OR ALL THINGS AND NOTHING RELATE

It is a maleness spring to come

Make a little riper trough

Slits in panties shielded

Whose grime, it did not place

Within the arbitration

The law could not withstand his

Peculiar uniformity to such male

Coward, leaking the licking

Diplomats between the arteries in

The throat and in the coven

Married and loose

He weighed too much sleep

To slumber

He loved a strumpet or a slit

That could no longer be loved

Like that is the rumpled incarnation

Of what Jacob moaned beneath the swollen

Angel bed, the ladder went to and against

And he in pride and unknown

Viscerality devised

A somatic metaphor

And wrestled haut

Within his own anatomy

So law diffused some millennia

And that was shown most

Frequently by the brains and brains of

Sweat, camel-toe

Jacob liberalized the fiction

Of good faith and went in search of Israel

And so was called Israel. Oh, Israel, who called myself

A dictator or a retard, that I hold in myself

All the secrets of the darkest human promise

And so am spoken for by them, and if Pharaoh had

Not come into his own will, how could Moses

Arbitrate like that?

Blood sword or barrel how Moses led

Them back to Canaan

Where Joseph had led them from, not for

His brothers

And I on the B43 express to downtown

Brooklyn, am not a martyr or a victim

Or trying to do much of anything

Despite the law

In Palestine that you must

Carry your ID at all times

Without much maleness,

Spring had yet to surface the

Dividends of wanton prosperity

Insure domestic tranquility

Slits and gates for the having

And have nots do not bring

Me your pencils write your own

Story and I will write mine

Or loose my lunch, when he

Made love to my bush and claimed

It was all he ever knew of the dark and

Claimed it for his own

How come you’re so dark?

And how come the cervix comes unlocked

At night?

And how come all these sutras are so plain?

And how come we lost our innocence so young?

The overcast hybrid plaintiffs

Counting their wits and wisps of

Ego shattering attitude that beckons them

Forward into the Dorothea Lasky poem

And out of my cunt.

But that is just another way to say that things, people

Or all things and nothing relate

Overcast Brooklyn ceases to deny

Its integrity for the desire to form a

More perfect perfection

Withheld from all slurped and synched

Pariahs the plaintiffs demand that he

love her, but there is truly no

escape for them.

IDK

Inspecting the condoms for bruises

And I don’t know what to do.

It’s a man’s world and I don’t know what to do.

How did everything in the universe  

Come to rip bones around my panties?

And he is somehow still alive on

Hancock Street, and I will have to

Have someone else’s babies.

And I don’t know who you are talking to

When you say you will love me forever.

And I don’t know what to do about us.

And I don’t know about the broken condoms.

And I don’t know how to take my third eye off you.

And I don’t know what to do.  

CORNELIA BARBER lives, loves and works in Crown Heights, NY. Her essays, interviews, poetry and short stories have been published or are forthcoming from Prelude Magazine, Lemon Hound, Queen Mobs Tea House, The Poetry Project Newsletter and elsewhere.