Poetry: Selections from M.P. Powers

the cemetery in my hometown                

broken little stones poking

out of the lawn

no flowers

for friends

no trees in the place

the tombs here are gorgon's teeth

their epitaphs

rubbed clean

long yellow weeds chafing their sides

 

the landscapers 

here don't bother cutting the weeds

with weedwhackers

if they can't reach them

with their riding mowers fuck it

why bother

it’s not like the dead care 

they’re dead

even mud

is more animate than them

 

besides no

visitors ever come

to visit them anymore

they’ve been lying with the chinch bugs

in the mud

so long no one remembers

no one gives a damn

the world has moved on

 

from whatever 

they were whatever they left

 

what were they anyway

but shadows cast by some moonlit vine

the wind chasing its tail

all of us

everyone

the same at last.

Love Unmaking

I know every part of her body now 

and I know what not to touch.

Her shoulders are off limits. 

And she doesn't necessarily like her breasts or nipples 

being touched.

I never touch her when she's sleeping 

as she is right now. We made love earlier 

tonight, but I'm not supposed to call it that.

I'm supposed to say we had sex or we fucked. 

Those are the acceptable terms.

There was nothing loving about it. 

But I love the love in lovemaking,

I can't help it. 

Love for me is the soul in sex and the truth beneath

the feeling and right now 

I can hear her breathing 

in the heavy animal darkness. She moves

her leg under the soft covers so her toes touch mine. 

She runs them up and down the topside

of my foot. She must be dreaming. 

This is as intimate as it gets.

Vincent

The Garden

 

yesterday I was a suicide

a queen a dolphin a flower a man

trampled by runaway horses

today I don’t know what I am

lying under this still cloud in green

elfin silence lilacs and roses

for a bed a tree a peach tree

the world-tree amorous nectarbearing

and sprouting from my belly

yesterday I had a name today

I’m not so sure

 

Perambulation

 

wandering in a daze

through snow and half-light

the streets murky the steam trains

asleep brazen dogs of winter

cold wandering through doorways

through empty spaces acquiring

memories from objects I don’t know

what I’m doing out here wandering

yesterday I was a girl with unicorn

dreams today I am slushy

water rushing through underworld

pipes

 

Atelier

 

I have discovered my love

finally finally I have discovered it

I have discovered my passion

in emeraldgreen ochre yellow ultramarine

these petals of golden stillness

tree sky water mud I have discovered

my love and will die for it I will die

somewhere high up in the music

I will die right here in the quivering

light of this burning tripod

I will die and the world will watch

 

Cemetery

 

Lying in the cool green garden

silences lying with coral

for bones my liver devoured

by crows yesterday I was a painter

of silence and cypress trees

of sunflowers green rivers

flowing over white

rocks yesterday I painted today

I paint the empty spaces

CW: Toes                

at the poetry

reading the poets

fashionably dressed with their fashionable

opinions and faces as soft and pink as a baby’s butt

prefaced their poems

with trigger warnings about bodily fluids

self-harm death even insects

the poets warned the audience about and after

the poetry reading I walked to the U-Bahn

station and there I saw a beggar from war-torn

Syria sitting on the concrete floor

his knees up in his chest his bare feet resting

on an old pair of shoes his feet were filthy

they had no toes

they were squared off at the ends like blocks

and when I walked

past him with my feet that had all their toes

I tried not to look down (I didn’t have any

change for him) and got on the up

escalator thinking about all the trigger warnings

he never got

never asked for even the word

pedicure could’ve been one

but he wasn't a poet

as far as I could tell.

Lange Nacht der Museen      

Is the one night

of the year

the museums in Berlin are free to the public

and open

all night. That alone should've been 

warning to stay away, but we went anyway, 

starting off at the Samurai

Museum, gazing at those strange

little outfits those violent little men

would put on

like sunlight.

 

After that, it was the Museum of Musical

Instruments. Violins

like hanged men in glass houses,

viola da gambas,

flutes from the collection

of Frederick

the Great, Ben Franklin’s glass

harmonica.

It was better than the Espionage Museum

that was so crowded

it was like fighting your way through

a hot and stinking factory

farm for cows. 

 

At the Unterwelt Museum,

the line of people started

outside the U-Bahn station and snaked

across a long marble floor,

slithering down a long marble flight of stairs

around a bend halfway down another flight

and into a door.

 

We abandoned that one,

bypassed the Planetary Museum

that had an even longer

line, and ventured yonder to the Spy Museum

where we sat alone on beach chairs in the drizzling rain,

a warped surveillance film from 1989

playing on the big screen.

 

We watched quite a few dull

scenes on that – it was mostly drunken punk rockers being

surveilled - then met our friends

for the tour, traveling in our damp clothes

through stale GDR rooms

with stale GDR furniture

under stale GDR

light. You could almost feel yourself sterilizing

as you paced

those gloomy wood-paneled halls.

 

Luckily, the tour was short

the rain

let up and we got an Uber

to some random bar, a brightly lit East Berlin

Kneipe with a balding,

taxidermized fox standing

in the window, autographed

guitars on the walls,

photos of Joe Strummer, and bellied up

to the bar

punks

ancient ones cigar store Indian

punks punks

who’d been

punks

since Helmut Schmidt was chancellor.

 

We watched them sway under the hot lights,

laughing,

smoking, quaffing up foamy Czech beer

as some crazy drunken 

German with hair so thin 

she only had three wispy dreadlocks

on the back of her head

scurried into the bathroom

and

began howling for her mother.

 

Finally,

a museum

worth 

going to.

M.P. Powers is the author of Fortuna Berlin and Hallucinogenic Dragonfly Intermezzo. He was recently featured on the Goethe Institute’s podcast The Big Ponder. Recent publications include the Columbia Review, Black Stone/White Stone, Jupiter Review, Mayday Magazine, and others. His artwork can be found on Twitter and Instagram