Pete Lee


Jack's

the guys all like
it here all they

do is wish for
coffee and here

it comes pulling
two nice full cups

of freshly perked
waitress sporting

a cream uniform
and a sugar smile.

*First published in The Underwood Review


Library Termites

are bookish

the workers
devour Marx
and Steinbeck
swarm over
Upton Sinclair

the soldiers
eat breathe and
defecate Sun Tzu

meanwhile the queen
plows through romance
novel after
romance novel

all her suitors
bore

*First published in Nedge


Moulage

Where did that book go? Elsewhere, out, away,
dragging you in. And I tell you I'm glad

you're a contraction. Only one chapter
of the mystery now remains for you

to leave at my door, the one about the...
Yesterday it was a corpse in a copse,

then it got dead quiet: blue leaves sparkling
like an MRI of the author's bliss.


Claws

The light's gone weird
at midday, in midsummer:

those green pomegranates
might have been painted

on the branch that bends
to set down the wine-

red ones, concerned mother
captured in stop-action;

a single leaf scuttles
across the grass, yellow

crab on a green beach;
an elm has shot straight up

from the ground and burst
into a display of leaves...

Autumn must be calling:
long-distance to be sure

but as sure as gravity,
will brown and bring down

to a gone-brown beach
a murder of crabs fleeing

the wind, seeking safety
in each other's claws.

*First published in freefall


Fourteen Love Projects

1. the ball cap of the world keeps sliding over my eyes
2. Victoria has a very proper name
3. my fingers listen to her in ten different tongues
4. I shall now predict project #5 in a prayer to aliens
5. the prayer comes false. c'est la vie, Homo sapiens!
6. ready neither to play ball nor to quench my eyes' thirst
7. her smile is like a simile
8. next to her, my toes are clenched and breathless
9. the proper name for my tongue's place is Victoria
10. the wet concrete of love flows towards the abstract...
11. now tell me why you killed Victoria
12. because she reversed her usual associative qualities?
13. she could be as abrupt as the buzzer on a game show
14. I sought victory...and I am Victoria's

*First published in Illuminations