Fragile

Glass delusion...is a mistaken belief that all
or part of one's body has turned to glass.
                    — Boston Globe book review

My hands are not replicas, science museum displays
with ice-chip fingernails, pipettes curved into veins
beneath transparent skin. Their glass is deep blue, like the hand
of Krishna waving to his followers. I imagine followers, too,
protecting my delicate fingers from the sharp protrusions
of daily life, the railings, park benches, and hastily closed doors.
You, of the meat hands, have no idea. Skin and flesh grow back,
but glass, once broken, is reparable only in the crudest way.
Those with broken hands beg on the streets, like lepers in India;
their jagged digits frighten away all but the most compassionate.
I need my protective entourage, but fear they tire of me. One day,
I will release them with an act of love, free my frangible hands
from their padding, raise them high above my head, and bring them
down on a concrete wall, shattering them into pieces of night sky.



The Elephant in the Room

I don't want to be here, either,
bulk pinched between sofa and television,
tension an ache in my bowels. Worst
of all is being invisible, the man's
anger prodding my flank like a sharp stick,
the woman's sorrow chaining my legs
to the hardwood floor. If ignored much
longer, I fear I will go mad, yank
the iron pegs from the floor, rip the stick
from the man's cruel hands with my muscular
trunk. But I am immobilized by their
denial, have no more substance than
a gray cloud of moisture and gas that
threatens thunder and lightning, but
delivers only a dull, steady rain.

Ekleksographia:
Wave Three

May, 2010

Poetry

Lawrence Kessenich

Lawrence Kessenich won the 4,000-euro first prize at the 2010 Strokestown International Poetry Festival. He has published poetry in Cream City Review, Atlanta Review, Chronogram, Conclave, Ibbetson Street and Wilderness House. His chapbook Strange News was published by Pudding House Publications in 2008. Mr. Kessenich was an editor at Houghton Mifflin Company in Boston for ten years, where he read for the publisher's annual poetry series and worked on Selected Poems: Anne Sexton and Anne Sexton: A Biography. He also worked with two Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award-winning novelists and many other fiction and nonfiction writers. He lives in Watertown, a suburb of Boston.