Paul Lieber

 

Gender informs my work in subliminal ways. The things I am interested in, the topics I might write about. Perhaps, the coarseness with which I experience the world.
 
There is a density, a dumbness that is comfortably masculine. Intelligence and grace seem feminine. I don't say this to attract women but it does seem apparent. I know this observation might seem general and stupid to some, but they probably are mostly men.

BACK

 

Cock

she talks like a girl
not girly talk. it’s a generous
considerate sound and
sports her frilled dress and heels
like incidentals, carries herself
as if those genitals
don’t indicate a thing.
she’s my son’s girfriend and they are
tender.
I think about
touching those breast implants, running
my tongue up her legs but
her dick swings
like a chandelier
though it’s taped to the inner thigh
somewhere.
it’s that dick i can’t
stop thinking of
the scrotum and testicles
like a clydesdales’
like a great danes’
hanging there oddly with nothing to do
ignored like those distant
mountains that irrigate
the lower plains.
I give her a Thai fan
and she says thank you
opens it, waves the air
as if she’s entitled
to the breeze
she creates.

 

Division

I head for the unabridged
Websters’ to look up foreskin.
It’s a terminal fold that covers
the crown. Although he’s cut
twelve thousand, I’m concerned.
Is it as definable as an ear lobe,
a lower lip? If there is a slip
will it separate my son
from a piece
of sentient flesh,
a rush
of blood?
The rabbi, slash, mohel
rolls his sleeve to explain,
the penis, his wrist,
a Ralph Lauren sleeve, the foreskin.
I’m saying rabbi show me
again until I don’t know who
suggests we depart friends,
waiting the ritual,
into the alcove where he says
let’s see the goods
with a glimmer for a grown up
penis. I pull mine out and
he points to a slight pink line
lassoing the stem,
a safe distance,
a relief
from more sensitive spots.
I ask about the scar at the tip.
He says, oh, everyone has that.
For forty years this error
was my covenant with God.
Things fall into a place
when a gauze of red Manoshevitz
kisses my son’s lips and eyes
register a sweet distraction
from the swift clean slice.


Sports Bar in Santa Monica

We’re cocked at a video game
where you race at top speed
in the city of your choice.
I select New York. Sam in my lap
drops two quarters and we’re off
past a sign that reads Cross
Bronx Expressway, above
the neighborhood I grew up in.
We’re doing ninety around a slum
as we skid into the opposite lane,
crash, flip and although we land upright
and poised to continue, Sam
screams the way he did when
a wide jawed dinosaur came our way
in another game. We depart
the steering wheel to settle quietly,
hockey on a big screen, one fellow
wedged and elbowed by another;
on a smaller screen football players
pile up. Sam points to one picture,
says, hockeee, to the other, says,
futbaall, then mouths, poool
as he indicates the pool table
to the right with its round mindless
balls, also numbered,
making that pleasant ping
as their colors collide.

 

 

Paul Lieber produces and hosts “Why Poetry,” a radio show on Pacifica Radio in LA, KPFK. Lieber's poems have been published in Askew, Alimentum, Eclipse, Summerset Review, Spot Lit, Solo, Beyond the Valley of the Contemporary Poets, New York Quarterly, Santa Barbara Review, and Spillway among others. He received his MFA in poetry from Antioch University, Los Angeles. He works as an actor and lives with his wife and son in Venice California.