Aaron Belz is the author of The Bird Hoverer (BlazeVOX, 2007) and Lovely, Raspberry (Persea, 2010).
He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.
---------
Love
She says her sister
has a crush
on George W. Bush,
keeps a stash
of photos of him from
when he was in the Air Force.
“My sister is
totally conservative,”
she adds. I tell her
I don’t have
as much of a crush
on Bush as her sister does
but that I did once see
Penélope Cruz on a bus.
She looks at me.
I smile:
“Cruz on bus.
I had a Cruz on bus.”
“It doesn’t work,”
she says. “Neither
does ‘No Child Left Behind,’”
I say, “not really.”
“Yes it does,” she says.
It’s dark. We kiss.
“Air National Guard,”
I add, breathless.
“I love you,”
she finally admits
and tackles me
hard to the ground.
Stella
A woman, eating nothing but Viet Nam,
sat in the shadow of a bushel of parsnip.
She beckoned me to explode daily.
Upon closer inspection, she graphed
moon events without any sort of lake
effect. I said, “That’s what’s called
the ‘lake effect.’” She said, “I bought
these balls in Bali on sale.” She winced.
I cleaned my watch. We urged the stars.