Robert F. Gross- Three Poems

Those Who Serve

Some suburb of D.C.  Unfinished basement.

By the hotwater heater and washer/dryer.

Ashes of his Jack Russell (knew forty-five words)

in a plywood urn on the dining room table.

Cats and tawses and floggers and whips

he used on me. He said Give me your back.

I need someone to take pain for me.  I did.

Dad in Arlington with a space for Mom

Military family and effects of Agent Orange.

He said Sacrificial stallion on the altar.

Ate Chinese take-out when it was over.

Read fortunes from cookies.  Put me

On the commuter line. Drove back.

Checked up on his Polish war bride Mom.

Birth of Venus

a different sky makes a different ocean

this one a scribble of its gray-black self

where waves pull apart and make a hollow

before falling back exhausted to pull again

there can be no intimacy with that one

blood spray sea foam lobbed-off testicles

knots tight as incest and parricide slacken

tighten up around the naked fact of wanting

headed from Labrador across the deep desert

headless battered torso bleak and swelling

Dover Beach Diodes

it killed them but we hear their razor voices

transmitted on some toxic low-tide expanse

the console was blasted away they remain

big as phone booths glassy crustaceans

monolithic vacuum tubes orange filaments pulsing

lessons they were taught by rote with electroshock

AHLOVELETUSBETRUETOONEANOTHER

a last ditch effort to transform the wreck of

the medusa lusitania hope titanic ship of state

through thrift commitment and realizing things

could be worse like monstrous plankton stranded

they give off phosphorescence of decay the half-

lives of what they were promised and settled for

we who jumped ship changed our names feel shame

WHILEIGNORANTARMIESCLASHBYNIGHT

Robert F. Gross, poet, playwright, director, performance artist, and nomad, is currently exploring Los Angeles, after performing in Minimal Martha and escape clause in Philadelphia with Julius Ferraro earlier this summer. He has published in a number of journals, including BoySlut, The Camel Saloon, Danse Macabre, Sein und Werden, Epigraph, and Dead Snakes, and is always eager to perform before an open mic.