dresses and mud A still-beating blood-ink pen sits on my bookshelf without remorse. the rain outside under my fingernails nips like a stinging nettle. the cars, driving in the rain, forget to call home, while I wither away, crust covering my sandpaper face. my shoes are underneath the bedpan where they belong, I never held the key to the coffeepot. Usurping sleep and tour-de-force snapshot poetry from nerve sparks at the beginning of and nervous endings. I wrote a Preface for the refrigerator, which she never got around to reading. I honored the quiet lighting bugs of autumn. I dreamt of clouds on sunny days and thunder in the summer, caramel-colored calm in false-flavored liquor glasses. two tomes left unread on the bathroom floor, words swirling in the bottom of the bidet.
lilting finality There’s a yellow cloud above my head. there are secret windows and leathered scalps waiting to be introduced, just beyond a moonlit nothing. each breath a quaint reminder as it all crashes down, like ambivalence naked to the sun, breezing by, afraid of something I can’t quite put my fingers into. gliding through liquid gratitude, sifting through waves of pirated twelve-inch candles on the hearth, still standing, still burning. the smell of ripening plums, of visceral realism, of water crashing, of another unsalted bath, the smell of melting wax, of the wick softly dying, velvet fingers on the pillowcase. ashes in the ashtray look like the Sierra Nevadas, backdropped by an imperfect note straddling another cigarette butt. the smell of greasy motorcycles and the quiet whir of crickets, a faint p u r r r r and a sad sweetness take hold, and I can’t imagine anything, can’t imagine anywhere else anymore.
Cagliari before a storm A hair on the page, the warm wind of tomorrow, chainsaw mopeds and clanging ambulances passing, squelching, falling away. a dark violet sky, the violent sounds and my smokey breath coming from another goddamn radio somewhere. the midnight sounds slithering through the cracks of streets, in between marble façades. the trash can cats in heat, murring and peowing later and later as autumn sinks further into darker evenings. only me and the cats awake at this hour, orange-lit in the streetlight’s shine. my aching, burning throat, bare feet cool to the tile’s touch. my hair falling out onto blank pages. a pitter-patter rhythm beginning to beat the rooftop as the first raindrops wet my pages.
*****
Stephen Kieninger is writer and teacher currently living in Cagliari, Italy. He is the former music director at KFJC, a freeform radio station in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he continues to volunteer his time from abroad. His poetry can be found in Cocktail Napkin Thoughts and Open Doors review.