Morgan Michaels Poems

What's the matter?

Awful! An enormous...
...

Bother! What did the doctor tell you? You're too old for that! So, you'll just boil the toothbrush tomorrow, like new.
Boil it? I'm throwing it out! Sloppy seconds on a Harlem fly? Not me!
Right, sorry. Where did it go, the fly?
I'm not sure. It flew off, after I shooed it from the toothbrush. It grazed my nose and looped off into...oh, God-
...

Nobody's where they're supposed to be
Remember how it used to be?
Despite the hour or time of day
You call to get your business done
...

And there it is- a sudden hallucination,
an irid shmear, a soaring dolphin
sailing memory's sea: not the whale, silly, the fish,
wire-hung between parapets of the boathouse hall-
...

I am the greatest painter who ever breathed.
Any fool enough to dispute this claim
Should simply inspect my work in the Cambio
At Perusia, in the college of that name.
...

There she stood-but how changed!
Her shallow back toward me, behind my tree
Draped by the pleats of her pink housedress
A sallow crescent of chest showing
...

It's like a roller coaster ride-
You dare yourself to do it
Feeling a little foolish, true,
But taking the trouble, usually conclude
...

The East was rent with sabor strokes
that bled a ruddy hue-
angry welts that opened up
to let the sun pass through.
...

Her hands behind her back were bound
as if they hid a flower
Her cheek was dry, her eye cast down-
it seemed an honest sorrow.
...

It seemed to me the mortal wrong,
the crime that marked her wretched
lay not in anything she did
but what she had neglected
...