Two Poems

Portrait of Sunset District

She tries to rape
God in the slice between
a bar and another

I sit
seething and
she tauts a cloth
to the open parts

of the sky–
God falls backward
into her like

a stomach. She can
sweep it into the alley now–
let the rocks roll off

her in beads. I wait in
the left bar to give her
something

we can Eat without it
having died or to be

dead before its in us.
I am alone without her now
because I undid my

own blouse, matched my
plumes of breast with her
eyes–no

sheathless thing
to my neck. Nothing to my
neck. I should have known

She’d only want what she’d
take.

She’s a coroner’s sheet atop god.
The lights in the left bar
are green. And now blue.

And now another sort of blue.
The only way to get red is to
stick myself through the door

where the guy does the lights,
kill him dead and fiddle

with the buttons.

Elliot and Charlie

“Some certainly were wanting to be needing to be doing what he was doing,
that is clearly expressing something.”
-Gertrude Stein, “Matisse”

Unto Charlie
suicide is hoisted

His women get pictures of death
by emerald glass The cancer is
carseated like a baby The whores
imbue the chewed roads with smoke
End him in a pile in
himself The things he used to
put in his mouth turn to
stranglers.

No one even starts
on Elliot–

the addict’s
addict who
we’d been
alone in
rooms with
A pilled
romancer too
busy penceling
his favorite
things to
be pricked
and killed
by that
we answer
ourselves the
question of
him when
his death
finally ends
after years

of splaying
itself

The first of his many goals
was death
He could not do any of
the others
until he did that one But
Charlie wore
death like some thing he could
not give
to himself and even then he
fronts it
A new scene Some of us
must cook
down the gold if we want
trophies.

Khari Dawson is a multi-genre writer based in the Washington, DC area. She attended the University of San Francisco where she received a BA in Creative Writing and Film Studies. Her work has been published in Poetry Magazine and the literature textbook Conjuring Worlds