LEONA, LEONE a six-character play

ROBERT MOSES
THE MAN WITH THE BRIEFCASE A WENCH
LEONA
HUNGRY PERSON LEONE

In a field of fallen roses,
you acquire the decency
to circle the city
like a dog chasing herself

He traveled all day
bringing with him
everything he needed to return
home

To every mother
blessed with a nose
useful enough to become
a straw

Leona, find me here
with a thousand questions
for me and one
for God

What pleases us
returns us back like
hunger, an infinite
scathing field of desire

Leone, who
Was always his own
Assistant

The city was too tall
for the unfortunate
in your interpretation
of violence

But, sir, what’s the issue
my ass spread across two
subway seats

Twisted on the ledge
hovering over
dusty do good for nothing

I and I and I what
else is there to say to
You?

It would mean everything
And nothing to be full
Of you until

To leave the house
every day only to ensure
it can comfortably contain
emptiness

This is a subway poem
dedicated
to your private sense of public
devastation

We planted freesias,
hoping they would
enlist us to
tend to them

Listless day
to chew on your
husband’s big toe

An uncompromising
view of yourself, Leona,
in this capacity

Continuous gravel enters
the office building, moves us
to our desk

You’re really no better
than the smooth objects
you revere, you ornamental
fool

Unable to pull apart sticky
headlines, flipped through the fingers
of your last lover

Slurred trapped shut mouth
hopes to present
you with this quarter’s result

Talk shit, if you must,
but I dare you to find a better city in which
to take a shit

I sat still here waiting
for the absence of strong smells
knowing it was a sign of fertility

Clueless clever but
clear, this is the incident best described
in poetry

Dear mayor, do you remember
the vestiges of our former commandments?
Do not touch what isn’t owed to you

Soberer than the last villain,
I would like to somberly
be remorseful, Robert

To have no name under
which to file your taxes

Blowing kisses to the drama
of the tourists who came here
to feel drama of a harsh life

Fruit of my loin, bearer of
my grunt

If there’s nothing left
but to listen
to your stomach declare itself
hungry

What useful life should be considered
when estimating the amortization of
intangible assets?

The cast was an estimate
for the distance we needed
from others to still feel connected

Having been nothing
but your favorite person’s
capitulation of sainthood

Mapping the routes to
the interminable project
that binds us

The edge ran wide,
an unorthodox boundary
from Leone

The distance was terrible
because it moved us
along

The edge held steady,
the orthodox lips of
Leona

The devil found ways
to get us to work
for less than $3.50 a day

Us that stands between us
was the possibility of
our escape

Nothing, sir, is lesser
than my body as
a series or errands

An arrangement of
self to complete
the task at hand

What was leftover
was hunger,
obviously

The demand of this
remnant is stronger
than you can imagine

The meaning of nothing
is this terse sense
of independence

It is a multilingual
declaration of an ardent
drive

A complicated loss
of what it means to be a saint

A choral argument
to continue to walk
on the back of a stranger

A ceaseless silence at the hands of a
radical invention of ours

It begets and balloons
and subsists at the will
of something like
organization

I am interested
in how we got
here

An expenditure
chasing the tail
of leisure

To stay attuned
to the limit between the
us

Is to practice
the performance of
togetherness

Leona, how did you meet
Leone?

Were you punctual in
your restlessness to love them?

The invisibility is actually
the material that binds
them

They said we had forever
to suspend innovation
for the sake of new endings

Could the freesias
bloom in this petrified
state?

Am I really time
itself, a pathetic
insistence to go on?

Solitude too goes on
in binding us to
a decent sense of organization

A taste of the center
is maybe what dislodges
this argument

And yet virtually
nothing can stay there,
Leone

The roses fell,
a proposition to stay
attuned to a fluttering
sense of time

My will cannot break
with saints here to organize
my potential

A nose points
us in the direction in
which we move

Your own body
as a physical anchor
when you sit

But you are not whole
because you imagine
other ways of being

And you have
a whole mouth
to feed beneath your
nose

Surely our being
together is the widening
we crave

Come here, then, and
tell me how full you felt
when we first met

Stay still and involve me
in this joy of imagining
being next to you

Shift in your seat and feel
the weight of the bench underneath
inch us slowly closer
together

For the time being, we slacken
and feel
alongside everything

Insofar as this is the
circular condition
of possibility