Category: Uncategorized

itten ears and painted whiskers
tumble down my block   in rows
rehearsed
in leotards and black lace gloves.
yowls  float through
open porches.
TV taught them how to meow
for Kit Kats   Snickers Almond Joys
male applause.
one bends over to tie her shoe
and seduce the nearest father;
he eyes the crevice peeking through her
black tights. 

I’m dressed like Glinda the Good
witch and hovering in a sing song
way, throwing out
Peanut Chews and
I burned a sigil for this
she wants attention from her own father:
a photograph or upward twirl,
burning torch,
purr in his lap while he strokes her hair
without fetish
or just acknowledgment that she is the prettiest
girl dressed up as space cat,
those others are unoriginal, just regular
cats, he says I love yours best
and pats her on her head
and there is no offense taken.

she will grow up  to be even smaller
than  she supposed:
silent    enduring still,
not awake in her own power,
her own body
like a stillborn tiger:
expelled with a tear,
coated in the blood of her mother’s
screams as no one prepared her for the
slow cooked torture, ecstasy,
that followed expelling something
 parasitic and omniscient,
a future rival.
she lands on the floor
fetal,
the thing no one wanted
without even a congratulations! bouquet
or a lotus to symbolize
finality.

we aren’t worthy of those feline
endowments
thrust upon us when we are playing
mole     carcass on the doormat
aborted from our burrowed holes
for something more vociferous
to grab onto and finish,
our kinship;  the lions.
we are nothing like our ancestors.
our virile mothers
who know nothing of preening,
who care nothing for tail feathers.
they take what they want.
they don’t grovel at their fathers’ feet.
they honor the slaughter,
the one they started
before the harvest and pay homage
to the sky for the water provided
before they stuff themselves
with vision.

we lack vision.
we just paint our nails black,
and dress like witches,
talk shit;
start shit for derision.
and we keep turning to our men
for forgiveness when we are wayward
or won’t marry them
or stand up when they
crush our necks and they
say the rope is coming next.
we should be
stuffing our faces with the meat they provided,
learning fillet knives,
smiling like shovels and
burying them.

“Halloween”

and we keep turning to our men
for forgiveness when we are wayward
or won’t marry them
or stand up when they
crush our necks and they
say the rope is coming next.
we should be
stuffing our faces with the meat they provided,
learning fillet knives,
smiling like shovels and
burying them.

“the fall”

“your end game is establishing psychic stability
with extreme ordeals as part of your
metamorphosis.”

my need for superfluous
fluctuations in behavior,
lifestyle and mood.
now, you are God-drawn,
celibate,
obsessively
binding yourself to
new conviction,

you are wrapping yourself
in your insistent
unhinging,
and your lovers’ brides.
for the way they scream your
name into the pillow.
but you are distant.
you are giant.
you are waving your hands
in the air and calling it
time.

oh, you are far, far away and
quiet in your cave,
becoming whatever you say
you are.
becoming whatever you say.
be careful what you say.

I say I’m always
someone’s secret,
watch me float across their
ceiling like a moon-shaped
cake.

“the magician”

 but to you there’s no difference between
decimation and solution,
so you’re palms out
begging for it
full of resolve
and here comes the reaper
wearing your blood.

“Saturn in Scorpio”

sitting on the edge of the bay
on a borrowed blanket,
I was vomiting up
an Everclear Slurpee
and peeling back the bottom
of your parent’s quilt realizing
I had covered the entrance of the
ghost crab’s home.
I was embroiled in my own
deafening philosophy
about the closing of the day;
the way it moved–
death,
like an itinerant wave
that followed me
everywhere.
I coughed that up second,
and finally to tell you
the rituals were there to
keep me safe.

the tide crept back
and I heard you light a cigarette,
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)

but I’m
witnessing plane crashes
and matching the numbers to the proper
order, reorganizing mantles
and bleaching my teeth and
every inch of my house.
first, you have to feel safe.
I begin to build the glass
around me

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.
I never said I didn’t
deserve it
just that I could outrun it
if they gave it.

“warnings”

Saturday, and the sun is out.
you’re licking the salt from the crest
on the underside of my elbow
and asking
where I would like to live
next as I am pretending I
am unchained, and beginning
the slow fall to
devastation.
when I hear my name reflected
back I melt, I’m stone
mostly until I’m just a cloud
of maniac.

I am begging you to walk
away, being wrong about
the others but dead right
about this.
you love being right.
now dead right.

sarah, we are begging you
to run away from this.

“Post Mortem”

no bra
and a weak smile.
mildly uncomfortable when
asking anything
more than how are you?
visible tan lines and big eyes,
hourglass and
a mostly untrained sex appeal,
a mostly stifled violence,
mostly mute when questioned,
always suddenly falling
silent,
maybe running but   
how are you?

lost, giving me
directions and
grimacing at the
passing time.

“how guys save me in their phone”

at least I give you transparency.

even when I’m moping,
I’m dancing
in songs of satin,
rippling with sob
and shimmering
deep    bright.
I am combusting
publicly:
a
flood of recourse and 
you are
drowning, immersed
in capillaries bursting with
crisis
and then immediate clarity.
my hands let go of the
flood I’m cradling.

you watch me move
like a snake across your
ceiling draped in shifting
constellations
you have no choice but to
memorize and I’m wearing
the crescent as a crown and
your ears like a gown
and someone else is full
of warnings.    me, I’m a dream
cat stalking rabbits
in the garden, or
waiting for the night
by the river for the
muskrat, and then
later on your doormat
pushing mice
all around.
each night I go to God and ask
for favor.
                 
I hand them back their most
prized possession as the only
way to get it:
a page, one line;
one at a time
wrapped in
flakes of
shrimp like little treats.
my barbarity, I desperately
want to play psychopath
and you told me you were
starving for affection.
I am the coldest
woman you’ve ever
met; catching your

goldfish, frying them up,
using your
own tank like
that.

“dreams”

sometimes I do ceremony.

I stick only to a daily morning
ritual and try to strengthen
some resolve with consumption.
I feed the cats, clean their
litter box, then stretch
and write my dreams down.
then I walk the neighborhood
to soak up sun.

sometimes I just
let things pass
like cravings or
weather.

we do that for others;

carry our grief quietly.

bury things deep

within ourselves.

I feel the root rot and darken
without altar, water
or speech.
you walk in and
I’m here now
growing into a black trunk.
you walk in and look
right at me
and I don’t know
where to begin.

but I found the
aperture.
I begin to grow,
unfurl, hum
softly.

V.