The Titanic

by Kenneth Radu

A doll’s head, chipped by salt,
green from drowning,
stares up from the ocean floor.

Fish swim among the prisms
of unfallen chandeliers
and, phosphorescent, glow.

An electric eel pirouettes
inside a sailor’s skull,
then slides out a socket.

The ship is broken
like a sunken monument,
soft to touch and moving,

a trick of lights under water
and the camera’s searching
eye. What moves is memory:

a woman’s white muslin
in the breeze, badminton
cocks slapped back and forth,

an orchestra tuning, a dance,
good-night Mother, iceberg
and black water breaking in.

Dracula

by Kenneth Radu

Last night, sleek with surfeit,
I read a disquisition
about sex and death.

The scholar, whose ancestors
burned witches and locked
their loins against

stray desires, footnotes
my perversions, annotates
the unconscious drives,

writes elegantly about
the bite in the neck
and transfiguration.

The fun’s in the piercing,
it seems, alluding to Sebastian
of the ambiguous arrows,

or the way men and women
spread their legs when
the moon announces dinner.

But before, between courses,
intercourse is the last desire
on my mind when I whet my teeth.

Poisoned by denial, only Calvinists
concoct theories of kinky sex
out of dead bodies and folklore.

My purpose is the poetry
of resurrection, the power
of living longer than God.