Deitmar Trommeshauser (dtrommes@direct.ca) hails from Maple Ridge, BC, is 39, has published in _Waves_ and _Writing_ and is currently at work on a novel called "My Life with the Sandman."




outlaw in cell #27


Life here
grows up through bare rock
pushes roots as raw and red
as the rust behind his eyes


Farrah Fawcett lies spread
eagled above his cot
stares for hours at her paper nipples
goosefleshed against the bikini top,
his ashtray full of butts
spent bullets
smoke rises to her thighs


in the afternoons
he feeds sugar
to ants


all day hears toilets flushing
others watch him
take down his pants


at night
they pass out magazines
chooses Playboy
every time
his ass hurts


there is a photograph
hanging
in his mother's parlor
of him on a horse
his father's large
hands on the reins


he is fourteen and ready
for the rope




2 thoughts of a distant summer



1

"I do love you,"
she said on the beach.
"But you burn easily.
Your skin is too delicate."
and she proceeded to bury me in sand.


and I thought of an onion
with a hundred layers of skin
each one pale and transparent.


you can look right into the center of an onion
right into the heart
with its tiny green viens
each one a river
and know where they all lead.


and just when I thought to tell her
where the river would end
she buried my eyes in sand
cut the onion in two
peeled away layer
after layer
till in her hands
she held an eye
hers tearless
mine on their way to the ocean
the wet rocks.



2


Waiting for the rain
my two plants on the windowsill
have curled
twisted themselves in brown.




valentine poem


this is the day set aside for lovers
one day
washed in red.


I draw pictures on frosted windows
it's hard to imagine
warm hearts in this temperature when
the body freezes
from the outside in.


I believe the warmest part of the body
is the eye
even at 30 below, water flows
freely

the heart
pumping




"a widow in her bedroom, N.Y.C. 1963"
from a photo by Diane Arbus



she paints gardens

and blue

birds

on clay


heaven

a collection on her shelf


at night

before she goes to bed

she puts a jar of roses
in the window like a torch.

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