Chris Tusa

Chris Tusa Poems

My grandmother’s teeth stare at her
from a mason jar on the nightstand.

The radio turns itself on,
...

Deep in the cotton petals of a watermark
I see my father stacking sheets of plywood,

his hands freckled with sawdust, his silvery
...

Divine and white,
you’re an aspirin fit for the gods,
the powdery ghost of Gandhi
conjured into a bottle,
...

Only three days and already I loathe this place,
this milk-white morgue, this smiling slaughterhouse,
where girls in straitjackets grow fat on pills,
floating on pale clouds of Clozapine,
...

A sudden surge of boys
with their smiles punched out,
care of a local Tough Man contest.
It was all I needed
...

Like a trick
you crawled up Hitler's sleeve,
a crooked cross with bent arms,
two cursed S's twisted together
...

Once a favorite conversation piece,
now something more like a disease.

A weathervane sings, a wind chime clangs.
...

after Sue Owen

Born from flour anointed with oil,
from a roux dark and mean as a horse’s breath,
...

Maybe it’s Emphysema, a shiny black jewel of phlegm
humming like a clump of bees in my chest.
Perhaps a tumor crawling in the crook of my armpit,
a blood clot opening like a tiny red flower in my brain.
...

The schizophrenic girl twists off a turkey leg
then scoops a spoon-full of corn onto her plate.

Her hair is a black brain of braids,
...

The sky is falling.
And Henny Penny is nowhere to be found.

There is no bright blue cartoon sky,
...

She looks rather pathetic, really,
leaning against the black air,
the three mangled fingers of her left hand
clutching a yellow purse,
...

Imagine a tiny black flower,
the nurse says,
blossoming in your spleen.
...

Another tornado warning, power lines
down, the same ring around the rosy.
But there’s no pocketful of posies
for this black plague in my brain.
...

Do not speak of that dreadful day in Cypress
when you stroked the green air
and my charcoal silhouette blushed.
Or of the black sky, how it swallowed
...

The earth was without form, and void;
and darkness was on the face of the deep.
-Genesis 1: 2
...

Someone stole Satan’s hipbone
and flung it against the sky.
Now you ride the orange horizon,
a stunned, wingless bird
...

You stand in the gray air,
your face a mirror reflecting
the dark shadows of trees.
Clouds drift in the brown water
...

I sill remember my father, on Sunday nights,
When he dressed up and played magician,
smiling as he pulled bright blue handkerchiefs
from the tiny white mouth of his fist,
...

for Leigh Mayeaux, whose body was never found.


Maybe he straddles you in the soft mud,
...

Chris Tusa Biography

Chris Tusa was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He holds a B.A. in English, an M.A in English, and an M.F.A. from the University of Florida. He is the author of Inventing an End and Haunted Bones. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Texas Review, Spoon River, Louisville Review, Passages North, Louisiana Literature, The New Delta Review, Lullwater Review, StorySouth, New York Quarterly, and others. He teaches in the English Department at LSU. To read samples of his work, visit http: //www.christusa.net)

The Best Poem Of Chris Tusa

Alzheimer’s

My grandmother’s teeth stare at her
from a mason jar on the nightstand.

The radio turns itself on,
sunlight crawls through the window,

and she thinks she feels her bright blue eyes
rolling out her head.

She’s certain her blood has turned to dirt,
that beetles haunt the dark hollow of her bones.

The clock on the kitchen wall is missing its big hand.
The potatoes in the sink are growing eyes.

She stares at my grandfather standing in the doorway,
his smile flickering like the side of an axe.

Outside, in the yard, a chicken hops
through the tall grass, looking for its head.

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