Three Poems by A.R. Zarif

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ON FRANK OCEAN’S BIRTHDAY

I thank the god who hates your silence
we would be ants tightening
along an anteater’s mouth—
if we die, we die on the ice
cream of your hair, we would catwalk blue &
numberless above your arenas
while you sang
the venomously glittered
handkerchiefs singe inside me: my eye-
lashes swim in green darkness. We don’t like skiing,
we sled on pink scissors, we sink
our eyebrows into the full speed sun

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FOR A FRIEND, ON OUR BIRTHDAY

the repeating headaches that started on tuesday,
in me, haven’t left and i don’t think will until saturday
when i will be so busy with my youthful screaming
nothing could bother me to begin with

the darkly-wooded and plantless arrangements
of your kitchen preclude me from thinking
fondly of the afterlife even if i could hear
the husk cherries outside no longer rotting

the american spirit is leaking
tobacco &
i need a small man
to crawl inside and vacuum my
careful, wool pockets. i will pay him
with a single one of your blonde hairs
and he will go to bed that night richer

we have to move gently as we
jangle on our feet

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SO SLOWLY YOU HAVE TO THINK HARD OF DANCING

before you realize it’s moving at all. I’ve folded
paper into irises, four-legged boxes , hawks—
Oh Lord
our strength, the same one wild spiders have;
is that we
could be a little uglier and no one would notice.
chewed elbows, poor sponges,
nausea velvetizing:
finding my mother playing
dead in the grass outside of Oak Brook Public Library
dazzlingly crumpled. I have stood locked outside
her. Her black, dead hair the closet I hunched in—
she sat up in the grass, we became dogs, and silence
was accurate. I was her most dangerous proportion;
while she sat up in the grass:
“see how much
you love me?” come here— I’m in
the arms of a straight-backed chair