Poem-a-Day

is up The Met’s stone steps,
so many that I have trouble collecting 
my girthy tourist’s breaths

and my palms, all sweaty, 
smeared with ink 
from his crinkled face,

wrinkled in the brochure, and
to think I’m too underdressed 
for a pocket square,

so up goes the tee’s hem
to blot my forehead dry
enough, when, of course,

there goes my furry gut’s apron
for everyone to see 
it unfurling like the carpet

Claudia Schiffer stomped
toward that one Lagerfeld photoshoot:
her mean mien

of a pouty puss made up 
to an almost-
black face, blond braided back

under a theoretical afro, 
an aphrodisiac, you know, 
what men want, a diasporic taste

in their ladies: hot 
enough to boil a stew pot, thin 
as ladle handles, good cooks

in the bedroom—yet 
still Lagerfeld wanted
supremacy’s payload, to not see

that which was too colored 
for his pleathered hands to hold 
not but to plunder, and so here we are

staring up at his sketched waifs,
craning our necks
to take in the niched wall,

each gown an upturned urn
shelved in its own alcove, 
dressed in nothing

but archive’s bleached light, 
the mannequins’ clean faces 
looking down on us—

crowded together 
like the staggered heads 
of snaggleteeth 
in his stitched mouth.