EXPECTANT MISCUES OVER DINNER

Expectant Miscues Over Dinner

Chasing the cold bathroom tiles
of elegant purpose and construction.

The leftover furniture an accidental
combine of determination and flowery
pretense gone deeply awry.

Upset by supernaturally chilled ginger tea,
the little phantom chips in the China.

Attentive but blue with obedience. A
measure of rouged cheeks. The barge
boards put to flooring.

What can be done with argumentative
flushed elevations of control?

A dialect exchanged on opaque
neighborhood boundaries, increased
and delivered like newspapers

on stoops, transoms. Deceptive fingerings,
tutorials on parquet floors, walls sparkled

with brocade fabric, thinly bloomed
eye lashes. This is the exact place
where “cannot” terminates

desire. The music lifts. The night
folds. The creases expand.

Count the things wanted. A house with wood
shingles stained dark brown. A secondary expanse,
curved into angular reliability.

Breath. Regular heart beats. Window panes.
Ceiling ideas. Glamourous kitchen range.

After those, parameters stretch into
ideological conceits, salon visits become
striations in cloud banks.

Bank notes huddle in cabinetry refined
by modal changes. See and wave. And parrot.

Night Shaded to 14 Tones of Periwinkle

Roast beef from Ralph’s
sourdough white bread,
C-Span vote counts.
Walked 8000 steps
and drank apple juice.

Someone was talking about
Feynman in the book on the table
from a store now closed, where some
guys sell crappy used vinyl albums.
All the names in the roll call
Collect like high school.

I sat at too small desks with
My bony knees covered in pants
wasn’t ever sure enough about
and coughed until my eyes dodged off.
I wanted that golden sealed pin. A classmate
from a different school than bony knees

stuffed under desktop, ran for a seat.
Another kid who bounced around
from privation to public, he got
that bug, too, and sacrificed his marriage
only to lose in a primary dmz. Some nights
I call out to those guys, from way out west

like a station wagon party from our youth,
by the tall fences the horses galloped over
while cans and bottles and flimsy paper
packets of cigarettes floated in the nearby stream.
That’s the cluster of blazers, of lazy eyes
in rubber framed plastic lensed

corrective eyeglasses beaming out into
the mythology of creek beds. That ongoing
list of names will never stop listing,
an alphabet of imperative commands
grazing the weedy democratic traditions
and lumps of aerated regard.

Symphonic Thoughts Deconstructed With Bug Zappers

A fragment. A shard of music
coming from the highway wash. Not
real, more like calculations meant
as monetized ambiance enhancers offered
by unacknowledged instrumentalists.

There was a corridor, swept and cut. A
collective following the mineral
patterns as they went across country,
the earth, where cleared
swaths grew again in support of

long, tall institutionally grey electrical
scaffolds that paraded the means for
things like instant refrigeration like
comfortable visuals, like binary information
packets. All instant, and sparking.

I saw a blonde strand in a pale
uniform smock of lime. But the
cars and the trucks and their
largely rubberized tires
straining along the road

hummed beyond that place, where
the divine note was not
as accepted individually, but
without blonde strands without
pale lime. With tires, with tires, with tires.

Henry Cherry is winner of the Silver Needle Press Award for Poetry. A working journalist, his fiction, poetry and criticism have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Cathexis Northwest Press, Australia's Cordite Review, Otoliths, The Loch Raven Review, The Louisiana Review. He received a Los Angeles Press Club award in 2023 for his writing and photojournalism.