sometime late January
you spent the night with a woman
watching the moon grow.
                  come take me in my own abattoir
I unrolled my tongue
ready for our first kiss
and out spilled
someone else’s lung.
how did these things get here?

I had created a dalliant
stockyard in my bed
to occupy us.
                  I’m red-hot and full of other people
You were outside in a corduroy jacket
counting her freckles
as I was slicing the outside of
someone’s arm
to crawl inside for warmth.
wait for us to duel it out
in the morning.
I was biting the inside of my cheek
to taste victory
and she was on top of you,
crowning.

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 believe in overflowing
chalice.  you believe in
holding space for growl
and distance and
your wife at night.

you watch me lay the
dill in bowl, line the bed
with tourmaline.
run the bath with
chamomile and yarrow oil.
it’s all for nothing,
you found me but
I am full of tincture now.
the best defense is
to cripple yourself
like victim.
they call me two games at once
and two friends at once and
crocodile tears and I trace the beast’s
jaws with your pointer finger
so you can feel the heat of my
thigh as I distort my face
into something moved by
real feeling.
I walk for miles:
slow and black and
hungry.
I am game.

you’ve been watching
jaguars move:
you’ve been memorizing motion,
I’ve been draping myself in Apollo’s
arms and
storm so you can see and
feel me as 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.

in winter
it is long and dark
and hard to contain
myself.
reaching,
hidden by
the wind, I am
lucid and hoping
but also malaised
and still seeking
an ancient revenge.
you watch me prey;
sip the drip of
the effulgent crescent
bulb I worship.
I hide my sulk
in strut and I mask things,
like sweetness or
consideration of the others in
your life. I am
dripping accusations down
my lips as you
learn each line of my
palm and you begin to draw
your duplicity out
for me.

you didn’t want to
be so right.
I become the
distance: the chasm–
scorned red bath,
the woods,
the bottom.
you are my
gun I am walking
quietly behind on a long trail
full of what we said
and old venom
and new thoughts but still
most obsessed with
improbable ideas of us;
the endless provision,
it ends on a bridge,
my body swollen,
tear-streaked and stretching.
I am always someone’s
secret.

you said trust
and I stepped backwards on the
slippery ledge
waiting to see
if I can fly.
picked out
thirty names to call
our daughter before my body
hit the bottom.

“datura moon”

“I’m always knives-out,
a chain of razors folded
behind each gesture.
You who loves me: are you
paper? Or plywood? Or stone?”
–Christopher Morgan

I never write about blossoming but
I’m seeing inflorescence in
dejection,
my unpolished toes at the edge of the kitchen
where the carpet meets the tile,
an unwashed bowl of almond butter
next to my tea,
empty half of a house,
my patient sponsor and the
tail end of my
frantic texts    public mania;
an affinity for
inscripting every feeling
somewhere permanent and
obvious and
flagrantly.
begin to plan the next
black mark on my body;
a crocodile eating the
Baphomet etched plainly onto
my right thigh and name him
Milo, like he’s some
dog to call, the giant
beast that kills me.

I could have been
sitting still,
saving face,
explaining through private sessions,
watercolor, grace or
long sleep.
she mentions  doing the
dishes         she mentions
breathing       she mentions
just let it be.

I see a bud in the daffodils you left me,
a water filled horizon that distorts
my perception
of what “leverage” really means,
and the big picture,
obscured by my choice of lighting;
all fluorescent,
            it’s cheaper
blinding              my censorious self-portraits,
overdone with explanation and
cyclic editing,
ornate,
constant litter in the place,
and now I have some dead petals
to sweep.

it used to be us:
two dirty bowls
but saw clearly.
we were soaked in
soft lighting and I held
your gaze,
your torso,
your incogitant rage
that I managed between fits of
self soothing and pleading,
placating you.
mouthful of bitten tongue,
some little good timing,
ready for
          hi there
some little soft haunting.
for you,
always:

a toothy smile,
walk for miles,
fingers crossed for some
little soft revenge.
yes yes,
I think about you
every now
and again.

VI.

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”