Is temporarily residing in a temporary residence. Eighteen years too-young, Soraya has little social tact with big sub-heading interests, which include bull fighting, bird watching. It is strongly believed by Soraya that one ought to hold at least one strong belief, and that belief, when found out, ought to be dismembered in a dark alleyway. S. has been published in The SpitJawReview, and The Wolf.

Trans-Canada Highway

We drive, two free
persons unidentified
and lacking even
soles to walk the street.

You speak in lists,
resolution, and I tune
the radio to April static,
my vacancy intensifying,
young and violent, I work
magic to keep myself
encumbered by your arms.

I feel you in my
teeth, the gnawing
fruitlessness of know-
ing our days are
numbered; wrestle
the night into a fire-
place with a pickaxe or
wet matches against
your jean thighs.
Participation, or the
candles I brought
from the lighthouse
where I stole the map.

Papers scatter like news-
faces, noise runs laps up
tree trunks and men watch
me waste my laughter; you
rain into the tarp of night
and I run outside to
catch you in my mouth.

New Zealand

The welding of anger with anger's
death, white-lipped and clenching;
splints of life pushed up against
the fighting bones of a
surrendered system.

Men pulling trains like horse-
power and money shooting
off guns in plazas.
The pieces of clothing shed,
skin on a track,
peddled, spun into
the roads we loved under the car.

Amazement spent on peddling
change for the pouches
of deliberation; the long eyed
station shadow that mimics
her passengers into waving
arms, forth and
back.

The neutral colours of
countries unleavened;
hourglass vigils kept
as dead gather to sleep
beside the living,
moths to the fire.

Published and tax-
returned in the dated
pages of text and script.
Financial salvation
from every crime
but history.

The sides of your body
I press and under
stand the celebration
of all lung and heart be
neath your rib; I under
stand men who tell numbers,
read stars, and challenge the brushes
stroke of like, of She, unfrench,
red-necked and collarless.

Immaculate scraping of
dishes left by other famished
men, the crumb of you on my
tongue, laughing in your
small and tidy throat.

Kindly remove your
self and make
room for more
room.

Everything but the Kitchen Will Sink

I am a deaf man,
turning volume notches,
down

I sing because I know you
will hear me, every faulted note
though I will not hear myself.

I am the flip
of a twopence, or mattress;
worth less and
still stained.

What is Human; worry
and bound feet?
Ribs only twenty-four
hours barring man
from peace.

Who is Human in a regime line
that runs across fields fertile
from decaying souls? Hail
God, waging wars of
holy murder; Hail God Hail
God,

you let me down
to a womb, parasitic and
waterless.
I, already dead
of thirst, was built
to birth an ark; I
who had never learned
the names of animals.

A Picture Window

His familiar and crumbed
pots, planters so
sensibly perched on sills
who suck the street scape;
one elbow slipping is
the jungle tearing its hair
under the modern auto-
mobile, lust green, and all
that's ever been natural to
him will so wear him out
on the town.

Walking as if I were
a manhole, ready
to find him falling or
crushed already, to make
a cemetery garden down
inside of body with his
seed, and sing
a terror of epitaphs.

Copyright © 2004 Soraya Maciel

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