Category: poetry

“I scheme a lot,
I know,
I plot and plan:
that’s how a queen in prison
spends her time.
But there is more to me than that.”
–A Lion In Winter

 

I want it back as good
as you get it.

I’m a queen wrapping her
linens in deity and
dreaming.
You are the stark silhouette
of a man on fire
stalking the world’s line
in an effort to destroy everything
that is naturally gold
or naturally divine.

I’m practicing brevity.
You are a friendly snake in my moss:
wraithlike and weaving,
delivering me whole orchards,
watching me devour the cores.
You’re black like me.
You waft wide away when you ignite:
spectral smoke that shifts into bored fingers
choking the equator’s throat
to have a good time.

I emasculate.
You invite.
 Remind you,
I have no true armor or fists
 to fight this,
I am no knight.
I’m a spell;
a woman of deific heritage who felt like a pot
boiling over and needed to
cool off for awhile,
remembered to kneel and wash my face,
drink the bubbling creek of my
 cool, blue heart:
a cathedral door standing frozen,
and slightly ajar.

I’m carnivorous but sick of the mess
so I become a melting ice cap
that will soon rise to run
and ruin everything she rushes.
You are impossible to hold on to
but I chase to soothe
like ice water on the last day of June
when school is long out and the high noon beams
are shining on every slide on the block
and the toes are branded pink,
and I want you to swallow me in one sip,
gag      spit me out in the dirt
and lick me back up slowly
from this burning Earth
while I watch.

I’m entitled to this.
The day the world runs red with horizon
and I emerge:
my hubris residing in my tongue
demanding you guess my name,
gelid and expecting it.
Hear my chest creak in
anticipation, the stained glass shakes;
 this great glacial organ that should give life,
but found in ire she is blindingly white,
binding, arctic and unmoved so
 she just envelops everything she can
to preserve and study
and surmise she was right.

I’m hugging you tightly.
Your mouth is one giant O:
sapphire and stiff and  trying to scream
and your two lips will never meet mine,
will never meet again.
In this place you will stay stationary
without a breath to blow
or a vein to bleed
or a vocal cord to tell me to stop or leave
 and your confusion warms
 these blizzard fits.
You want to tell me some final thing.
What left do you have
that I couldn’t conjecture myself?
I’ve heard it.
I’ve lived through this.

The words eternally yours
are most often cried throughout
hell, and I have spent many nights
covering my ears with pillows
and other ideas about
twins and pockets of
“well, it always starts in winter”.

“horizon”

0

You started listening to Aphex Twin
based on a recommendation that someone
 recently made;
that I had made prior.
but I didn’t point that out.
You were now making short films
with girls from Brooklyn who said things like
“I wish I was a real witch like you”
and demanded you talk in a British accent
when we ordered at Taco Bell.
The minute I got home I started a fight
with my new one before I
started to feel the insides slip out of their
cozy pink packaging,

started to rummage through a rush of old texts
as it happened that said:
                meet me at ____
                  and now
so I could hold onto the idea of being wanted so badly
I was the top shelf cognac in your
unpolished snifter glass,
not the flaxen swollen kidney,
or the repercussion;
the egregious morning after
and the girl laying beside her.
I pretended I was the prize, the warmth,
the poison you crave.
I felt his fingers try to clean me out;

clean out the place where you rested your cheek once
and inhaled my constant fuss.
I now lay still, impassive in the habit of some
pretend attention with my eyebrow lifted,
half smirk and suspicious of his onslaught of
sudden affection that seems to twist me once the words
leave his lips and hit me with a dry kiss
I didn’t prepare for or want in my
corner.
When he started to ask me if I was bleeding again,
I started to explain about anise  angelica
the cohosh family,
about a poem I wrote,
the curse of vision,
and a dramatic induction

              what does blood taste like?
I licked our home from his fingers;|
swallowed hard to taste the copper,
the iron I lacked and the insight.
reached past his undercurrent of verbal rancor
to grab a tampon so he could forgive
my temporary brooding for the night.
I felt an altar in his bathroom
flushing our daughter down the toilet.
I had a sense of quiet importance
bleeding openly all over his floor
without apology, without
discernment, or
judgment of my ethics.
With men, it was pertinent
I was both feared and
adored.
I didn’t clean things up.

I left his bathroom
stained with our attempts at
reconciliation so he knew what
once owned me;
knew what I once owned and
abandoned with silent, fervid
violence.

“the infusion”

0

here’s a free scroll:
like the algid vortex that
blows from the north
and coats the town in
freeze and forces those to skate
across,
I break men.

I live in a pink room
with a rectangular mirror
propped against the wall on
the floor surrounded by
cards and flowers
and at night,
she comes to me
like the riding crop
that sharpens as they gallop,
I break men.

“the mirror”

0

me, I’m self effacing only in lines,
only in verse.
humbled by stark correction,
a closed fist perhaps,
a silent light that sets you on fire
(they call you a forest fire)
drowning in self,
an ocean as well,
insides rocking
tidal laments that implode in quiet, wild
violence,
stalking the world’s line,
biding mine with letters
and blades      my time;
(no they call me on my way to steal your man)
stifled, I’m waiting
 for that envelope
you promised
reminding me I was
right about time and
space is the price.

“space” 

0

Desperately trying to make a home
from a houseplant
that looks pretty but doesn’t
talk back.

Plant myself on your lap:
you’re making other plans.
Plan B
in my gut,
in my hormones,
in my warm dead cavities,
exploding from my disillusioned head
running down my thighs,
my knees,
my pink toes
to the bottom of a drainpipe,
run the shower,
watch it drip away,
the afternoon I said
come over and borrow a book or two
and then
stay  indefinitely in my head.

We’re being filtered in our water,
everyone can drink to our failures,
our funerals,
our feigned orgasms,
our chary romance
that look wets & red hot but
feels like blue-black denial
like the sky I admire during
my psychotic December.
I’m manic and
I warm iron grates like the gaseous sun.
I’m a big, bursting ball of red-hot fun.
You’re libidinous but glued to
the floor and a
cool steel gate made of
gray imposing bars that stay shut
all year long.
How do I make love to that
without pricking my finger
on a strand jag
or rusted lock
or melting you so much with my fiery stardust
you’re just a mush of could have had?
but now you really can’t.
(oh, now you really run)

Where do I put my hands
or my head
or my mouth?
My ideas, my legs
my gaze.
My arms have nothing to wrap themselves around.
We’ve hit a steel ceiling.
Plan B,
you said,
was our only option.
I cracked my abdomen open
again
to please another man
that from a distant looks like
mirror, or a sunset
with no color
and feels just as bad.
I’m reeling and keeling
over.

Now, despotic lover,
now that it’s over,
now that it’s gone,
where can I put my feelings?

“Plan B”

0

I remove the rest of my top
 and close my eyes deliberately
to show you the length
of each thorn,
the length of each arrow.

rose garden behind
each eye, the sky is
lined with bolts and  I
 have never become divine
 without first becoming storm.

 

“full moon in Scorpio”

0

Threats of a
healthy
pregnancy.

“Short Horror”

or

“Maybe they’ve never seen a real woman before
and they just don’t know how to
pose you,”
my friend chimes in.
It’s friday night and I’m
stuck in a mirror
with a convex stomach and a
complex about who I’ve been.
A real woman.

“Nudes make me feel good about my
curves so I let them take my picture
and plaster it on their wall or screen
or dick or face,
but only if they pay me.”
My stomach out;
a foretelling declaration of
where I’ve been and
where I’m going next.
“And that’s how I got through my twenties, “
I turn to her, sucking back some breath,
 ribs and minor self beratement that I mostly manage in
soft-spoken statements,
“but they never angled me right so I always looked so
unbelonging.”
(I wave my hands over nothing)
“So unkempt without the cool ferality.”
(Adjust an invisible strap)
“Fat even.”
(Pat a bulging abdomen)
Pause for impact.
A real woman


an old 31 and
 I should have tried giving birth but I’m just
posing for the boot-licking attestations,
disrobing, digging my heels in the Earth,
cultivating filters that diminish my history of war,
and planting deeper into myself.
I’m circling mugwort and other herbs to kill
those infantile stages of myself
and then ripping them up and lining the steps to
his back door,
snapping pictures of my friend’s feet
so she can get in on this self-started
oppression.
Profits.
“Guy love it when the heels are dirty.”
I assure her and remove the lens cap.
“There’s a niche market for that,
for gross imperfection so long as you
only fuck about it.”
I snap a shot of exposed ankle.
“And don’t complain.”
Pause for impact.
A real woman

uncaging,
growing up like a tree,
like a tall, tall sycamore
trying to root the sky
snapping fingers at the clouds
willing them to come down
and cradle me,
birth me a Venus
or a man
or a son
I can resent
for not being born
in the female form
and never feeling shame,
injustice,
or scorn at her online portfolio,
for her brown spots or crows’ feet,
smile lines,
un-perky breasts and policy made
citing divinity ruling the clefts
we have hid underneath asphyxiating tongue
 and dress.
never ending clots,
never ending “sorries,”
never coming orgasms,
stretch marks,
YOGA INSTRUCTORS,
intense self-awareness and not a safe space to
hold it nor the courage to bare it so I’m evaporating
into my cunning,
molding my imprudence
into little piles of cash.
Heart like a baby bonsai:
blossoming once but pruned quickly
 to be largely unassuming,
small in stature, right in might and
size and always frighteningly
quiet.
A real woman
chasing

boys who call at one am
and never more and don’t you ever arrive
through any front doors,
boys who kill animals they adored,
boys who kill whores for sport,
boys who kill with roving eyes
and theories of futility and economic utopia
 that sound a lot like
affairs and partial femicide.
Quenchless chocolate cravings,
unbleachable spots on the sheets,
glass ceilings and wrinkles in the
skirt and no domestic creak in her joints,
several unexplained premature births,
sudden miscarriages,
early menarche in white,
late menopause through work,
over two uninsured abortions,
or in my case,
threats of what look to be
an extremely healthy
pregnancy.
A real woman,

pausing for impact.
I am not knocking on his screen
with assertion,
with tears,
with ire.
I am fingering the
tiny empty tincture bottles of
pennyroyal,
blue and black cohosh
on his back porch
where he missed the recycling
and remembering the first time
he served me tea before work.
Let me stay for breakfast.
Let me lie down for a while.
when he admitted there was dairy in something
and I said
“I haven’t slaughtered in years”
and
“It’s just my stomach, don’t
worry..”
Laid me down gently and
smiled and said
“feel better soon.”
A real woman:

a concave silhouette
bleeding outside
of his locked door.

”Black Cohosh”

0

I have a low murmur that reaches
street lamps and cracks them
with it’s under snarl
that runs naked for miles
seeking something with a
warning and I hit
the corner as you are
walking up.
the light goes out
and a tire screeches
and a cyclist tumbles
and this city is full of
accident now.
you will
know me by my
fang-toothed smile.

you will see the smirk
open wide in the sun
into an open-mouthed
gutter.
you will call yourself
mine and line your bed
with rosary to
stop me from coming
but I’ve already
been invited.
I will be around and
you will be
in tears by
the end when

you remember the
agreement;

                  revenge is an interesting game,
                how undiscerning rage becomes
                      when it turns red
                      the story begins
                         as you remember everything
                                          again.

when you remember everything.

 

“morphic resonance” or “notes to him” or “notes to self”

0

you,
thorn in my rib and
absorbed in my
fascia,
sharp in the introduction
 but dull  once picked.
you tickle my spine
without bloodshed
but left a trail of detritus
for me to pick through.
for me to sift.
find what’s yours,
what’s ours,
find it somewhere.

me, I sink into your elbow,
lips a bobbing knife;
seasoned and slow,
blunt but steady,
cutting deeper with each
grin.
I am patient,
 learn the swerve
of each artery.
lick your neck.
lick your fingers.
cut you open
with each flick.

we are curved into each
other    two indolent
 house cats striped with ribbons
 of the other.
trimmed claws but
voracious and reaching
cautious with each lunge,
each obstructed mile
in our separate paved
jungles,
tame and
crouching.
tame but
longing and
finding what is
us.

us, scratching
 at each other’s scabs
to remember how to
hunt.

“us”

 

 

0

My bones cut like an oasis in this room
and you have decided to live
in the shadow
of the hallucination
that promised shelter.
I promised you
I’d stay hot
but you never thought
it would come
so dry,
so big and abandoned
like this.

“the desert”

0

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