Chad Frame
Invisible Handkerchief
Left Pocket
I walk into the room, saying nothing,
drop to my knees on the floor before you,
and reach for your pants, awkwardly fumbling
for the antique World War Two pocket watch
your grandfather left you, pop it open,
and twist the dial, winding back two hours
we would have spent having rough, nameless sex.
I can never adjust to the new time.
I will miss important work meetings, films
about puffy-faced Jennifer Lawrence
saving people, in the process saving
herself, and perhaps in the dark theater
I could have steepled my fingers sweetly
with yours if we weren’t now worlds apart.
Right Pocket
I step sideways into my other life,
see us lying there, twined like dead ivy
on a cold wall, no room for pillow talk
about the men who have fucked us before
and never returned for seconds, the veil
between worlds heavy as down comforters
and talk of dying fathers. I will float
through the wall, into the next apartment,
and hover like steaming breath in the room
over the sleeping family huddled
in one bed for warmth, desperate husband
separated by three squirming children
from safe harbor and helplessly erect,
the chill breeze on his skin—my phantom mouth.
Tattered Handkerchief
Left Pocket
Means I'm into childhood trauma. Tell me
about the time you skinned your knee. Skin it
back and forth, hand cupping gingerly, big
wheel idling, alone. Show me on the doll
where they cut you, where the base of your pain
grows proud from its mound, desperate to root
anywhere else. I like to think that loss
is more than flesh wounds, more than the people
who scrape against our lives, each taking one
of our finite layers in their passing.
And we are docked more than a flap of skin
for this lesson, that what bares itself, red
and shining to the hungry open air
cannot ever be covered up again.
Right Pocket
I want to let you lie on top of me,
still as sediment, wait for the motion
of the earth grinding deep into itself;
or the earth spinning like a desk globe slapped
over and over by a bored schoolboy;
or the earth whipping around its orbit
like the same child beating a tetherball;
or the earth hurtling through the vast blackness
like that child flying, legs up, on his bike
over asphalt, at night, spurred by the thought
that the road continues unseen ahead—
and that shapes, resolving in their passing,
are unable to stop him from putting
his feet back on the pedals and pumping.
Conservative Handkerchief
Left Pocket
My legacy will stand, dark and glossy
like a finger sunk to the last knuckle
in your seat of power, a monument
to emoluments, lording over you
like a ziggurat, bastion of a bronzed
aged god—look upon my works, ye mighty,
and depants. Everything I am given
is my due, life grabbed unrepentantly
by the pussy, yowling and scrabbling claws
with my small hand on the scruff of its neck,
failing to comprehend the difference
between petting and strangling—all the while
whispering into its panic-flicked ear,
Shh, believe me, I know what I’m doing.
Right Pocket
I want your hands, fresh from signing a bill
to take away my healthcare, my access
to the pill that stops transmission of blood-
borne, slow cyanide, bubbling up your pen
onto my clean page, to bend me over
a desk of laws that thoroughly fuck me
over, so hard I have all the bloody,
cold calculus of it tattooed backwards
on my cheeks. Tell me I've been a naughty
little constituent, tell me I love
when you smack the marriage right out of me
and the fiscal responsibility
right in, so deep it feels ingrained, so hard
I want to pull a lever in your name.