People are Dying, But

I’m in my fifties when the officer informs me,
houses are for kissing, not parks and especially
not parks after dark, never mind that’s where
the moonlight and the stars hang out. She bores
her blinding headlights into us and barks,
are you clothed, why are your seats reclined,
what are you doing–we terrible criminals trying
to steal a little romance under Orion and Mars.
She demands to know where we live and why
we don’t go home, because houses are for kissing,
she repeats, as if I’d never thought I might kiss
you over the sink, or while paused in the doorway
handing you a book. Never mind the loveseat,
the corners, or the infamous nooks. As if I’d never
imagined the whole house being one big kisseria,
because that’s how it is when you’re in love
and want to kiss everywhere. But it’s a rough
night for the thin-lipped park policewoman
who looks like she hasn’t kissed in years, she
with the deadest beat, her short arm of the law
stretching only from her high beams to random
parked cars, as she makes her rounds in Rock Creek
Park, driving from playground to playground after dark.

*

Grief is like that

the plovers ticking this way and that, threading
the shore with their disappearing tracks,
the waves relentless, lulling, the wake
as temporary as our own wakes will be.

When they took your body away, the quarters
that weighed your eyes shut dropped
to the floor. No one wanted to touch them.

Cards stacked up by the hothouse flowers.
We’d held it together all day. Then the sky broke
open, and we were gutted like fish. Someone
brought over ice cream. I don’t remember who.

*

Christina Daub is a poet from Maryland. Her poems have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Poet Lore, Potomac Review, Stone Circle Review and others. She has been a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee.