by Nicholas Gruber
An hour after your first tattoo, you bent to collect a niece who told the world, “Isabella’s thirsty for ink.” She only meant you’re so pale veins are swift blue lightning, but suddenly you weren’t, you were red—like the gladiolus I plucked from your neighbor’s bucket later that night. “No thanks. Don’t have much of a sweet tooth,” you said. But expeditious stamen found your thighs had set like crema catalana.
***
Though the conversation filling your grandmother’s last room could’ve taken place in any suburban dining room, she was lace on your arm; her face, eighty-some-odd acres of cracked rawhide, gurgled “it is just now scarier to stay.” Not a blink, you rather dusted a stubborn memory to ease her heavings. “You’re going to finish the pudding?” you said, ripping streamers of laughter from your uncle’s throat.
Above her carcass I crossed
my right anterior shoulder first
& dawdled on a wafer & that means
donkey-punch the baby Jesus, I guess,
because fuckin’ Friar Tuck barked:
“Please consume the body.”
***
Your belly pressed into the beach, a brown tide swallowed your legs. “The ocean is thirsty for you,” I teased. Curls willowed to hide an absence of pigment, while driftwood doodled Te extraño mucho in the sand. The moat of an abandoned castle acquired the ocean.
Through your windshield, aphids were
marionette strings flung over
an oxidized horizon. I think I said,
“The puppeteer is elusive,” & a spider
crawled on your tongue just then.
***
Grad school meant poetry workshops in Brooklyn & you dressing like Old Mother Hubbard. A Thanksgiving airport terminal brandished a cleaver. “We’re both just saplings right now. You are a sunny sky; I’m a star forced to hide.”
“Okay, so I’ll smear ink all over the stupid sun.”
“Ugh. Then your galaxies are swirling manacles. Don’t cry, for Christ’s sake, just pray.”
Okay.
I pray terrorists take over your plane
a second after the flight attendant bangs
your elbow with the drink cart
even though you’re stuck in the middle seat
I pray every female gynecologist
in New York retires tomorrow so
you come home
for Paps & every time you do
you walk in on your parents
& see mostly your dad
I pray your socks are ever moist &
you stub your toe
every day. I pray every door
wraps a spider web around your face &
at least once it happens
while you’re making faces at your niece
so it spools like cotton
candy on your tongue
I hope a whole Brazilian soccer stadium watches
when you parallel park. I hope you fart
every time you go near
a trampoline. I hope
you hatch an egg in your mouth for some reason.
And, sincerely, I hope all your poems
blossom from the bottle
of ink I shook for you
& you’re the only one
who ever truly reads them
because the sun scorches
any page you manage to chisel
from whatever dopey tree
you ensorcel next.
I hope your journey stretches you
into a redwood so tall your branches can,
at last, harmonize with the night
sky’s canticles & she teaches you to
shine like a fucking star.
Dilettante.
