Category: poetry

how to lean into the sharp points.

ooh

I am here during the dance of wolves:
pitch black,
some hooded room of knives.
talk of betrayal,
and me blindfolded
without warning.

the past
come slowly dragged:
it’s
weighty and pressured,
almost settled at this depth
in acceptance of its rot,
its forfeit but we are
curious about causes.
so there’s a forced decompression
and chipping sides and
losing even more aesthetic,
a film developing as its
exposed to air
 like a sunken ship
exhumed solely for gawking,
touching, petting for its
tectonic power, I am a compressed rage
expanding into tower,
the tallest feline in the room
and I demand method
and production.
I am big like sun rays,
just as far, true,
 but warm.

my cancer in the 12th.
 my house
guarded by a tiny scorpion
so no one knows how
to step and
what else?
you want to ask to hear
the most assured yes:
this is 6.

not previously numbered.
you are an arithmomaniac
because you count your worth
in things and people and
to hoard both things
you need numbers.
lead a couple lambs
to slaughter.
have him drink directly from
your ceremonial wine glass
left most days hidden.
clear but for the black writing
and polka dots:
“not every witch is
from Salem” and he makes a joke
says because we’re not in
 Salem
and you say,
I’m not from

Salem and you’re halfway
to the spider now.


“6.” or “full moon dinner party in cancer”

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what does all of this
mean to you?
she waves her hand
to no one. 

you say it’s important,
ask me to tell it in
“linear order”
but how can I get away with
things telling stories like
that? and besides,
I have survived time
and cage and aged
in linear order.
my proof
    (flex a ripped tricep)
is endless strength,
brimming veins
that have learned how to
vibrate, hum, cluck,
even whistle when your girl
walks by me       I’m
a snake

through her core
and now all you see is a doe
gored in your forest and
I got to eat the whole orchard
I asked for.
are you lost or
just quiet, just hiding
from the butcher inside
it?
 you know I’m dense,

ice cold, flush with
forked tongue ready to puncture
someone,     i’m lush;
maintaining a sense of
dam and containment
even in my most berating
fits of temper or panic,
I manage to remain
frozen these days
like a cracking lake
you say I am
sharp and

bitter.
but underneath my skin,
that blue-lace casing,
a carnise river:
little tributaries to
the turning of the world
in linear delivery.
and you say
full of rage     and I say
ok, just wait,

you and I are from
the same place
and I start to pace
the block once more. 

III.

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sitting on the edge of the bay
 on a borrowed blanket,
I was vomiting up
 an Everclear Slurpee
and some sort of philosophy
about the closing of the day;
 the way it moved
death,
like an itinerant wave
that followed me
everywhere.
the tide crept back
and I heard you cough,
felt myself starting to drown again
and then your hand on my thigh
and then nothing at all. 

pain subsides in very
miniscule amounts
of time
if  you don’t
repeat the
 story. 

do not repeat the story

“how to be a river”

or

sit in it.

“how to be a lake”


and turning to you again, I
implore you to pick a title and
stick with it.   for me, I say:
do you like warnings or do you
like to drown?

I think at some point
you have earned the right to say
I know already because you lived it
without acquiescing to
authority so I asked
to see it first:
the river’s mouth,
even though they said
I’d never make it.

“warnings”

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I have two constant insatiable needs:
clarity and validation and I
usually get neither.

my only true constant is my suffering;
that is how I relate to others.
my suffering is a secret comfort
because it allows connection.
we only know feelings by comparison;
yours, mine, ours.
this defines humanity–
our perpetual hunger,
our perpetual processing
 about the matter,
our reaching hands,
and the inevitable suffering
 that follows.

 

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Express the value of life
in lines and
daubed charcoal.
Add the girl’s lids and tinted lashes,
fixed eyebrows,
nose,
lace collar under
overblown cloak.
Hair tucked beneath hood,
chin tucked to neck,
subtract her gloom;
then what would she do?
Harder to draw,
harder to draw something
in.
Highlight her cheekbones in rouge.
Add breath to an otherwise
achromatic lover.

Add her troubled partner in the backdrop:
blue-gray with a hint of black at the corners,
small silhouette of a rainstorm
receding over the edge of the horizon.
Add some balance to a ruminating giant.
Find and add
her absent brother.
Subtract her moans.
Erase her nose.
It’s too bull flare.
No one will take her like that.
Thin the clavicle.
Thin the waist.
Add some plum to the lips.
Add a remark.
“This will not do.”

Grab the Hi-Polymer.
Try to capture the gleam
of mistakes on her face:
birthmarks, pencil marks, oil sheen,
eraser flakes,
lines that are furrows or scars or
warrior wrinkles,
ruddy blotches on the thighs,
dry skin on the feet,
swan’s neck,
bucked teeth,
knife marks and a
revised smile.
Never trust a man with an
airbrush and a promise
the clouds whisper. 

She is flawless.
Precise.
Analogized you.
Contrast to your optimism;
your bubble of assurance
that is dominating,
that denies a compact or an inventory
and drawn in shady undertones
to hide complicated desires.
Proof of hidden bruise
shoved deep inside the confines
of gusto and canvass
come to life in the luster of pencil dust
and uncomplicated process,
 stretched wide
for the world to admire.
A deflated mirror.

She still has all her freckles
and you are noticing
a few things
about yourself.

 

“the artist”

 

 

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your house was yellow.

my house was blue and
a ten by ten box;
a cage and me trapped,
torn between watching them
pack up their stuff
from their own pact to self
and me, dripping virulence,
pushing them out.
we needed a spark,
I pounced and

shortly after,
 the railing tumbled on my
sprinting ankles,
the basement rattled and the
floorboards dropped
filling the place with the kind of emptiness
that is so dense
 it smothers.
smoke smells a lot like
 ticking minutes
if we scented time the way we
spray each other.
I hear a bark.
hope the turtle remembers how to
duck and cover.
the cat’s sure got it.

remember me as a black-winged fury
hovering over your bed at night because
 there will be nothing left by dawn
except some burning blue
cedar wood and a cheap comb
that found its way buried in the dirt.
the photo albums gone,
dusty cookbooks charred,
vanished remote controls stay hidden
and the asbestos and fiberglass ceilings
imploded despite our fear that was the
thing that would kill us.
I am left with a cancer
that gnaws through the joints
like packs of rats chewing through cables
to take the attic back.
and I need this.

I really miss your hands on me
and the convivial cluster of caterpillars
that swallowed the bark
the day in the orchard
when you held me in sullen incubation
before the devastation of the forest,
before I made way for us,
the start,
the parting and somewhere
an empty crib stays unfurnished.
someone starts an engine.
the varnish is melting and so am I.
         God gave you a chance and
              an unfinished smile.
a smoke alarm malfunctions
mocking your reluctance
to just grin and bear it,
to just open up your arms
and catch me when I jump;

                but first here comes the fish tank

catch me with all the fit I threw.
we all look like burnt books
blowing in the breeze
 and now, I too,
am wafting with the exhumed memories.
before my legs even hit the dew,
you watch me dwindle to a million floating pieces
in the cradle of tar black trees.

 

you see the contract ascertained a certain
ephemeral appeal
and I’m too thirsty to complain
about anything but the heat.
hold your breath and wait
for some other current to take me.

                    baby

there are no exits.

 

“chrysalis”

1

you can shake your fist at any
foaming coast but her
break remains unscathed,
her scorn in
waves,
her calm in
 tides,
wet snarls pacified in
moon-swept stages
depending on the time of month,
the climate or the
stage.

you are barefoot:
some pedestrian gesture of
 worship.
shrine.
avoiding the shells and
ghost crabs that litter the beach
at gloaming.
you’re wild and roaming
 again seeking to slice wrists
with guilt and urgency,
pretension,
steal the scissors from his girlfriend’s
pocket.
                    what’s it like to be a hypnotist?
take a seat.
notice your veins rock,
glisten with munition.

life’s a seething blade
and you wear yours deep in your lungs.
the ways you have learned to assuage
are more permanent in placement
if you face it when you
say it.
write it on the page.
have them sing it with
vexation.
have them say it out loud and
curse themselves.
you watched your hands become tributes
to iniquity so you ask your feet
to become your fingers
now,
nothing from your mouth
going forward.

watch your toes curl in the sand
before you start wading.
you are practicing the dying art of
self-restraint.
you are practicing
prayer, overdo
amends.
you are seeking a quiet rest
inside of  yourself.
you are seeking the
 sudden wreck
that laid you.

 

I.

0

 

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.

i begin to charm him,
untie a ribbon from her
rib cage and kneel,
tie his wrists together
and lick his inner thigh.
someone asks
and then?

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

“maelstrom”

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this is fresh.
like the last word
someone said
or you losing to find
old photographs
of you unsure of
yourself in a graveyard
set to the mountains
at sunset like you couldn’t
imagine not being there
or having that.
because it was there it was outside
and you were there.
the last time you look at a place.
the space between states,
the plane ride to your
brother’s coma
this is fresh.


this is the last time you’ve ever
seen or heard from someone.
my cool affect, my rehearsed
temperature that I am clutching,
I watched waves take things away.
do you know how close i stood to the water
that day?
the sky was black and full of lightning,
swollen with compulsion.
a tropical storm touched the
ocean and on instinct,
 it swallowed itself.
 my aunt screamed,
came to grab me and
carried us both up to the house.

i cried about a flip flop
drifting in the current on the shore,
begging her to go back.
you can’t tell anything
about a statue
except it’s resting form
 but i have experienced forty,
 maybe more,
 deaths.

cool
but if you ever saw the contents of
my purse: the twisted straws,
the clutter, lists of
things to get or hold,
you would see
 that peevish child
taunting the ocean’s
grip and dashing,
longing for her
endless swaddle,
 invincible in
execution and
carried. 

“the bay”

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it is the sun streaming through my
bay-sized sliding door windows
and the white capped mountains
framed within them
that I will miss most
 in winter.
today I have
 a piece of paper and
a dozen dead things wilted
in their vase
to remind me.

 

there is a touch of red
sprinkled around the glass
 that browns and sets as dry
on the sill in
my small uncurtained bedroom that
 I pace
when I have too much on my
mind and today they

remind me

life is a patient rot
to tomb, a gauntlet and
fluid so I  better keep
 moving.

life is a patient
gut to get to
 wound     it was April
on Earth Day when I wrote
My Brother Is Dead
in the back of a notebook I would never
look at again.
it would be the thing thrown away
to make room as I packed the car
two years later in the most frigid
 December, my partner,
the weather, the frost of us and
I was in my big brown jacket
that absorbed me in
synthetic down and
I’m twirling the stem of a
decaying feather
of a real dead sparrow in my pocket,
 the lyrids
are crowning across Colorado as
I am responding to
a nod, someone asking
was he your only brother?

 

I repeat the question in my head.

 

yes, he was my only brother.
it is much easier to disappear

but the house moved with
me;  from freeze to open
like an unattended mortuary
moved to resurrect itself
 after years of
neglect and

did you know,
the bones given a soft lick
will sparkle white
  like fresh-caught ivory
 and once it feels the brush of
mouth
will file any joint to tip
with tooth
and gore the things that touches 

it, that holds it
near to chest or
safely in its palm?


as it shreds the flesh from
crown to feet,
someone says to me,
with sincerest sympathy

and I fall into a fog.
I repeat it in my head:

 

was he your only brother?

 

as I pass a trashcan,
fumble   make room in my bag
for lipstick.

 

“the sympathy card”

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