The Joy Composter and other Poems

I like the way your jar lingers, like flower

packed light. There’s a mountain here that trails shadowsof grease. Anyone could be a homeowner if you packedit down. I want to be eating a grain that is healthy. I want to beeating a grain that is good. My apple has roots beyond tastyand keeps poking me in the toe with its vitamins. The kindof certainty you’re asking for grows foul-smelling leaves. They smell like antacid and asktoo many questions. Do you know the wayto the clearance vegetables. Do you have privies on tap.The things it says grow in curly-cues thick enoughto trip in. My mother asks about the muscle I left. I wouldn’texpect to die if she wouldn’t keep taunting digestion. I can seefarthest from the Tenderloin. You’re that roped-up. The city aches like torn and greasy ribs. You thinkyou can fold into Fountain Pose, but you’re actuallylaughing from the chin. You’re trying to fit a roundcar in a square peg for bicycles. It’s easy to beconfused by long-term storage. I want a seriesof hills that keeps pocketing my natural refuse. Iwant a refuse that composts joy. 

The Joy Composter

A diligent and yieldingtoy, it takes everyone who didn't have the timefor clean-up. It takes the hands of small childrenwhen their parents stray. A well-functioning modelpresses the buttons of city officials, but remainslegal and relied-upon. No one can arrestthis model, because it's always flopping on anotherside. You can put in it the moments you wishwere strictly useful. That solvent soil is only freeradical bots. That chemical signal is injest. Your table scraps just get foldedin with the rest of ours. Give the toy your bestshot: It makes proteinscomplete. 

Foil

I’m basing this on my accumulated knowledge of bees. I’m packing honey tightly. I’m whipping up some supper on the floor. Can you trust me to keep in tasty germs? I’ll breed them up and calm them with a cage. Every fornicating antelope needs a firm and weary plug to give them limits. Every baker walks the narrow path to salvation by uncomfortable temperatures. It boils the goodness into you. It spills forward upon command, out of the door and toward the front of the house where salvation is getting dehydrated in line. Customers await either their exclusion from everything or their ability to watch it all get chopped. I rely on numbness to progress toward a sense of outlaw-hood. The further I move from the kitchen, the less I know about order. My methods grow more carnal and homegrown. I only came sniffing around your ankles because I know about sustainable methods of hygiene. My nasal passages can degrade and hide it all. Small plugs only enhance my nasal passages’ fecund capacity. Who creeps out there? Who is an example of formulaic peoplehood? I am watching everyone glom together to try to save themselves. I am not one to betray the movements of the diligent tides. There are enough large disturbances in this world, enough tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes of wasted food. I’ll load up on aluminum flakes so that the next time someone tries to blow my house over I can throw foil segments to the wind. It will throw them off, maybe, the excess grit. I can’t control my feathery mind that way, my immense over-reveal. I want to double each result. Who left this pile on top of the fridge here, this hulking vow? Oh it was mine, I wanted everyone to know what a torrid meal I had planned. I want everyone to fly out at me ready. It isn’t foreshadowing, it’s beating the hive.  Leora Fridman is a writer, jammer, translator and educator living in Massachusetts.