(Stop and bow to silence.)
You hold me the way the soil
holds the bones
of those we’ve learned to mourn
in private:
eternally & quiet
with an airy tightness:
the way the heavens hold the pious,
the mob holds the riot,
the way the ocean holds all that falls below
that deep blue surge of
sea.
I drag you under to show
you what I’m made of.
“squall”
shredded letters I tried using
as fertilizer,
grow something from our
sudden valediction:
calendula,
jasmine to lighten the darker parts
of my libations;
the ones that tease my hair and
take me pull me under the bath
water gently
as I kick and try not to
scream.
violets, honeywort, scent of honeysuckle wafting
from the roach holes,
mugwort to get my blood moving again.
Easter lilies the cats shouldn’t touch so I
hang them from the rafters
and let the leaves fall brown
one by one;
let the paws scatter the ashes of that,
mice, my previous
laurels.
cheery dandelions burst from
the cracks in the linoleum and
I keep a bromeliad at the doorway
to protect me with her spikes;
self-effacing, straight and strong unlike the
hard, twisted ways I grow to be.
orchids to wilt in too much sunlight when I’m
doting myself to death,
a bouquet of roses to give my daughter
when she becomes moss
in someone else’s garden,
feral evocation an arboretum
started at the ankle. or
a whole cherry tree,
rooted and I can chop
it down to gorge.
something sweet to chomp
while I’m choking down
the acidic no,
extra pillow space.
my place: curtains drawn,
devoid of moons.
my place:
curtains open,
enveloped in
the new full sun.
my place,
giant cobweb stuck with
stem and black succor.
I prepare the dried lemon balm
in the mason jar,
two cups of hot water,
watch the window blanket itself in white flakes
of anesthesia,
embrace the change in seasons
openly without any phone calls,
any text, any hexed
postcard,or really,
much incident at all
considering our history
“perennial”
lightly doused
in cramped atmosphere,
I am cradled by my
gnawing contrition.
I am a well of sadness
contained by anger.
your hand is in mine.
you are stroking a painted thumb,
this nail polish is called kerosene
smiling openly.
I return the gesture:
show my unkempt life in off white teeth,
sore tongue,
gums as red as love.
someone gently rubbed glitter on my
forearm to make me
*pop* a little more and I
meant to respond.
my heart is a brass bell,
frozen, staid,
caught between two
hungers
my hair is up and partially mussed,
dark auburn when there’s sun.
I don’t wear my brother’s ashes
around my throat
anymore.
I think that’s more telling
than I let on.
today is partly drizzle and partly
made up in my head.
you stand taller than God and I
shrink; gothic in a mixed
drink and someone else’s
dress wrapped around my hips,
daydream of someone else’s
rough lips picking at my thin skin,
someone else’s orgasm
propping up my knees,
someone’s meek kiss carving diamonds
on a weak spine
that is atrophying
rapidly.
on a bleak night,
I almost turn thirty
like this.
someone taps me,
asks me for a light.
my hair is half down and
covering my eyes.
my feet are bare,
rooted in mud somewhere near
a soggy paper plate
that has a dot of frosting on the rim
scraped from a cake
that probably read
congrats on breaking indigent!
but we devoured it without skimming
as if ten plus years of
bohemian arrogance is anything to celebrate.
I should be dead.
I should be erupting by now.
I feel disproportionately large
for my soul but growing smaller
by the sip.
you are muffled laughter and
showing another woman the view from the balcony,
holding space for her pain in a way
that romanticizes internalized rage.
I am watching.
I am the dark breaking sky
who forgot how to storm
so she just lightly pours
another flask full.
my chest is broken and brass and
coughing politely.
“Ahem.”
I point to the moon
and start running.
i’m turning another year and
I’m looking for checks,
counting my reasons for staying
or for running the other way.
I have overdue things.
recycling and wrinkles
and Kombucha bottles
pile up
and the hairballs on the floor
I avoid without cleaning sometimes.
make a zig zag to the door
where I cast spell:
the fits of importunity,
little raps at my neighbors door
sugar, that’s all
that make me wish I had chosen the life of a mendicant
but my knees always hurt.
I have unchecked messages everywhere:
voicemail reminders and
grandma’s leukemia is pretty bad and
I’m rotten and everywhere like her snaking
liver spots.
Mom bought me a new chain to carry him on.
i’m allergic to anything that looks like silver
but doesn’t hold its weight,
including nickel-painted gold
so I’ve gotten good at tearing things apart
to see what they are
made of.
and the red spots line my throat,
white dabs of cream and my
strapless dress taking out my earrings to dance
with the new one who laughs with
stormy intention,
and I’m obsessed with the way men
strangle anything dear to them,
the way I run right into their butcher shop
and ask if they can
I want to hear the way I plead from inside of you
finish me.
I got a new mural and icing lips
and white teeth.
no mercury caps unless you include
my orbiting lips.
dream of Christmas, cinnamon buns and
him choking out an
“I love you”
with my color by numbers.
I’m remembering hugging an unnamed kitten and
trying to hold onto
this feeling.
I didn’t get impermanence,
just a new bike every year
to run away from home.
and suddenly my phone chokes out a reminder
that the living are
hunting me.
i’m hunting something else.
my heels in the dirt, his hand in mine,
smile
I say for no one.
nail polish named kerosene and
gums as red as love.
my hair is auburn in the sun
and today is partly drizzle and partly
made up in my head
congratulations, baby, you made it.
wet cheeks and leftover streamers
and trick candles
and weak knees when I’m
bobbing to the rhythm.
polaroids on the table and
girls that try to
tell me secrets.
I tell the sky all the things.
I’ll show you all the films I like
we barely talk.
we watch films.
he finishes
on top of his fingers
and my wrapping paper.
i’m half asleep
butull of sugar
and thoughts like a
wadded piece of past
shaped like rope
tightening
and
I wake up in his forearm
biting through his moles
to get to you.
“happy birthday”
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 a quivering knife.
“tributaries”
I drove through
all of middle Earth
to get here;
to lean into the sharp points
of middle hurts.
in true poet’s parlance,
I am nothing but
death rehearsed.
I am nothing but
kamikaze and the
soot palms that steer it,
practice typeface.
I smile to show you
some white in this
hot, red place tonight.
I’ve got my cat suit on:
solid shoulders, strong,
curved back and a heavy head
that is full of
it a blue cracking
heart to match.
I say where?
and you say
nothing.
smile to show you
my canines.
I come over wearing
everything I own:
a pack that stalks
and stays together in lunge,
a freshly oil-stoned
suit of knives and|
the bled-dry opaline
home that I nest in,
my cozy coronation robe:
my clanking vest that
announces my arrival to
your home.
it is me
wreathed in
all my men’s
bones.
“Hecate” or “the red book”
I had been waiting to show you
self immolation.
You had been waiting with kerosene
and some promises to hold
my pretty ashes
hostage.
“fidelity”
I unzip my hoodie
slowly
letting my finger trail
from the end of the zipper
to the front of my pants.
let my index lull
somewhere near the heat.
(some guy puts down his phone)
with the other hand,
I remove my hat
carefully,
wipe a stray hair from
my shaded eye.
reapply my chapstick,
then lipgloss,
then fire engine red
and I stick a finger
(some guy removes his earbuds)
very slowly in my mouth and pout
before a loud
SUCK
pops at them
and then
slowly pull it out.
check for the ring around my finger.
(there’s one shifting in his skin)
cross one ankle over the other
delicately before lifting
a pruned eyebrow in the direction of the one
that resembles you the most,
smirk at my reflection in the window.
(a clearing of the throat in the distance)
drunk on memory and the
cessation of feelings about it,
let one side of my hood fall
revealing a velvet bra strap,
a bone white shoulder
crowning through a sheer black sweater
like the heavily saluted moon-break
on a murky night in late December,
i’m worshipped for an instant.
(all mouths open now)
wrap my thrumming fingers around the pole
assuredly and
(the way i never was with you)
squeeze,
(they’re all watching now),
bite my lip and rub the palm first down,
then up
but with stifled fervor
(do you like that?)
like it’s alive and pumping and
I want to enjoy
the ride for awhile before I
(retreat inside my gut)
grit my teeth and grab it harder and
go a little faster,
little harder, little wilder,
little wolf girl caught in moons,
chafes my life lines
the one where the money should be,
or the love or the way I was
before I keep trying and
(some guy is walking over)
I can’t even
(do you even hear me?)
I can’t stop
(this train is full of breathing)
and I can’t even
(“Miss?”)
(finish them)
finish them.
I can’t even finish
them completely.
“the aviary”
I believe in wormwood,
dried root,
my brother’s ashes
in a silver heart or
a ceramic urn
locked in vase
locked in mirrored chest;
a chant, a poem.
datura when the time
is right.
sometimes I do ceremony,
sometimes I just let things pass.
we do that for others:
carry our grief quietly,
we bury things deep
within ourselves.
but sometimes in a fit,
I spill over,
tell you everything.
you said
I like to swim
so I am braised with razor;,
become a carnation lake
at your feet and
you said rain:
I like gardens.
so I condensed and
waited to show off my new arms
lined in fresh alyssum.
my cycle: I always meet them in
winter where my only
light is moon.
my flowers blossom
under the chilled night:
drip a dark nectar and
I am thirsty and
you already know,
I believe in
altar.
I believe in overflowing
chalice. you believe in holding
space for growl,
holding me with
distance.
you watch me lay the
dill in bowl, line the bed
with tourmaline.
run the bath with
chamomile and yarrow.
I am full of tincture now.
I can move like a jaguar:
slow and black and
hungry.
I am hard to see that way.
you said
I am game.
you’ve been watching
jaguars move,
you’ve been memorizing motion,
I drape myself in constellation
so you can better see me,
storm so you can better feel
me and I traipse across the forest
floor waiting to be found.
my tonsils growing
chelicerae,
my rib cage growing legs,
my bottom becoming fat
with thread and
I know what you like
and I know that
you are game.
you are writhing
game in tiny, tiny
snowflake threads
hung far above the
ground.
I said let’s switch places
and I know you said
my name. I become the woods
encircling your howl and
you become the kicking,
screaming, young and
drowned.
in winter,
it is long and dark
and hard to contain my
grief. I
am gorged with nectar
and hidden by
the wind.
sometimes we do that for
others: hide our
spines.
you watch me prey;
sip the drip of
the effulgent crescent
bulb I worship
and become the
nightmare you fear.
you become the shivering
deer, caught fly,
gutted bunny hooked in
jaw.
I become the bath
of blood.
you were right:
we’re the same.
rewind to the night you asked
if I would ever kill someone
if I knew I could get away with
it.
we become the woods
and you become
my game.
“datura moon”
under my therapist’s guidance,
I switch chairs to talk
to my inner predator.
now, now,
listen to the guilt,
it’s talking,
I want to find out more about
her; what to call her,
where she hides sometimes
before I feel her seep into
each step.
I decided to have some boundaries
with the universe;
lined the edges of my bed with
geranium and lilac threads,
lined the sills with limonium,
wove my weave with daisy.
my tub dripped nightly:
an altar of salt and
lavender sage.
watched my toes glide to the surface
by a dozen votives.
tease the cat
with little splashes at her nose.
forget everything.
my entire winter
was littered with
shards of celestite
and low violin.
I could see the sky when I wanted
from my dining room table
or on a brisk walk
to pick up oranges and Earl Gray
for the morning.
rediscovered medicine in prayer
and herb and
open mourning for my karmic retribution,
suddenly rectified,
suddenly deserved.
(do you deserve the good?)
amethyst in my sock drawer and jasper
near the lamp, I held
one shout in my throat
in an effort to continue to
subjugate myself.
protect myself from myself.
protect myself from herself.
but it’s so tiring;
that anorexic
bloodlust,
insatiable mouth,
the doe eyes and
planned outfits,
the scent so close
you begin to change shape
without notice.
you begin to grow a
mandible heart.
you begin to drool.
you begin to chomp
a little at their
wrists as they hand you
something.
I decided to get rid of my light
and aventurine,
I calmly tell her
the following week.
I tell her:
I plan to spend the year
fat; replete in web
and feast.
“gestalt”
daturamoon.com 