it is the sun streaming through my
bay-sized sliding door windows
and the white-apped mountains
framed within them
that I will miss most
in winter.
clearly, I can’t hold
two things at once without
favor, and
today I have
a piece of paper,
a dozen dead things
wilted in their vase
to remind me.

there is a touch of red
sprinkled around the glass
that browns and sets as dry
on the sill in
my small uncurtained bedroom that
I pace when I have
too much on my mind
and today they remind me

life is a patient rot
to tomb, a gauntlet and
fluid so I better keep
moving.

life is a patient
gut to get to
wound it was April
on Earth Day when I wrote
My Brother Is Dead
in the back of a notebook I would never
look at again.

thrown away to make room
as I packed the car
two years later.

“grief (part two)”

January 17, 2021 0

don’t tell anyone what i did to you.

January 17, 2021 0

humiliation of
all the little violations
that add up to today
without one strong word
or accurate verb
to describe the way a knife
sticks for a second and you moan
the wrong way.

what sounds better to you?
I say over coffee, trying to
finish some titles,
possibly in love but also
possibly

.“besieged” or “PTSD”
or simply
“raped?”

“the act of naming things”

January 17, 2021 0

the boy in the bed asking
me to try on something that
slips off and
now I’m in tight pants
and loose sweaters and
just another verse
picking at its stitches,
grunting from the dark and
taking educated guesses at the Rorschach blot
that spreads across its skirt
when she is strut.
but writing with a vocal fry;
a sort of deflection, uptalk and
cadence, downplaying
it with rhythm as you
try to capture the moment
you were knees first on
a pink and white daybed
as he showed you all the ways
to take it;
passive pistil,
this is what men want;

January 17, 2021 0

I wish I had more words for
“terrorized”
tossing jumpers from my dollhouse,
that may have been where I learned
to cut my hair like my brother
but first I
learned how to get undressed

January 17, 2021 0

grow up big
like
great, big
potted
bonsais:

warped,
admired for aesthetic,
pruned to look pained,
trimmed excessively
with some self-seeking worship;
most every limb
lacking expansion
or utility,

most every limb
kept smaller than it
should be.

“girls”

January 17, 2021 0

“we are obsessed with exposure, and prefer to take initiative, to expose ourselves.”

–Louise Gluck

“mercury in eighth house vs. mercury in first house”

“Of two sisters
one is always the watcher,
one the dancer.”

–Louise Gluck

January 17, 2021 0

I just have to make rent.

I read a note out loud to myself,
something I had written in an urgency,
a mania and with its own
staggering precocity these little
messages keep me crawling
on the ledge:
everything that is really hard
is going to save your life

and a blackbird landed on the branch
outside my living room
window.
still, their eyes small and
sharp, waiting to dive,
waiting for the buzz of cicadas
to start again.
that reminds me,

I say in my head
i’m emaciating.
I take a sip of water.
starved, looking
without touching and
I want too much
has many meanings.
I read the words aloud again
and pour myself a thimble
of almonds.

it is first that I craft the story,
not out of revenge but
of general idleness and
devilment, the two things
slated to go hand in hand.
I begin to charm him.
do you believe everything I say?

and then you become the
braced masochist
and I become
the looming hit.

“maelstrom”

January 17, 2021 0

I return to the original plan,
answer yes or no to whatever you
ask, truth.
I begin not timid,
but cautious.

my birthday is the day of
the fearless crusader and I know
you won’t believe this, but I really
can’t tell a lie unless it is
to save my life.

January 17, 2021 0

5. sort out near death experiences, drive to
make sense of it.

(cats have nine lives)

19, severe drinking
problem–so much so that
I had been arrested for
playing the stoplight
game with my boyfriend again.
the stoplight game is something
I made up out of fear of
intimacy: we take a shot of
vodka at every red light.
they found us in a parking
lot; me pissing, and
them thinking I’m a whore.
made me walk a straight line.
made me recite the alphabet backwards.

easy.

blow. .28
they were impressed.
i was 123 lbs, 5 7
and I admitted to them
that yes, I’d been drinking.
just five shots,
I said. which wowed them
more. I had taken at least fifteen.

it wasn’t jail but the second
morning of my alcohol group
that almost did me in.
in my shakiness,
I reached for my shot glass
and poured myself my hair
of beagle. certainly, any shot
glass on my shelf would do.

and as I began to gag in horror
feeling the sharp metal in my esophagus,
stuck, people home but
pride will kill you too,
I began to choke,
really choke.
cough and stand up,
clutching my neck,
somehow by iron will
spit the safety pin out
in my hand and recall
in horror, the designation
of that glass as
“utilitarian.”

to keep pennies
and safety pins in.

“near death experience #5”

January 17, 2021 0

“Of two sistersone is always the watcher,one the dancer.”

“Of two sisters
one is always the watcher,
one the dancer.”