I used to be an empty room.
Now, I’m filled with things,
stored with things,
other people’s things and
so many things
to dust.

I spent the winter
dusting,
rearranging.
I spent the winter
lost in a learned childhood drawl
where I mumbled yeah,
uh huh, where I hid my hair and
pants behind my dollhouse,
where I was on all fours in a daybed,
where I was stuck inside a moment
like a picture
except it all moves past you and
you stand,
captured

watching him; his
excerebration process,
mine,
without anesthesia or
any explanation.
don’t touch me anymore
what becomes of disorder
when ignored,
when resolved?
unhinged.
remembered hair behind the dollhouse,
remembered yeast infections,
temper tantrums “without provocation”
they said.
remember you never learned to trust.

I started roaming giant sandboxes
underground
following the Atlantic’s soporific
siren voice
to find something that called to me
long ago.
Something vague.
Something warm.
I’m unwrapping the resin layer,
I’m coughing up the heads of dolls,
I’m moistening the cipher.
I’m coming back, I’m coming
back, bandages
off.
I’m walking forward.
This is how they’d rather have it.

I once was a space of
bright, blue lakes,
but now I’m
bursting with black magic.

“the unwrapping”

you’re wild eyed and
doleful and
absolutely beautiful;
an encumbrance to my chastity.

you mention  my smile
is bright and sharp,
threatening to steal the star’s
twinkling thunder.
rocks come unraveling but I’m focused
on  the way your
mouth talks about me.
you move closer and I
move behind something.
three billion comets crash the sky
but I’m focused on my knees,
how they feel and how they
look in moonlight.
my mouth is a river of whispers;
body deep blue and
impenetrable.
your crystal eyes flare when you
talk.

              Look up!

the moon has caught fire.
your hand retreats from my lower back
and I glare at the adversary
that has stolen a second of my night,
a second of attention away from me.
today is special for two reasons so
I stay crouched and
the sky flares like jaundice and I
retreat to a past life.

I look like a year ago Sunday,
like a shadow of a hugless child,
a big, bawling bowl of acerbic bone ash,
like a forest fire fixed in a flicker
caught in a speck of my dead brother’s eye.
I look like a mirror of someone
watching her own upsurge
of implacable sorrow.
sorry,  I let go of his hand.
I’m always so sorry.
so hurriedly racing memories against my
own borrowed time;
so sharp and sore and
mostly unheard,
so tangled in pieces of us.
so now what?

so now you play mortar:
you keep it together
so I can  finally come undone.
I’ve always got running shoes
and an idea
and one rolling tear I’ve got to get
away from.
so very torn,
so splintered and hefty,
so tempted to hold this
just as it was that
final Christmas
but I’m too
slippery palms and
soft-eyed and strident and
sidelong gazing and first uncontrolled movement
of the century that renders
me suddenly
I have to tell you something.

absolutely
inconsolable.

“lyrids”

miseries I keep:

seasonal allergies,
pictures of me thin
and  tan and
glowing
at seventeen.
dormant addiction.
overwatered plants that are never
bringing buds to blossom–
never springing back.
shards of broken glass
in the carpet
somewhere missed ;
then in heel,
then too late in trash.

insatiable sugar cravings and
the cavities they take,
insomnia and the
quakes of sobs
repressed but twisted
into nightmare at the
first minute of rest.
the first taste of irreversible loss
(my brothers ashes swinging
from my neck),
a hex in teeth and
ideas of you glancing towards me,
towards us,
just that once.

me,
back turned
at the time.
me, always clouded
in black.
me,
opening my mouth
and releasing it.

“memory”