnut handle
the .357 caressing
the nipple
your lines were songs
I drank, youthfully
awake, aware of the
possibility of living
as a writer, trespassing
into another life.
_____________________________________________
Prom Dress
Lisa was an addict. To everything.
Late shifts as a shooter girl, amplified
tips that transubstantiated to opioids;
she’d scare-up on coke, ascend the ladder
then slide the long snake down
with Percs and Oxys,
take whatever pills were masquerading
as the gospel.
Overdose, heart attack, and then brain dead:
Sunday’s Eucharistic cannibals gave
her a baptism before unplugging life support.
There was a lump in my throat the size of Jesus
at the funeral, where she lay
in her prom dress.
_____________________________________________
mimesis
sleepy plywood eyelids
of frowning row houses.
A peal of church bells plays The Westminster—
La di da-da, La di da-da.
There she is again, a soup-spill,
cigarette-ash psoriasis,
carries that naked doll,
her plastic effigy, an albatross;
Child Protective Services peeled her fingers
off the doorframe decades ago.
Stovetop ball-hat corner boys, dial-a-dopers,
fentanyl werewolves, hair-trigger star, pit bull terriers.
A kid in my wife’s class says, “Momma works
on Waterloo Street,”
her emaciated legs have the best veins
for shooting-up,
barefoot in cowboy boots, Johns order her to shower
before they start.
These leaning houses need cleaning ladies;
the city’s priority tenements are distortion mirrors,
blinds pulled on shuttered lives, Christ,
must mean more than Sunday tithes.
_____________________________________________
pain threshold
Inspired by Zach Well’s boxes
protest for longer
in the searing fear of tear gas
canisters, as skirmish lines
get rougher,
for longer than they will,
I will,
suffer.
I can suffer slow death,
months of lassitude,
linen changes,
scores of bedsores,
the rat stench of betrayal
as her body died.
Drink ferric mouthfuls
of failure, abide the endless
attrition of a pandemic,
managing the growing horror,
solitary on the teeter totter,
the milk of truth has turned sour
across the border.
Without sleep for days,
chained forward in dark caves,
downwind from mass graves,
face punched, pommeled,
kicked like a rotten stump,
stagger up— stagger on,
ragged, ripped kneed, laughing
at the taste of my blood.
I can swallow fear,
cross a valley of dry bones
tripping over despair
in broken ruins,
through bombed cityscape,
listening to sinister whispers
from shadow men.
That I can suffer, endlessly,
is what makes me tougher.
_____________________________________________
performance art
tailpipes
dripping gonorrhea,
three paddy wagons
lined up like grave markers,
someone sitting curbside,
handcuffed,
so I ate our mushrooms.
cellophane tied in a knot,
swallowed that too.
spinning watch hands,
felt my body thermostat
spike.
drug dogs grinned.
I winked back.
through their checkpoint,
found a watermelon stand,
my head, now on fire;
used a flick knife to make
a helmet,
gouged out handfuls;
tender pink flesh,
wore it.
giant hogweed rose from
the ditches like
Day of the Triffids,
a caliphate of cow parsnip,
swarming honeybees
and hornets
arrived to worship,
a misunderstanding,
they came in waves
of confusion, panic,
suicide attackers
en masse.
my face became
a Picasso.
_____________________________________________
About the Author
Gerald Arthur Moore is an adventurer, a part-time university lecturer, a high school teacher, and a rugby coach living in New Brunswick, Canada. NON-Publishing released his first book of poetry Shatter the Glass, Shards of Flame in 2018. He received the PubHouse Books Chapbook
prize in 2019 for Trigger Fingers.
