in this dark forest, few answers
matter: are you the hunter,
or the hunted?
are you for us,
or against
us?
are you
certain?
7.
my favorite word is
unabashedly
I say to no one.
6.
I liked your pressed shirts
best
kept on you.
end of day:
wrinkled, faint bleach smell,
sleeves rolled up past your elbows,
I count four moles on your forearm
musk standing straight and consumptive
eating away at the fresh cotton scent
you sprayed in the air and
walked through just before I
laid on my side,
urged you to come in
from behind.
I was always craving the earlier temper
that had you so wet with sweat and
despotic reproach.
You would re-enact shit:
yell at the floor and I would become it
to prove my loyalty
to soft barrage.
I assured you of my masochism,
let you whip me guilt-free.
spent hours in the mirror
counting each mark;
the ways you showed me
how you owned me and I
followed your hot bellow
all the way to North Philadelphia.
I’m stuck in North Philadelphia.
I’m stuck in a daydream.
I’m stuck in a memory of a canopy of a
full fertile moon
that I painted my toenails under
the night he said,
“I want to see you more often.”
And my feet shimmered:
stars of the portentous summer.
You say love freely now without any meaning,
but the word holds a bit of a sharp weight;
like a knife when it’s oil-stoned, serrated
and facing you and you aren’t sure
how this is gonna play yet but you’re
trusting and palms out;
I count three cuts across your fists
like expectations you had on yourself
or someone else when you should have just
taken out the trash,
counted blessings,
bit each other’s tongues and hushed;
like a sudden accident
and you are humbled and
concussed,
unusually quiet and
stopped.
I looked in my bag today and saw
a bottle of blue polish
peeking out.
The train screeched to a halt
and I saw people tumble through the
exit signs.
I saw men that wanted to
shred my spaghetti straps with their
pocket knives and abscond with the fabric
to prove their might to
absent wives.
I smiled to show them my canines:
remind them women are animals,
women are predators;
foxes, defensive and
all of the time.
doors are opening
I found a book of poems that someone
printed for me and
a nail file.
(be creative, child.)
Are these signs or are these shadows
that are chasing me?
doors are closing
Asked for a hint.
(this unfolds reversing)
Now you become the braced masochist
and I become
the looming hit.
Began the note in my phone:
with love,
I spit.
“retribution”
you were born to understand
and teach lessons.
you were given a choice.
you chose this road
first, then the
present.
become an alcoholic to
find a higher power.
meditate occasionally to
see how well it suits you.
in between,
fill the emptiness with Oreos,
coffee,
a smoking habit you detest
but gives your fingers something to
do when you’re speaking anxiously
in public,
when the caffeine is rearranging your
tongue into metaphors and you
need a moment of pause,
clarifying to the audience
with a descriptor you
forgot.
run a 5K every three weeks
to give yourself a mission,
get back in shape,
hone your vision of
yourself.
bathe everyday.
tell the cat you love her
and pet her for an extra few minutes
before you walk for hours
to lose those new found vowels
completely.
pluck out your roots and
dead ends
hiding in a stealth spot.
begin a practice of voyeurism.
sit comfortably and
file your nails into sharp points.
when deadly,
lean into them.
write everything down.
start ordering your steak rare:
inhale the lost veal,
the lost zeal of an entire feedlot;
the scent of plasma and cud.
devour a a squealing colony
without remorse.
give cannibalism a chance.
you’re talking to yourself in public again.
the looks from the other patrons are fine;
they don’t bother you.
you remember them with skinned knees on
bathroom tile; your stomach in
velvet knots,
your obsessive purge.
you remember them peering at you
in courtrooms,
you remember them in handcuffs,
in shackles,
side eyes from jealous brides
as you make a scene at the open
bar.
the way you’ve stolen, the way you’ve
groveled afterwards. the way they held
onto those wrongs and their
condescending pats on the back,
withdrawn.
how you’ve managed to
survive it all with gratitude,
without much impact.
you’ve risen to their ranks.
get your wisdom teeth removed
and then
cut them into daggers.
check out Home Depot,
ask for “industrial size”
ignore all the
are you ok ?
you’re muttering again.
read the directions,
this stuff is toxic,
don’t get it on your eyelids.
press the bone back into your sockets,
flick the canines,
gotta be solid.
smile:
you’re still celibate.
you’re still hungry;
avaricious,
less slovenly from
all the exercise,
less addled than before
and armored like the night.
go back to the diner,
lick your plate,
click your tongue.
you showed them how starvation’s done,
you showed them how to roam.
you put your money where your
mouth is: your gold
is in the bones
you glued into your gums.
now you show them home.
your mouth is lined with
homemade knives, and you’re
wafting noxious with each
breath you begin to teach
them how to
move on instinct.
you begin to salivate
with virile.
you begin to chew more
loudly.
Miss? you ok, Miss?
now you’re gonna
show them how
to run.
“the siren”
“I scheme a lot,
I know,
I plot and plan:
that’s how a queen in prison
spends her time.
But there is more to me than that.”
–A Lion In Winter
I want it back as good
as you get it.
I’m a queen wrapping her
linens in deity and
dreaming.
You are the stark silhouette
of a man on fire
stalking the world’s line
in an effort to destroy everything
that is naturally gold
or naturally divine.
I’m practicing brevity.
You are a friendly snake in my moss:
wraithlike and weaving,
delivering me whole orchards,
watching me devour the cores.
You’re black like me.
You waft wide away when you ignite:
spectral smoke that shifts into bored fingers
choking the equator’s throat
to have a good time.
I emasculate.
You invite.
Remind you,
I have no true armor or fists
to fight this,
I am no knight.
I’m a spell;
a woman of deific heritage who felt like a pot
boiling over and needed to
cool off for awhile,
remembered to kneel and wash my face,
drink the bubbling creek of my
cool, blue heart:
a cathedral door standing frozen,
and slightly ajar.
I’m carnivorous but sick of the mess
so I become a melting ice cap
that will soon rise to run
and ruin everything she rushes.
You are impossible to hold on to
but I chase to soothe
like ice water on the last day of June
when school is long out and the high noon beams
are shining on every slide on the block
and the toes are branded pink,
and I want you to swallow me in one sip,
gag spit me out in the dirt
and lick me back up slowly
from this burning Earth
while I watch.
I’m entitled to this.
The day the world runs red with horizon
and I emerge:
my hubris residing in my tongue
demanding you guess my name,
gelid and expecting it.
Hear my chest creak in
anticipation, the stained glass shakes;
this great glacial organ that should give life,
but found in ire she is blindingly white,
binding, arctic and unmoved so
she just envelops everything she can
to preserve and study
and surmise she was right.
I’m hugging you tightly.
Your mouth is one giant O:
sapphire and stiff and trying to scream
and your two lips will never meet mine,
will never meet again.
In this place you will stay stationary
without a breath to blow
or a vein to bleed
or a vocal cord to tell me to stop or leave
and your confusion warms
these blizzard fits.
You want to tell me some final thing.
What left do you have
that I couldn’t conjecture myself?
I’ve heard it.
I’ve lived through this.
The words eternally yours
are most often cried throughout
hell, and I have spent many nights
covering my ears with pillows
and other ideas about
twins and pockets of
“well, it always starts in winter”.
“horizon”
“I scheme a lot,
I know,
I plot and plan:
that’s how a queen in prison
spends her time.
But there is more to me than that.”
–A Lion In Winter
who’s the wolf and who’s the moon
and am I the witch that controls the
two?
You started listening to Aphex Twin
based on a recommendation that someone
recently made;
that I had made prior.
but I didn’t point that out.
You were now making short films
with girls from Brooklyn who said things like
“I wish I was a real witch like you”
and demanded you talk in a British accent
when we ordered at Taco Bell.
The minute I got home I started a fight
with my new one before I
started to feel the insides slip out of their
cozy pink packaging,
started to rummage through a rush of old texts
as it happened that said:
meet me at ____
and now
so I could hold onto the idea of being wanted so badly
I was the top shelf cognac in your
unpolished snifter glass,
not the flaxen swollen kidney,
or the repercussion;
the egregious morning after
and the girl laying beside her.
I pretended I was the prize, the warmth,
the poison you crave.
I felt his fingers try to clean me out;
clean out the place where you rested your cheek once
and inhaled my constant fuss.
I now lay still, impassive in the habit of some
pretend attention with my eyebrow lifted,
half smirk and suspicious of his onslaught of
sudden affection that seems to twist me once the words
leave his lips and hit me with a dry kiss
I didn’t prepare for or want in my
corner.
When he started to ask me if I was bleeding again,
I started to explain about anise angelica
the cohosh family,
about a poem I wrote,
the curse of vision,
and a dramatic induction
what does blood taste like?
I licked our home from his fingers;|
swallowed hard to taste the copper,
the iron I lacked and the insight.
reached past his undercurrent of verbal rancor
to grab a tampon so he could forgive
my temporary brooding for the night.
I felt an altar in his bathroom
flushing our daughter down the toilet.
I had a sense of quiet importance
bleeding openly all over his floor
without apology, without
discernment, or
judgment of my ethics.
With men, it was pertinent
I was both feared and
adored.
I didn’t clean things up.
I left his bathroom
stained with our attempts at
reconciliation so he knew what
once owned me;
knew what I once owned and
abandoned with silent, fervid
violence.
“the infusion”
here’s a free scroll:
like the algid vortex that
blows from the north
and coats the town in
freeze and forces those to skate
across,
I break men.
I live in a pink room
with a rectangular mirror
propped against the wall on
the floor surrounded by
cards and flowers
and at night,
she comes to me
like the riding crop
that sharpens as they gallop,
I break men.
“the mirror”
me, I’m self effacing only in lines,
only in verse.
humbled by stark correction,
a closed fist perhaps,
a silent light that sets you on fire
(they call you a forest fire)
drowning in self,
an ocean as well,
insides rocking
tidal laments that implode in quiet, wild
violence,
stalking the world’s line,
biding mine with letters
and blades my time;
(no they call me on my way to steal your man)
stifled, I’m waiting
for that envelope
you promised
reminding me I was
right about time and
space is the price.
“space”
daturamoon.com 