NEW! Joanna Fuhrman poems

Joanna Fuhrman

Three poems

ALCHEMY MORAINE WITH EXTRA MICROCHIP

We unpacked what
I thought was mystery
and found a horse
straddling a precipice.
I said, “take off your
plywood wings and
I will ride you to
the center of a digit.”
I could see my own
brain glue bubbling
on the plastic flowers.
In the orange kitchen,
the replicas of my heart’s
tubes hung, while my
favorite rock star
prayed to the
luminary computer.

*

I was angry at that horse. I was angry as that horse. The horse became another name for anger. It’s huge white teeth: a substitute. The mirrors of its eyes: my only way to see.

*

Have you
ever felt this
small
as small as
my small
breasts,
your only
origami
frog folded
from a
postcard
of false
tears?


PULP NOVEL VIEWED THROUGH A THINGAMABOB MORAINE

     He was two separate baby boys dressed in the frills of a single pineapple, so he had to wear his grown-up sadness pasted to the outside of another’s face. The woman, in the bleachers, loved this and tied a phone cord around his neck as a reward.
     Taking the metaphors out of sex would be a challenge they agreed, not easily accomplished in the time they had allotted to the task.
     So long magnificent marigolds, fresh mornings in Hanoi, fly swatters! “Sacrifice,” would be the requisite catchword for their newly anointed endeavor; a fuzzy rat-shaped pencil top, their only other pal.


BROOKLYN EFFICIENCY APARTMENT MORAINE II

You drove your toy car into the tub so I would dive for it, holding my breath. Your cock turned summersaults in the mirror’s amphitheater until that game turned into what I was young enough to believe was a new form of symphonic notation: a canary’s brain waves flowing through the pages of magazines.

We were both conscious of a certain same feeling. It wasn’t like being awkward in the locker or at the doctor’s.

The room might have been wearing trench coat. There was a knocking from beneath a knee.