Category: poetry

the first thing I showed him was the callous
 here look
and he licked it with his tongue
without questioning my need to
grip things so tightly
I’ve succumb to carpal tunnel,
arthritis, delusions of
grandeur and infancy.

“has anyone ever talked to you about splitting?”
is what the doctor said to me once.
I was twisting the straw
in my fingers, contorting my
face and confessing things,
 sometimes i like to shoplift.

“Who is Catarina?”

sometimes I like to fuck men with wives.

“splitting is a phenomenon in which you  sort of leave your body to allow another persona to take over.”

sometimes I like to punish bad boys.

“like possession?”

sometimes I like to peek at Christmas presents.

“no, more like split personality.”

sometimes I watch the mirror dance in candlelight
            and wait for her to come in
               I break men
 like the swell that rises over bridges
 engulfing islands with her mouth,
 we break men with turns of
tides.


“the journal”

0

 

only two days ago
your hands wrapped around my throat
and tossed me on the bed
 and still dutiful,
I am on my way
 to pick up a bag of cutlery and dishes
 for our house from the front porch
of a stranger’s
when I stop to admire the cracks
in the side of the building.
the wall is coral, faded but still
garish, stands out.
 it’s brick and

this building has no doors and
one broken window.
these defects in the painted halls
lining my new city catch my
eye each time I run an errand
 and I pay my respects in
photographs      stopping at each one,
trying to remember how the boulders
 haunted too      how the ocean felt
on my wasted ankles at dusk when I guzzled
vodka Big Gulps and watched the
white crabs roam the bay.
watched myself dissolve into
the bits of me and can I remember
how the sunset looked draped over both
 tide and flatirons,
hold two things at once
without favor?
how it feels to lose several
small countries you claimed.
I’m invaded.

these overcoats that rot
hold space;
 there is natural beauty
 here but it shines brightest
 in demise.
 these bricks are painted to distract from
it’s true inability
 to keep a home  safe like
the way men have held me;
hugged with their claws,
I cracked at the touch     put my rosy shades on
 I only see them
 in their handsome sway.
I snap a picture of the edge of the broken
glass pane and the beginning of
the paint peeling into
white–the fissure.
I trace my finger
over a chip and watch
it flake.

how they left me.

“doors #1”

0

my knees hurt from walking the line
between prophecy and
presence as I stomp the
concrete for miles.
I’ve been dreaming of fish everywhere.
I am going nowhere;
only getting older so
sometimes I need a second
of stillness   rest
or I suddenly need to stretch
my calves on the railing
and I stop in the center.

it doesn’t matter if I hear them,
I always turn around and
two or three or a
lone man step around me.
once distracted, now
astute, upright
without visible panic
growing my back into a knight
and I keep pace behind them.
a gargoyle with cat
ears and a smirk
and I can walk for miles,
a giant keeping stride with
the beat of legs in front
of me.

watch

women move like machines
too.

 

“catcalls”

0

one day I had a dream
you bit the head off of a blue jay
 and spit it back into her nest.
when I asked why you said:
To prove you will never leave me.

here I  am,
on command about to run
across the canyon and I
laugh real loud in my
skin tight
dress:

the one cut real low in the back
in the shape
of an obtuse
triangle;
jarring contrast to my
scared-straight spine
but I still
slouch.

I twist the straw into crooked pieces
and tell myself things:
    make sure they know
     you are having
      a real good time
 show your teeth
 hearty laugh
with belly and mouth and your
lips are stretched to the limits like your
social apathy.
show your full moon eyes
and hide.
hold your tonic like a wand;
fall asleep
inside of yourself
in the middle of
everything.

later, he will show
you photographs
to prove you were
there.
if you are lucky,
he notices the story
dripping from your
eyes, the door
opening, the splash
of scarlet on your tights
as you replace each page,
as you become the
walking lake flooding
the wake that held
you, and he becomes
the witness that love
is shaking sometimes
but still sharp
and with purpose,
the utility that seizes
to deconstruct,
to create with its
efficacy,
to create layers
and cut through them,
distorting to repair
or make more of less,
make more of one solid square,
make moats of larger masses
retaining density.

not the surgeon or the stitch
but the undulation,
the quiver of the knife.

“tributaries”

 

0

 

I have innumerable theories about
myself because people have told me
who I am and I was
unsturdy, unstable, in tantrum,
unfed in many ways.

I watched a lot of screens.
I used to stare at my face in the mirror
to watch it change and I used
to talk to plants.
called it “plant math.”
a way of division. always
start with subtracting then
adding then multiplying.
at a young age, I grasped death
by cutting worms in half and watching
bugs eat other bugs.
you can say this even if you can’t
say psychopath.
I felt nothing watching worms
writhe except giant and I slapped
two friends across the face
before I was ten.
classify the dormant into boxes
and you have a child who will
spend all day behind a shed doing
“plant math” until she has created
 a science.
I know three things about myself:

 

  1. I’ve never been in recriprocated love with a man.
    2. I have no compassion left.
  1. I once built a pyramid to God and invited everyone inside.

 

“the act of refutation”

0

I’ve shoved my current project
to the side of my mouth
because I am bursting with
decisiveness and for once,
can you even believe
that I chose perplexity,
a saint’s patience,
not begging,
ruining it anyway
just so I can sit here like
a lonely bitch tied to
outdoor patio furniture
waiting for the sun to go
down or for their master to step
out?

 

just panting and sitting in
her own piss,
shedding like crazy,
bewildered at the sky’s
sudden brightness,
conditioned to salivate when
your screen door opens
as if I even have a spare
drop to lose in this
heat.

 

GIVE IT TO ME.

 

“bells”

0

this is fresh.

 

like when my cat’s claw gets stuck
in my fingertip or when I
bump my elbow on the armoire.
things only last for seconds unless
they are eternal like
God’s choir,
mass extinction,
our howls like bells
like doom
like fate.

 

I try to tell too many
that this has happened before but
never with the same
patterning; the cavern
patience that’s filled with
liminality   me in the
tub and dreaming.
I have no fear of the color
hazel or unmade beds
or the way you let your fingertip
trace my thigh’s Baphomet
 as you turn to me
and say
this will never end.

I bet you never say a word.
I’ll grow to equatorial proportions
and bellow.
I have no fear of
mirrors, men,
mirages or monsters.
I have no fear of depth.
I have no fear of flight
or landing, heat
or frozen streams.
those talons.
those waves.
those headlights.
I have no fear of death.

you? you will know me
by my sudden rage.

“the red book (revisited)”

0

they are not shocked that I have
tattooed every lover’s glyph
along the stitching of my skin
but that I repeat the same story:
I have never, ever loved.

“yet such grand displays for men
that have touched you!”

 

I glare.
in general, I glare.
you can fuck three thousand men
and fall into each one’s abyss and
never touch a feeling but
no one believes me when I say
I have never, ever loved.

 

“yet you repeat their name with
such fever I think you may be
sick.”

I cough just to get attention.
if we are in a room full of people
and no one has looked my way
for seconds, I clear my throat.
no one believes me when I say
 I am a pacified nihilist.

“yet you lend your hand to
every thing and the way you wear
your man’s cologne makes me
think you want so deeply.”

I want to sit still.
I walk the streets wrapped in
beats, a phrase tattooed on my
tongue. a glyph for everyone
I sung to.
(toss five dollars in his cup)
I have never, ever loved.

“the seraphim”

0

we both saw the lighting storm
and we both held metal rods
 under a tree
 like we deserved it or
 like we just wanted the tingle back,
 confusing amends with self slaughter.
 we could just enlist–
bring kerosene to the housewarming and
 tell your friend,
             pour this here
gesture to our clothes
and necks.
hold hands. 

 

watch us try to put

the other out first

so you believe you can

long without conditions.

consider love and

freedom exist at the

same time.

here is what I demand:

eye contact.

a witness.

an extinguisher.
your fit in vocabulary,
whether fresh or stored
or researched but 

directed right at me

so I can hear the way your irritation wrestles,
the way you covet remorse and old marks
 and I have a new cane to brand you;
mahogany wood  hand carved,
 if you ever just laid down to take it,
my sting.
let your silence make way for screams
and welts, not fair?
well. that’s what I deserve.

 

but you don’t believe in any of it
or that you are growing a handlebar
mustache and I’m squirming, in bondage,
under a metal rod under a tree,
amorphous so I can slip free
 and the sky is finally black enough.
the antonym of black is everything
at once.
consider love and self-sacrifice

exist at the same time.
consider my ethics and organic
expression.
consider I’d be real dumb
about it.
consider my skin would melt like
altar prayers, wax and I’d be
 wasted    sending rain, a lake,
a splash your way.
me, avoiding water.
me, melting.
 me, disintegrating just to rise in
white like an osprey or
an egret,
perched and
habitual,
seasonal.
graceful, large, eyes on
the prey.


consider love and altitude
exist at the same time.

“the long flight”

 

0

carried with her
a weapon: her keys in hand,
a disarming speech pattern
and no reason to suspect
her about anything.

I never tell a lie,
she said
leading me to
someone else’s house.

 


(how do you get away with that?)


I just never finish the story,
she said and I
hung there like a
Christmas ornament
glistening in her iris.

 

“How guys save me in their phone #12”

1

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