Category: poetry

how to lean into the sharp points.

I believe in altar.

The opposite of destruction
isn’t creation; it is
stability, longevity,
ground.
It is mired in the Earth.
It is steadfast.
It is wings
with purpose.
I had insisted on burning every
bridge, every baby,
every body that came from a fit
of fervent execution.

Play Oya,
the moon dared.
I hoisted myself on the stake and
displayed my plotted empire in pieces
dancing to the flicker of my
ardent fire parade.
Previously, my life had
been of lingering malignance,
but it had no fangs to suck
the bleak from my veins.
I turned black
and sidelong
with every corner.
Now, I am
moving in giant
fit of blaze:

I am the forest catching wind.
I am the scream of the first tree falling.
I am the silence of the spark’s eventual dim,
the mess in between;
the burst of orange, the hara kiri,
the gray cloud of obscurity
where nothing can breathe,
where nothing can leave without
serious damage.
I am the stampede that warns you.
Everything that tried to stay in the comfort of
my pine bosom;
 gone,
lay slain at my feet.

And me,
incendiary and flying,
rising from the ash in a
crown of bone
and teeth.

“the stakes”

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apodyopsis inflicted
and I can’t lick it
so I imagine you unfold
like paper origami
one more time.

finger your jeans and
you spill open.
I lick your cheek and
feel you bite the side of
your mouth in halt and
can you remember
the times you fanged
your way through bra hooks
 and brunches, never-ending coffee
 and one-liners?
something the other ones taught you.
stiff congratulations or how are you and
that’s wonderful
followed by
nine months of inimical
silence.
I move quietly     quickly
distort you into something
palpable.

my hands move
clumsily.
I keep you in amulet
in my pocket and I queeze you when I am
nervous.

you are licked,

smoothed with assurance,
rubbed.

you’re the botched swan
I frame proudly;
me, robed in black flowers
and loaded rifle walking
out of mid-February
with you tucked in the crook
of my arm.
you become loosely creased
 looseleaf reduced to a crumple
floating to the floor
without altar,
a harmonic little
m o r e
in my palm
on your way
to the tile
where I gently lay
you    leave you
altered without prayers
once more.

leave you twisted
in want,
deformed.

“warning forms”

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kiss her fingers and say:
you are a jungle.

I stretch,
yawn,
and out falls a
knuckle.

What does love feel like?
she asks.
I turn,
cough,

and out falls another.
kiss flowered mouth through teeth
and say:
like a wet machete
ripping through the jungle

“camouflage”

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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.
Death reversed.
I am nothing but
kamikaze and the
soot palms that steer it,
a blaze of worst thoughts,
typeface and colossal remorse.
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.

“the red book”

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I’ve always been drawn to sentences:

spent sunrise picking at
 covered clots      carpet soaked with
unsheltered heart:
profuse and spilling drops that
take years, nights of picking and
other forms of self harm
but eventually amount to
one abrupt and disconsolate
 flood.   I’m upright,

soaked in streams,
copper rivers and caged
in sore body and
the newest sun.
smear some blood from my thumb
as I pick up my phone to
 take a picture of my torn knees
in the rising dawn.
find a filter first.

“sepia”
to cloak my embattled joints
(hide your armor)
before I send you the veiled snapshots
about it.
I’m not obvious in
torture.    I’m not
obvious in scar
but I have spent
previous lives hung and
spurned for your enjoyment.
      define retribution.
when you finally see me
again, I’m a smirk on a lynx
 peeking
through a grove of bush:
dead quiet in pursuit,
low to the ground
holding steady for
pounce.
you will feel my jaws
land before you feel the beat
of my pulse.

if I am anything first,
it is a woman
of course.

“lilith”

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I am releasing the stiffness:
years of posing, postured
and pacing, chasing
gratification.
I’m indulgent at
least, greedy when
touched and hoarding.

 

when you drop the straw,
the miracle happens.

 

clutching at the edges of everything
for security, my life of
picked up pennies and
spinal pain from bending over
and taking it, from being prideful
in my penurious form,

twisting myself into smaller
shapes.


crowned and the oracle reminds me
of that swirling storm,
I’m near to, right outside
and.
  heavy is the head
that little lie about
choice.

 

“the tower” or “two of swords”

1

for some of us,
freedom was a legend;
a cage of smudged windows
and insatiable longing,
a crippled twirl, 
 pace
around the apartment
with a wand in hand,
repetitive crescendo in head
or the sudden broken glass

on the porch,
the
knot of fervent caterpillars
sliding through my guts and
prematurely spilling out onto the floor,
dissolving into pools of blood
like little girls ripped in pieces
in the midst of a tornado’s whirl
when they should have hid in the cellar,
waited patiently,
incubated like their wild brothers
anchoring in the moisture of a soft,
hemorrhaging sarcophagus
before they soar;
destroy their cotton packages
and hatch into thin air.
when the day is finally warm
and facing them, they
tear through the tether
unbridled in
exodus, unimpeded
and ready to transform into grand ideas
and take off without interruption
like the little girl’s
scorn;

now grown,
an envoy of acrimony
and the blue-black tones of
home and I pause here to ask myself
before I commit to the
flight,: what does metamorphosis
really feel like?  
ask for knowledge,
wait for the visceral reply:
  my skin
tearing at the thread of
each inside, each wound
 stretching wide
for me to see,    wide
like an orbit
enough to case the sky
 and black inside turned
outside; now
black each wing of
bone and vine,
black my eyes and
black the sea I shoot
from; everything I touch is black
like me,
and I can see for miles.

“transition (pt.2”

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when it came to me
you said I was all
  muscled positivity
as if I didn’t hang myself once before;
as if I didn’t try to tell you

how cavernous a grin is,
or anything at all.
even though you are never sure I won’t
find that perfect bedsheet knot
or not or a razor or a kitchen knife
or a drunk night on the freeway and I’m
headfirst in the cement mixer
but I made it out of that
in jail and alive and I am
always palms clasped and grateful.
you say   you pray
with FERVOR  as I finger the locket,
my brother’s ashed clasped
around my throat
and I hold onto
 that same little lie
about choice.

I let go of the wild lavender
 sprouting from your toes through
the hints of splattered paint.
there’s a meadow in your abdomen
coaxing foxes from their
holes    your knees knock mine,
sudden sting         close and sharp
  the way memory sits on your skull
then pulled back
 how you held me
far away sometimes;
making wind happen
blowing kisses from the pines.
the bath is on, I’m cold.
you always say
I’m cold.
I beckon to the side:
you and I are from the same
arctic sky.
help me in so I feel
the frost of your fingertips
trace me;

my broken back to you now.
my nails are brown tipped and filthy
from digging myself out of my ancestral
grave and I’m spattered in the ,
sweat from a hard night’s day,
walking alleys, stalking shadows
and you’re truly unremarkable
 these days save
the mosaic of carpenter’s paint,
 some gray cement
garden: no flora, no fauna,
and even God told me to pause  
and rest on my previous laurels
before I get carried away.
but i’m a martyr for this,
God,
I crave repercussion

I become a
yawning, clanking watering can
 spritzing your open lips,
dolling up your stolid ground
to birth your stories:
pollen murals out of micro gestures,
extinguished longing that suddenly reignites and
I’m grabbing cattails from the gales to
 comb out the tangles of your childhood,
fistfuls of mud    planting seeds in the
 tiny cracks around your chest that my own
sharp-toothed grief left when you
muttered the first
no  and I stepped a few
years back.
freedom will teach you how
to stay in all new ways.

there is no difference
between love and liberation
and some were born saints,
you say as you help me
in the mugwort bath,
the smell of rose and lavender.
I plucked the petals and dropped
them one by one
for aesthetic reasons.
not free of indulgence, but
patient   your fingers make
stems in the water.

“hurricane”

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all day long
I vacillate between intention
and immediate withdrawal;
my habits, my beloved

hermeticism and the double meaning of
everything and I’m
ambivalent about every choice
I’ve given myself over to–
even in completion,
I shrug.
let the wind take me.

now I am in blindfold,
a preparation and I am forced to
declare it.
    your arms are free
someone drew two swords and
showed me and I am superstitious,
lining wrists with crystal rosary and
jasmine smoke and tea and
smashing my fists into a
mirrored wall to feel the way
(across)
it might when I finally
say something,

when I finally stand still enough
to embrace the thing that’s
said.

7.

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things I like:
symmetry and
the act of naming things,
the synthesis of dream and
disorderly thinking,  and my bout
of many hidden rituals
like a drunk blossom,
full and suddenly
noticed

“Leo”

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