Category: poetry

my interest was
social experimentation.
it’s why I went to college.
I  wanted to be educated on the ways
to manipulate small crowds
and because of my naivete,
I did not realize at first
that my interest in slightly
sociopathic
behavior was a reflection
and that I find,
truthfully,  serial killers
to be undeniably weak
in their compulsion.

they are artless megalomaniacs.
you could just as easily garden
with the same amount of torrid wonder.
learn to grow nightshade and then
plant it all over town
in places where people smell
flowers and pick weeds for each
other.
but these are men and
they have to be known.
I’ve always had to cross my
legs.


Mrs. Shepherd said you
cannot bet on things that talk,
Sarah, when I interjected to
share my observation that
the same formulas can be applied to people
when presenting with the same patterns over time.
they would be seen as a fixed event
because they have not wavered in
reliability yet.

another time I stated calmly to
my ethics class that the best way to enforce
a law to ensure it gets a message across
 is to just begin enforcing it.
if you believe in the death penalty
the best way to slice it
is to make a black and a white clause;
no matter what the circumstances,
calculated homicide will put you
in the electric chair and then they
wouldn’t quibble so much with semantics.

 

the first girl to shoot her hand up
was the most riled by my
callous eyebrow lift and when
she presented to me a law and order episode
where the murderer was a child,
I said kill the child.
“events #1”

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I believe in overflowing
chalice.  you believe in
holding space for growl
and distance and
your wife at night
or your girlfriend,
whomever.

you watch me lay the
dill in bowl, line the bed
with tourmaline.
run the bath with
chamomile and yarrow oil.
it’s all for nothing,
you found me but
I am full of tincture now.
the best defense is
to cripple yourself
like victim, quilled
with a shaky lip
but quilled and
squared.

what you catch about me
is the amorphous not
the heartbeat and to be
 fastidious requires
no real feeling
but constant poking at
all possibilities,
pausing with the probable
but still lusting.
almost thirsty for your
deluded thoughts,
your dilluted candor
that you say is grace
but you have bitten more of
your tongue today,
and you are now quilled
and squared in another woman’s
corner
what you meant to say was


there are some voids
that
are so insatiable you
collapse with the craving instead.
I walk for miles:
slow and black and
hungry like that,
reaching.

I am game.

“Datura Moon”

 

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I’ve been learning
performative emotion
to keep the ones I’m fettered
to warm, and to feel their
slippery manacles tease
the tops of my feet
like feathers as they pull
me.
paint my lashes black
 and they’re wet  and
shaped like little
bolts.

we watched fireflies and I
licked your earlobes,\
tried your fingers on
while I played with truths,
denied them.
felt your chest pressed against mine.
we clanked with ease
and I took in the scene of two people
unclothed and unseen
underneath some crescent
in your backyard
without friendship between them;
without people between them and I dared
to stare in a way that endures more than
deciduous planting.
I broke at the

not now
you spoke back
with a masculine fragility
I had never known     envied,
tried on later with pants,
unplucked eyebrows
and alone.
you became all red and
graceless,  I became an unwatched bull
headed to your porch,
snorting and you were
bare faced and guarded in all the ways
I have yet to learn.
I’m so obvious:

a scarlet blaze that starts with a joke,
two bodies parting,
an unreturned question that ends
with a sharp exclamation,
annihilation of something.
ends with a reminder from someone higher
to stop destroying something
to eliminate one part.
I am a wave of coercion
pulling you in and under
when I should have been
patient;
when I should have been laid in the grass
gently  next to the ant hills
where you can learn my thighs,
breasts,
spine,
toes curled without injury;
when I should have been pausing to notice
there are no people between us;
when I should have been gracious,
with you and bare-faced,
or wet cheeked.

I remove the rest of my top
and close my eyes deliberately
to show you the length
of each thorn.
wear my eyes like an arrow.
with my tongue pressed
against your chin,
my lips trace
your jaw       I say
more softly
than before:
you know,
I have never
become divine without first
becoming storm.

 

“Scorpio”

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kitten ears and painted whiskers
tumble down my block   in rows
rehearsed
in leotards and black lace gloves.
yowls  float through
 open porches.
TV taught them how to meow\
for Kit Kats   Snickers Almond Joys
male applause.
one bends over to tie her shoe
and seduce the nearest father;
he eyes the crevice peeking through her
black tights. 


I’m dressed like Glinda the Good
Witch and hovering in a sing song
way, throwing out
Peanut Chews and
                I burned a sigil for this
she wants attention from her own father:
a photograph or upward twirl,
burning torch,
purr in his lap while he strokes her hair
without fetish
or just acknowledgment that she is the prettiest
girl dressed up as space cat,
those others are unoriginal, just regular
cats, he says I love yours best
and pats her on her head
and there is no offense taken.

she will grow up  to be even smaller
than  she supposed:
silent    enduring still,
not awake in her own power,
her own body
like a stillborn tiger:
expelled with a tear,
coated in the blood of her mother’s
screams as no one prepared her for the
slow cooked torture, ecstasy,
that followed expelling something
 parasitic and omniscient,
a future rival.
she lands on the floor
fetal,
the thing no one wanted
without even a congratulations! bouquet
or a lotus to symbolize
finality.

we aren’t worthy of those feline
 endowments
thrust upon us when we are playing
mole     carcass on the doormat
aborted from our burrowed holes
for something more vociferous
to grab onto and finish,
our kinship;  the lions.
we are nothing like our ancestors.
our virile mothers
who know nothing of preening,
who care nothing for tail feathers.
they take what they want.
they don’t grovel at their fathers’ feet.
they honor the slaughter,
the one they started
before the harvest and pay homage
to the sky for the water provided
before they stuff themselves
with vision.

we lack vision.
we just paint our nails black,
and dress like witches,
talk shit;
start shit for derision.
and we keep turning to our men
for forgiveness when we are wayward
or won’t marry them
or stand up when they
crush our necks and they
say the rope is coming next.
we should be
stuffing our faces with the meat they provided,
learning fillet knives,
smiling like shovels and
burying them.


“Halloween”

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I value freedom most.
I wander
in both eyes and body
always collecting
but devoted to the last,
even fixated
but also loose with most
acquaintances stressing
compromise, meaning
yielding to my rule
and enjoying breaks,
enjoying screaming.

favoring
opportunity over floor,
I value the sky and
currents more than houses.
 the ephemeral in
our lives while also walking
three inches higher than I am,
on tiptoe,
touching things,
making threats in the air
when angered and
you say I am

 for-mi-da-ble,
           a bit virulent
is how you say it and
before we seek the advantageousness
of everything, it’s Friday
 and we are
 processing hard truths.
the way silence hits
mostly and my hand
opening, the spontaneity
of losing things.
tell me,
where do you keep
your pocketknife?

 life is rushing and swamps
with its shades of
blue; azure
  (you name things)
sky, or cobalt fluid
or nightmare
like a wall of nail polish
you’re reading every
dressed up inch of you.
your rehearsed malignance.
your wry contribution
with your cocked smile
to hide your jealous
sulk.

the moon moves
from womb
to waste
to task those
unsewn wounds
 and you embrace things now
with reticence
but you’re open to the epitaph
scrawled across the rock hard
eyelid
       temperance
that means patience, 
my Venus in Leo
is running.
you made him carve something else
across
your eyes that night
on Jupiter:
          I remember everything.

but you didn’t want to be
so right and you didn’t really
ask
 for things,      usually
you just opened a door
and walked in but
you made it clear
as you rummaged through
 the closet smelling him,
you are always someone’s
secret. you are
unconditional when furtive
but frigid and passing
like a northern mist
otherwise.

 

“venus in 12th house”

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I wish I had more words for
 “terrorized”
tossing jumpers from my dollhouse,
that may have been where I learned
to cut my hair like my brother
but I first
learned how to get undressed:

the boy in the bed asking
me to try on something that
slips off and
now I’m in tight pants
and loose sweaters and
just another verse
picking at its stitches,
grunting from the dark and
taking educated guesses at the Rorschach blot
that spreads across its skirt
when she is strut.
but writing with a vocal fry;
a sort of deflection, uptalk and
cadence, downplaying
it with rhythm as you
try to capture the moment
you were knees first on
a pink and white daybed
as he showed you all the ways
to take it;
passive pistil,
this is what men want;
humiliation of
all the little violations
that add up to today
without one strong word
or accurate verb
to describe the way a knife
sticks for a second and you moan
the wrong way.

what sounds better to you?
I say over coffee, trying to
finish some titles,
possibly in love but also
possibly 

.“besieged” or “PTSD”
or simply
“raped?”

“the act of naming things”

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I read a note out loud to myself:
everything that is really hard
is going to save your life
and a blackbird landed on the branch
outside my living room
window.
still, their eyes small and
sharp
waiting to dive,
waiting for the buzz of cicadas
to start again.
that reminds me,

I say in my head,
i’m emaciating.
I take a sip of water.
starved from the looking
without touching and
I want too much
has many meanings.
I read the words aloud again
and pour myself a thimble
of almonds.

it is first that I craft the lie.
I begin to charm him:
untie a ribbon from her
rib cage and kneel,
bind his wrists together
and lick his inner thigh.
do you believe everything I say?
I stare intently when I
ask things.

and then you become the
braced masochist
and I become
the looming hit.

“maelstrom”

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the boys I rescued
 and turned to saints;
their features outlined in
filthy thoughts    I

let them touch me with
rinsed fingertips,
watch them take great pleasure
in stroking the arches of my bare feet;
my callouses holding proof
of the miles I have walked
to hug the west.
better than my own docile traces
of lust pressed against them;
my own famished touch
as I dip into my cleft and whimper
because I can’t come big enough.
that sweaty heart of male violence,
male wants,
eroticized guns,
learn the art of being
enthroned in your
sex.
those biceped tongues,
those blue black nights where I fuck to get the
battle out so they don’t
 accidentally drown a garden
they were supposed to love.

 

other nights I do it hard,
grip the keys and shout sometimes;
let the room fill with copper, lick myself
from the chain,
taste my own
domination;
my submission to myself and
let you understand the dangers of
eroticized pain;
the art of being bled
for your sex.

 

smudged lip gloss
on their bare cheeks,
hosts
my undoing.
       teach me how to love like war
my persistent
bleating
inner child,
hands out and
crawling to you,
barely fed, swallowed by
red     lonesome and
under you,
next to you,
over you,
overdone,

 

but yet still a shadow
at your nightstand
waning in your rising
sun. 

 

“the martyr” (#7)

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 once upon a time
I floated
through rooms.
we were ghosts
draped in human furs and
red felt flowers
to keep ourselves warm and
using illness as an anchor,
I was a grave when I wanted to be
a stove. 

you
twirled to the sound of my fluttering
 lashes: broken and
 sloppy     untimed;
the way you glanced towards me
on street corners.
I could tell by the
way you held yourself,
the books
and your heavy eye contact,
a light coat and no gloves
 and no verbal complaint
about the term addict
 being thrust upon us that
you were cold 

and you
 didn’t just act strange,
you possessed it,
            the leaves are turning,
I sniff patiently.      sip hot water with
lemon and basil.
someone sang on a makeshift stage of
upside down milk crates.
you looked sidelong, gingerly,
an afterthought that led me here.
I played with my hem and revocation,
 silence that halts
you make me feel young, I mouth
to the ground.
you returned the gesture with
a prepared grin and returned to
accompanying yourself.
the ground fell away and
I was a picked thorn;

some perspiring flower,
I knelt in a corner
stem growing from a red plastic cup,
cowering and open
knowing this crowd rocked you
in her drunk cradle.
you walked by with a glass
and no one else and
a relentless
first sight and I’m swallowed,
staggered,
swollen with ideas of our
first life.
come first light
I will be buried in drool,
wandering around squinting,
tiny eyes and barely a
 move, I watch you pass
 effortlessly
like my continual gap years.
turning to give each other one last glance
over our now bronzed shoulders,
I adjust my strap so you think about skin
 (I’m swimming in it)

 

and that chilly way we do:
show a little set of teeth and move on
in a pool of cool air and unresolved
 disorder, I keep coming back
to the idea
 of meeting
you.

i need that.
like a shark
needs blood.

 

“pool”

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     “I have no future plans,”
I began calmly.

 I am arms outstretched
walking nowhere but with
ardency so
I am labeled,
whimsical and manic,
a troubled woman
not to marry and
like a wound up
fairy, the character that
keeps the music box

spinning.
until it’s boring:
the repetition,
the posing,
the pink smile and
matching slippers
leaping from her
gold coiled post
sprinkling glitter,
growing nerves and
ankles that bend flat
to walk to run to
crawl

 people like me because
 I have
 no plans,
am honest about it,
resplendent teeth when
writing sonnets to the men
and a sense of fury when
reflecting on affairs.
big,
have wings that carry weapons.    I
hear in a distance
   someone repeat it
I use intimidation as a tactic
to seize opportunity
well,
I am blessed with delusive
lips and
 I also use
 black magic.

“seven of cups”

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