note: The sonnenizio was invented in Florence in the thirteenth century by Vanni Fucci as an irreverent form whose subject was usually the impossibility of everlasting love. Dante retaliated by putting Fucci into the seventh chasm of the Inferno as a thief. Originally composed in hendecasyllabics, the sonnenizio gradually moved away from metrical constraints and began to tackle a wider variety of subject matter. The sonnenizio is fourteen lines long. It opens with a line from someone else’s sonnet, repeats a word from that line in each succeeding line of the poem, and closes with a rhymed couplet.

Ex-boyfriends

EX-BOYFRIENDS

They hang around, hitting on your friends

or else you never hear from them again.

They call when they’re drunk, or finally get sober,

they’re passing through town and want dinner,

they take your hand across the table, kiss you

when you come back from the bathroom.

They were your loves, your victims,

your good dogs or bad boys, and they’re over

you now. One writes a book in which a woman

who sounds suspiciously like you

is the first to be sadistically dismembered

by a serial killer. They’re getting married

and want you to be the first to know,

or they’ve been fired and need a loan,

their new girlfriend hates you,

they say they don’t miss you but show up

in your dreams, calling to you from the shoeboxes

where they’re buried in rows in your basement.

Some nights you find one floating into bed with you,

propped on an elbow, giving you a look

of fascination, a look that says I can’t believe

I’ve found you. It’s the same way

your current boyfriend gazed at you last night,

before he pulled the plug on the tiny white lights

above the bed, and moved against you in the dark

broken occasionally by the faint restless arcs

of headlights from the freeway’s passing trucks,

the big rigs that travel and travel,

hauling their loads between cities, warehouses,

following the familiar routes of their loneliness.

Dance

DANCE

When you are finally, magically, able to clone

yourself into several identical women,

so that each one can move toward a man

who’s been waiting for his turn

to come around for the first time, or maybe again,

won’t you be happy then,

all of you together in a lustrous ballroom,

each woman wearing her distinguishing number,

the judges scoring everyone the same, music spilling

from the bandstand, the men thrilled

to be near you, each one whispering

a different pet name, each one polishing

with his black shoes a perfect circle of floor

while he raises you up, holding your

hips in his hands, gazing at you with his brown

or mottled green eyes, looking down

with his startling blue ones, taking you into a corner

then spinning you out toward the center

where the light from the mirrorball

splinters over your skin, sidereal