Corey Habbas

I Know a Woman

Beneath a crescendo
she fans herself with notes,
wind's hidden syntax.

Something bays at it
raucous made-up girls at night
men arching their necks,

a man's bike chained to a
bosom gaudy with cleavage.
Girl's pay. Boy's night out.

The woman-ness crouches.
Wigged men read her abdomen.
Glass ceiling of what--
the oscillating black and blue sky.

Letters on the scales
reach everything but his heart.
In Marseilles it rains

people, lovers, candles.
Isolated cigarette
bringing up life and

all her boats are docked.
except for one--the plush green
leaf at the current.


Portrait of Olga

On any occasion when a girl might have cause to wear a white dress
but the time has passed, somewhere inside may be Dora Maar
matching a shadow against the white wall.

She always resides out of sculpture. The smell of turpentine
dissuades a venturing out into the rounded bodice of a full woman.

She slips back under the point of the sun's triangular ray
and how unfaithfully the colors mix in light; the flat orange
moon falls into the solid lake, the tree's oval mast hides her
view from the sky's flat plane, her long rectangular legs
dangle like Marie-Therese from the line tied to the square garage.

Her eyes only sway side to side, or out. We look
in but our gaze hits a black wall in a star field of pricks,
concealing with primary shapes all the brute innocence about us.

The Dance of Veils, side to side, never drapes around the men,
and the bullet of Jacqueline, just a small tear in the canvas.