for some of us,
freedom was a legend;
a cage of smudged windows
a foiled pine for everything.
crippled twirl,
pace around the apartment
with a wand in hand,
repetitive crescendo in head,
tennis elbow from the instinctual
bend.

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 until  the day is finally warm
and facing them,
tear through the tether
unbridled in exodus, unimpeded
and ready to transform into grand ideas,
take off without interruption
like the little girl’s
nascent scorn; 

now grown,
an envoy of acrimony
and the blue-black tones of
home, I pause here to ask myself
before I commit to the
flight,: what does metamorphosis
really feel like? 
there is a visceral reply:
  my skin
tearing at the thread of
each inside, each wound
and stretching wide
for me to see,    wide
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)”

my hands are currently stinging,
ungloved and pallid and I do
this daily, these walks with my hands out.
I never wear gloves and I never put them in my pockets.

often times I blink,
realizing I’m not somewhere I thought I was.
sometimes feeling I’m back on a street
in Virginia.
kids always watch me. 


they’re the only ones that see me muttering
under my breath,
fingers curved then moving
like I’m counting
my thoughts as they digest
they smile.
they don’t think the same as adults
and can see secrets. I’m crazy. I change my route mid route passing them,
deciding suddenly to get coffee from a different place.
I  had been to the other place three times this week
and I don’t want anyone to know me.

to seek me meant
pleasure in ineffability,
a loss for words perhaps
out of fear of my retaliation
and to remain hidden
from some parts of the depth
of me and from the world with
me. I prefer the furtive
curl against another.
the unutterable and silent
worship
drives this depth
and the others and
you and me
like rifts adrift
like that, the moment
I turn my head.
I like to live,
eat, sleep alone
and move the country
this way; solo,
home
a solitary war
between
picking up impulse
and
deep, deep reflection
upon impulse
control.

I’m so sensitive
though
that if I settle into
think and spread
the cards like a fan,
I’d feel it out
in five seconds
eyes closed.
show me,
she said.
show me one year
show me two years
show me three years.
flip it and
it’s the King of Cups,
again.

plus I’d pick the right
song to match.
get the numbers to flash 3:13,
my lucky bet. “duplicity”

“And you will know the difference between the two?”
“The difference between a truth and a lie?” he asked to clarify. 

“No,” she said. “The difference between how I got here and the weirdest thing about me.”

of course i would never kill
a child.
I continued with her,
but the question was
how do we make something like
the death penalty less of
a moral argument?
and the only way to take morality
out of law is to write clauses that
outline exactly what will happen
and under what circumstances and
then without reneging, go and
enforce it every single time.

these are authoritarian things.

but I didn’t agree with any of it
so I felt like battling me
was moot but I enjoyed the spectacle
and had, for no reason, invited
a male friend to join me in
class that day.
I too was interested in
motive but we cannot prove
intent truly without
absolute confession.
and even then, we may
doubt what we hear
if it doesn’t align with
what we want.


“events #2”

she was pandering to my 
emotion, calling this episode
a real child.

she said you said kill everyone.
I never said kill everyone, I said
if the law is  x=x then it’s x.
I could see her reaching for
the feminine in me
whichas far as I could see
was straddled and leaning back.
confident enough to be the first one
to volunteer for the exercise,
which I remind her, is not
examining the morality of the law
itself but to remove debate around it
so that it may be better enforced,
without outcry and fairly.


when I finished nine hands
went up. we were a class of eighteen.
unsure of why
I volunteered for the exercise
first, and given the freedom to begin
with any declaration, why I chose to
examine how mass assassinations

could really kick things off to accept
blindly that some people are
executed. and some people ought
to be.

the argument was not over
until all counter points had been examined,
the professor said.
she was tall and smiling when
I spoke and I felt thankful for her
defense of me any time she reiterated,
I was correct in re-summarizing the
exercise for each of the
nine hands that went up,
consuming the bell with a
theoretical society that arbited
punishment blindly as the statue
alluded to also,
the society we have tried to
have now is composed of
criterion like that. 


I was eighteen and glowing
and enjoying the attention
with zero conviction about
the death penalty.
and when it came back to
her, and she presented it again
after many others had spoke,
I am sure I said,
to be perfectly frank,
we would HAVE to
kill the child in order
to make the law work.

and then I just kind of laughed
because the exercise itself asked you to
first pick a side and fight for it;
not to defend the death penalty
but to remove morality from law
having the freedom to remove all
structures of law around murder,
I could have created a punishless state
in which murderers walked free
or a Hammurabi and it is with the
same amount of callousness that I
have begun to plant
nightshade around your house.

probability being like

you probably like to touch

things like me

and thinking it

to be Queen Anne’s Lace

giving it to your girl

for Valentine’s Day.

“Valentine’s Day part #1”

my interest was
social experimentation.
it’s why I went to college.
to be educated on the ways
to manipulate small crowds
and because of my naivete,
I did not realize at first
that my interest in sociopaths
was reflection.
but I find serial killers
to be undeniably weak
in their compulsion.

they are artless megalomaniacs.
you could just as easily garden
with the same amount of torrid wonder.
learn to grow nightshade and then
plant it all over town
in places where people smell
flowers and pick weeds for each
other.
but these are men. and
they have to be known.
I’ve always had to cross my
legs.


Mrs. Shepherd said you
cannot bet on things that talk,
Ava,
when I interjected to
share my observation that
the same formulas can be applied to people
when presenting with the same patterns over time.
they would be seen as a fixed event
because they have not wavered in
reliability yet.

another time I stated calmly to
my ethics class that the best way to enforce
a law to ensure it gets a message across
is to enforce it blindly.
if you believe in the death penalty
make a black and a white clause;
no matter what the circumstances,
calculated homicide will put you
in the electric chair and then they
wouldn’t quibble with the details.

the first girl to shoot her hand up
was the most riled by my
eyebrow lift and when
she presented to me a Law and Order episode
where the murderer was a child,
I dropped the brow and lifted
the mouth and I said
then kill the child,
bitch.

“events #1” or “effect of varying events”

It all started when I was five and he bent me over and said

here’s what it’s like

to fuck a man

I set the example of

safety in malice.

what do I deserve?

what is fair?

it feels like
government fingers
and pricked skin,
unbled,
veins everywhere.
sleep.
an interrupted sleep
and a train coming by,
every fifteen minutes or so.
and cold.
I hate gloves
so my bare fingers trace
the pole,
sleet.

I named the feeling
of living in Philly
gray but this particular
day is 

“allegheny station”

 I used to dream but now I get up four or five times a night.  To pee.  Not because of my fist.Anywhere from one to twenty four.  And as I prepare to get up, to begin to unfurl the covers, I have to clench and unclench my fist  to get it to work. And i think, what would happen if I just put down the straw?

I have all sorts of medicine.

Though sometimes I am asleep on it. Sometimes I am. But most of the time it is laying flat next to me. What do I do with my time? Walk for hours. Hours. Thinking. There are great moments of collapsing on the bench. Tears. Public displays of thoughts.I pet dogs. I talk to the dogs and their owners. Things are better now. People let you pet their dogs again.

I just write little notes in my phone.

I spend some days mulling over whether I Love You was enough.

These are the repetitions I tell him, and then
the private  replaying of some events:
his head lifting as I walked out,
sudden and hurriedly towards  him,
noticing the stream of
blood on his face
and all around him.

I replay it. 

Be careful what you say

I’m in pain.

Drew the Hellebore plain as day

and anger they say,

is a killer.

———————

It was my right hand. To start, it was my right hand. Dead in the middle of the night. It would last a minute. Then a couple minutes. Now four whole minutes. They say it’s a compression nerve. Completely numb and I would begin to shake it. At first, it took a minute? Likely a minute and a a half but now it’s seven times to the bathroom and three minutes to wake. Which doesn’t seem like a lot in writing but count it. Begin 1….2….3…4 and imagine you need this hand to prop you up. /imagine you’re waiting, some urgent need or just the shock of it. The consistency; every night it seems. IImagine it, if you will, the dominant hand, and you need this hand to open knobs. Imagine flushing the toilet. Imagine the toilet paper. Imagine if you will them both now, left and right, and now you have to pee three or four times a night. 

He said when I talk about you there’s a lilt in my voice. What do you say anymore to the question was he your only brother?  They simply don’ t ask the number of fathers. And really, there’s so many other things that bother you sometimes it doesn’t even come up. It’s redundant grief. Or at least that’s how it seems.

—————————-

as if I am even hurting anything;
some tremulous thing
shaking her fist at the
moon and praying for a tidal
wave.

you notice my arms are toned,
you say I really wear my weight.
you watch me lift bone to sky
and notice the notch in my veins
before you even notice
the flood.

before you even notice the tilt of the
throat, wavered and
lifting.

1.

——————–

I’m in pain.

Be careful what you say but also there’s a ring to it. I’m ok.

Place the drawing of the Hellebore somewhere near. 

It is with love that I do this, Thy will be done.

———————

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