I leaned left towards your block
focused on feeling the weather change
in my tights and mock
wool mini skirt
in hopes it would
cure my malingering,
would halt my bloodlust,
my persistent inner child
pleading with her hands out
looking for touch and I am
suddenly spades out in your dead garden and
running forward,
something pinned between
my teeth:

lines, the way that
pauses form a look,
a stare, a book,
my thirteenth draft
to you. Saturn
returns to Scorpio
and I begin to grow
the tail.

I write these things
in fits you know.
it doesn’t mean that I will
do it; it means that
I am furtive and capable
of managing my face
to outwit anything
high stake or based on
principle. I am thinking
you’re thinking
what’s the probability
I still hold grudges and
what’s the likelihood
I save a thing that any
man has given or said to
me, but we also have to examine
formula, so you have to see the way

I move at night, first.
foremost, you have to
ask yourself whether my stasis
is truth or lie, and if all
serial killers love getting
caught what does that mean for
us?

and starting to feel myself
dissolve into the walls,
I become
first so large I cannot be unseen,
and then with a snap of
my fingers, gone.
blending
in like camouflage with the
cracks along my walks,
I could not stop myself
from seeking even in
chill, I could go from one end of town
to the other.
when the city closed the
streets for the pope,
I walked from Frankford and
Allegheny to
30th and Market,
having also biked it
first.

and even though I had
left the mountains
in the polar vortex
something about spending an
entire two months
watching for black
ice and cars even
at red lights and being watched daily
by a nemesis who began emailing
myboss, really
made it feel much more
weighted in its bite;
the movement I had
and at such a shifting
a ponderance,
glades of icicles
to wade through,
my hamstrings so strong
towards the end of
February.
and I hadn’t adjusted to anything.

I really could not stop
talking about the trash
everywhere.
it was the trash everywhere
that really shook me.
everything else became
a buzz.

“For Emma, forever ago”

I do remember February,
always as the coldest month,
starts in January
with a little bird who keeps
following me begging to be
immortalized by signing
her full name with every
email she sent to me:
you’re a fucking whore and
you should kill yourself

but it really just continues
for two years.
I don’t know
what to tell you
like I am one to
waft, picking
daisies in a raincoat
or am I the one to
drop the deluge,
watch you stack
your mileage,
sue?
like men have not shivered
at my feet, ways I’ve kept
note of every tic.
I’m scorned like you,
witch but I didn’t send
you seven emails outlining
all my plans to ruin your
career with a link
to your business at the end.

they say revenge is a
dish served ice cold but it
can be hot too;
just sudden, blaring,
a surprise. I sign
every single one

“xxx”

this next section is called:

philadelphia or the alligator

one day I heard encroaching
steps and turned around
just for the scent
of it. sometimes men
sniff your hair when
you sleep and enter you
before you wake up
just for the scent of it. 

“the black book”

“You fit into me like a hook
into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye.”

call him up,
read a passage.
when he tells you he wishes
you were dead, laugh, say
me too and try not to think about
it. write the ways they raped you
with honor like
it’s a badge to be a
daughter; forlorn
on cream-colored carpet
in the barracks
after high school
being fucked on tequila
by someone else’s
husband.

call him up and
share a little something.
when he tells you to get lost,
go buy five plane tickets
somewhere exotic and
send him a postcard that says

i wish you were here.

cry cry cry and then get your palm read.
write the book
but no one ever talks
about the sharpness of
sudden affluence, success
and tarot spreads
that name him
your most worthy adversary
yet.

I begin to weigh the scales:
what’s the probability
that illusion grows legs
or that imagination is laden
with foresight?
you see if I don’t begin to
think this way, I will
begin to cross the bridge
and when my foot hits the
concrete, I want to
leap, arms spread.
it’s not about anyone coming
back. it’s about me
accepting love is a double edged
sword and I’m a fucking
whore. isn’t that what
you told your friends?
that you can’t date
a whore like that.

and to end the poem
graciously, i want you to 

feel the pins sticking out
of your eyes before you
taste the thumbtacks.
it’s not voodoo,
dear, it’s the way I write.
they say I’m
bitter. they say some
whores are so bitter
but well at rhymes.

“brine”

he wants to know,
appease the fella:
motherfucker if I have not clapped this
back with open mouth:

I

have

done

this

before.