Body, Remember
BY DAN KRAINES
Remember, standing in the doorway seeing
another body lying
on the kitchen floor clutching
his genitals.
That is the way it is, that is what you are now, you think, spending hours
on the gray suede couch in the lonely, beautiful room.
Remember when you ran through the streets in your tracksuit,
swam as best as you could through the lake,
the rain never stopped you, cooling the locks
that stuck to your brow.
Flipping through Schopenhauer, giving all of yourself to nothing,
let yourself rain and hail and snow against everyone you love.
Remember watching Friday Night Lights
and feeling the rape scene, the woman pinned
in the front seat of the truck, reaching
for the cigarette jack and burning the man’s face.
Seeing violence is your way of controlling
the violence put in you.
The images flashed against
your closed blinds. You made the volume louder, softer, louder.
The Shore
BY DAN KRAINES
She lay like the reclining nude in the Modigliani I love:
arms over her head; thighs crossed; crotch hidden—
Not far from us, seagulls congressed and pecked at the algae
foaming at the shoreline.
Her breasts poured out of her white bikini.
I thought to myself, Why would she lie here with me.
The sun burned the skin off of my shoulder blades.
She asked what I was thinking. I said,
Daydreaming with that bird.
“With the bird or about the bird?”
With the bird.
