Trimmings
frangelico
It slops from coppery
glass Dominican cassocks
thicker than water,
thinned syrup crackling
and smoking over ice,
pale as hearts of hazelnuts
half-caramelized
or relics lit in cabinets.
Angelic alcoholic for kids,
all quickening sweetness
without the burnt palate,
it’s praline, gilt, milk chocolate.
Don’t knock it. Also,
don’t drink a lot of it.
Handy mnemonic for nuts
and Alps, the Piedmont
and Languedoc, Our Father,
fluent Occitan, Orthodox
baroque brass fixtures,
all the schmaltzy
terror of Christmas ...
Bright liqueur, maple sap,
throat’s lacquer, misnomer,
namesake — couldn’t quench
a thirst, of course,
but gives occasion for it.
lametta
Fuck me, I love that stuff —
tinsel stripped
like a tarragon stalk
of its million radial tines,
nervy with static
in shredded cascades,
angle-confounding
and biddable as a fistful
of grasshoppers.
It implicates itself perpetually
in socks, hell-bent
as Japanese knotweed
on travel, and infiltrates
the kitchenette, which seems,
beside its disco stooks,
too much of a muchness,
too matter-of-fact.
Could we dress all utilities
in spangles of lametta,
revel in the vulgar
Italian TV
indestructible attention-splatter,
the cat-bewitching
twitch and dangle, the dross?
Would things be worse
or better?
periptero
Apparently
peripatetic, it pops up
wherever I go, glistening
on my shoulder, a gold epaulette,
a stuffed piñata
albatross of bubble-gum, filter tips,
and lottery tickets, glossy
cascades of laminated sleaze
difficult to care about,
much harder to reject.
Less explicably there are
sewing patterns, puzzle books,
and tiny plastic helicopters
bearing stigmata
from the molds where they were cast.
The proprietor slams
the shutters up
and locks himself inside
like a djinn in a lamp,
a night-busy, helping-hand
kobold in a kitchen,
utterly invested in the enterprise,
inseparable from it. What
is the epicenter everyone reports
but the staple through
the nipple of a centerfold?
Source: Poetry (October 2014)