Gutbucket

Gutbucket, bittersweet,
unsalted butter and flour and water make dough.

Jass, you are an ellipses:
I crow you to sunrise, I berrypick your heart from bush,
strawberry, cornberry, organberry.

Your name, music to my sometimes-deaf ears,
like when I stand with the kitchen scissors in the citygarden,
thunderloving a green skinned fruit.

He hears my kisses, a wall grabber, the neighbors’ dog
left out in the cold.      Here’s to his
soft wet nose      and a part of me
that bleeds dogblood, impure.

Gutters mean rain, and the storm has come and gone.
Buckets for keep, sing me “How High the Moon”
and collect the falling water for the reaping-- cockberry, fruitberry.
Dear women of the night, harvest me the brightest
yellow one you can find, call it November, call it Jass.

My Globe is Wrong

The walk-in closet in my new house gives me déjà vu
in a bad way. We have a few options. The dog will not

let me leave her alone. We can operate. We can remove Yugoslavia
and replace her with what has become of her. We can remove

Byelarus because who has even heard of Byelarus. We can tell the dog
to learn English. We can tell the dog that she needs to learn English

or we will never figure out what she wants. We can ask the ghosts
quietly to leave, perhaps using a Ouija board. We can determine,

afterwards, that déjà vu is not caused by ghosts.
We can keep reliving these moments. We can keep

reliving these moments. We can keep reliving these
moments. We can keep reliving these moments. They are

as follows:  weights and measures; the night the four of us
were in Daddy and Linda’s van, on our way to their

wedding rehearsal dinner; the globe being wrong but not spinning it, just
its being wrong; the dog’s wanting something but we do not know what;

the walk-in closet, specifically the area where I hang skirts,
where that part transitions to blouses that I would not wear to work.

Everything else I forget.
To remember everything else, I will have to go upstairs.

I will have to find a skirt to hang and both hope and not hope
that I get déjà vu again. Remember, it is the bad kind. We can operate.

We can remove déjà vu from your brain. Think of a black cat. Forget
the black cat. Think of a black cat. Forget the black cat. Count backwards

from one less than a million. Don’t ask if it has gone. Never find
another skirt to hang. Never remove any skirts from the walk-in closet—

never wear any that may cause déjà vu. Trash the globe, even though
it is not trash night. Someone will take it. It is a very fine globe.