First Visit After The Divorce

by Len Kuntz

Reasons for living
never come cheap
is what my daughter tells me in the car
on the way home from the airport,
her fidgeting and
smelling of incense.
When I ask if she smoked on the plane
she calls me ridiculous,
dropping an F bomb.
I angle the rearview to
steal glances.
She’s as thin as rain
wearing a nose ring
and dreadlocks that look like
coils of dingy pillow stuffing.
I’ve missed her,
but now that she’s here I realize I’ve missed the daughter I had before,
the one who hugged my knees and called me Daddy,
who asked to be read a story or poem,
asked a million questions about anything and everything.
This young woman beside me seems a stranger,
an interloper.
She’s silent for a spell,
then tells me she changed,
changed for the better,
that she’s never going back
and I’d better get used to it.
At the restaurant she pushes lettuce leafs back and forth
across her plate, making windshield wiper motions.
She only eats a sprig of parsley.
She says she wants to see her mother now.
She says I should stop pretending to be somebody I’m not
and that it would be best for everyone involved if I
burned in hell.

Corkscrew

by Len Kuntz

I started drilling a corkscrew through my skull
three hours ago,
at dawn,
when it seemed the strategic thing to do.
Blood’s been pouring down the sides of my face
like fondue
and there’s brain matter stuck in my hair
and I keep twisting the curled spire
farther and farther through my head,
into the mealy meat
but no matter how much progress I make
there’s only more pain
and so help me God,
I can’t,
I just can’t get unstuck.

If Only

by Len Kuntz

I keep thinking;
if only I were a little shorter,
fatter, uglier and thick-skinned,
then things would be better.
If only I weren’t witty and sly,
well-read and tan.
If only I were a hemophiliac
and there was a sharp knife handy,
the world would
be a perfect place.

Rehearsal

by Len Kuntz

Old woman wears a wedding dress,
her hands white wilted carrots.
Watch her eyes.
See how wet they are.
Do they widen at the sound of your entrance?
Is there a way to reclaim that space
before time and years
took her to the back alley
with brass knuckles and baseball bats,
reworking her memory
and trading it for
the price of someone’s smoked cigarettes?

Pallet

by Len Kuntz

She brings me blue,
sticky sweet and gritty.
I take back Kelly green,
those coarse kisses and candied prayers.
We swim in waves of mauve,
shielding secrets
and holding onto our breaths.
There is red glinting in a high corner,
yoke-yellow spaces out of reach.
We come back to white,
our shoes filthy,
tracking in black,
the footprints of another time.

Old Pictures

by Len Kuntz

This is the tribe
stationed around the gold sofa
on a Sunday in June.
The sun is an interloper
showing off smears in the picture window behind us,
glaring like a chemist, winking so wise.
My brothers have put down their fists for the time being.
You cannot tell from the photo but it smells like antiseptic.
The refrigerator rattles and chuffs.
Our salt and pepper dog whines a few feet away.
The frames of the house hold us in,
an entire family together
just this once,
some of us destined for gory pursuits,
the rest hatching plans for escape.

Wind Pipe

by Len Kuntz

We land in a pipe,
caught in a curl of forced air.
Your mouth is moving.
Your lips are flat, faded stripes
hiking up their hems like a laundry line
whipped by the wind.
You are trying to remind me how we got here.
You hold up a picture of us.
The war had ended and a new one brewed
but we were tanned like varnished wood.
We hadn’t paid taxes.
We were so damn young,
bordering on unborn.
We held our resolve
in each other’s hands,
our loping gait down the church aisle,
unaware of the world shifting,
thinking it owed us something.

The Truth About Snow

by Len Kuntz

The line meanders out into the street.
Some of us smell cinnamon and chicory,
others a wet compress of an impending storm.
The bored lieutenant rattles change
in his pockets,
the chinking reminding me of sleigh bells
and frostbitten hands,
of that one winter when
I learned the truth about snow.
Back then I was bolder.
“Did you know,”
I said,
“that I am old enough now to
ride
swim
run
fly away
from here forever?”
He held me down
and that was his answer,
the weight of snow
the spikes of blood
the winter white
no longer for this child,
never again.

At My Brother’s Wake

by Len Kuntz

The meadow that used to be here has been scorched.
The tree fort cinders and nails,
charred stumps.
There are reasons for things yet
even the sparrows seem lost,
the sky too barren.
“Over there,” I say,
“is where we’d fight bare-fisted,
no one ever winning.”
She says I must have loved him then.
The wind runs its fingers across the slope
as the ground gossips
about events that never happened.
We head back to the old house
where the others are telling
tall tales
so that everyone
looks good.

The Seamstress

by Len Kuntz

Our bathtub is filled with buttons--
mother of pearl and metal,
plastic pea coat shapes with
embossed anchors,
wooden toggles from Holland,
horn and hemp.

Your hair is a gray dandelion gone to seed.
Your eyes flit like a startled squirrel
and saliva webs your mouth when
you open the door.
“What on earth?”
you ask.

In bed that night
I listen to your coarse breath, your frail bones moaning when you toss and turn.
But we were young once,
and you stitched beautiful things then.
You dressed queens and saints,
men with money.

I slink off the mattress now,
and click on the bathroom light.
As I slide inside the tub
the buttons chatter and gossip,
their color shimmering.

Perhaps you clipped them
because they reminded you of better days,
or maybe you overhead me on the phone.
Either way, I grab handfuls and watch them clatter
across the great heap.

When I look up,
you’re there,
naked but smiling.
You ask, “Is the water warm?” Then,
“Got room for two?”

The Gift

by Len Kuntz

She would hang them on walls and doors
or lean pieces in metal easels,
so many of them that her work space looked disheveled
and cramped but always colorful,
radiating the rich hues of spices
she’d grown as a girl in India.

I laughed when my newlywed wife undid the bow, unwrapped the box.
A single platter?
Her grandmother was rich.
She knew politicians and peacemakers.
“But this is special,” my wife said,
and I laughed a second time.

Once I found the old woman in the garden,
arms outstretched,
fingers feeling for something in the wind.
When I tried to skip by
she said, “Stop, stop right there,”
even though she couldn’t have seen me behind her.
She told me to close my eyes.
“Come on, Come on.”
She said, Do you see it, all the beauty pressed beneath the spaces?
Do you see the things that fly?

My new bride placed the plate
in the kitchen of our first apartment
so that the painted goddess would stare at me if I washed a dish
or poured a glass of water.
Many times I considered breaking it over the faucet,
yet the plate traveled with us,
back and forth through every relocation.

Today we buried my wife’s grandmother.
A village of people attended, more than a thousand,
young and old, famous or not,
all mourning.
While my wife’s on the phone
I take the plate in my hands,
feeling the cool ceramic,
tracing,
and even though my eyes are squeezed shut,
tears spill free,
watering blue daisy pots,
splashing billowed orange skirts,
pelting the gray-white plumage of geese as they
rise and fly.

I Can’t Get the Smell of You Out of My Skin

by Len Kuntz

It’s been there since Tuesday,
sinking deeper every day,
imbedded
now into my blood system,
circulating like poisonous gas,
this scent
which had once been so very
lovely.

Illustrated

by Len Kuntz

All those stories stitched into your skin
with their wicked fonts
and buoyant color
are mere camouflage.
The answers hang
like gallows in your eyes,
swaying in shadows while
the ceiling creaks
from the burden of your dead weight.

Afterward

by Len Kuntz

She claims she does not brood.
I have a view here,
now of her on the dock
kicking heels of water
with a sluggish motion.

The rowboat man is a toy image so far away
yet she tries to sight him,
waves.
The smell of her in the morning
always makes me want to dance,
even when I’ve had insomnia
or black dreams about
days that should have turned out different.

I crack my window open,
quiet as I can.
The lake gurgles from her kicks,
everything in our sad world
sounding like a baby.
An infant.
What should have been ours.

Front Porch

by Len Kuntz

She has a breeze in her eyes
shifting like sheer fog.
We lay on the porch,
our chins collected.
We take turns staring.
If not for her I would be somewhere else,
my words weaker,
too pliant.

Her laughter lifts light to the sooty clouds.
They don’t part.
Instead they send down winged angels,
one taking residence on her shoulder,
looking so pleased to be there,
as am I,
all of us in desperate need of each other’s sustenance.

Brick Room

by Len Kuntz

She says, “But I’m a bleeder.”
Her eyes are alarm clocks blinking.
Her knees bounce.
These places are so white and wide open.
The woman coming up to us
is not a nurse but her voice is soft.
She says they’re ready for my daughter now.
Walking down the white-walled hall I hear her
tell Amy not to worry, that there’s still time, that she made the right choice.
Amy lifts her rag doll head at that,
a thin smile parting open
turns to me and says over her shoulder,
“See Dad, I'm not a murderer after all.”

Real Beauty

by Len Kuntz

I made it look like an accident, an iris happenstance, tearing the blue out of my eye, first one pupil then the next. The sun was the only thing that went down that day, stayed there, head in the dirt, glowing in the ground like a brim but nothing more, blinded, not even breathing. After the fire, you said I’d never love you the same, your face full of scar melt now. But you were wrong: here are my eyes to prove it.

Contusions

by Len Kuntz

The sky is such a beautiful bruise of brutal blue-metal-pink. It reminds me how there can be loveliness in pain, that even art is a kind of contained torture. Uncertain, I look to the horizon while pangs of hope spike my heels the way my feet will tingle when they fall asleep, go numb.

In the morning you visit early before the family comes. Your kisses are light like moths upon my bandaged wrists, your breath syrupy in my ear. You say, “We can make it.” You tell me, “Nothing’s so bad,” and I close my eyes, hearing the unblemished beauty of your promise new for the first time, taking your fingers in mine, holding on, believing.

Kindling

by Len Kuntz

My brothers were sunk, they took me with because they were babysitting. Still, the girls there had wavy, wheat-blonde hair and dance-floor lips that shimmered back question marks. “He’s so cute, isn’t he?” one asked. “He doesn’t look like either of you,” another said.

When they paired off and retreated to rooms, I turned on “The Mod Squad.” Julie looked like one of the girls, only thinner. I could hear both girls hyperventilating, as if they were a pair of kittens being smothered. But the air was sheer, pulsing and hot everywhere, so I got up to open the kitchen window, only the stove was there, as was a roll of paper towels and cook books nearby, a butcher block made of wood, mail and newspaper… so much kindling.

So, yes, okay, I did it. I started the fire, but I didn’t end it. I left before then.