creative writing

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”

May 17, 2019 0

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”

May 17, 2019 0

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”

May 17, 2019 0

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”

May 17, 2019 0

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”

May 17, 2019 0

Desperately trying to make a home
from a houseplant
that looks pretty but doesn’t
talk back.

Plant myself on your lap:
you’re making other plans.
Plan B
in my gut,
in my hormones,
in my warm dead cavities,
exploding from my disillusioned head
running down my thighs,
my knees,
my pink toes
to the bottom of a drainpipe,
run the shower,
watch it drip away,
the afternoon I said
come over and borrow a book or two
and then
stay indefinitely in my head.

We’re being filtered in our water,
everyone can drink to our failures,
our funerals,
our feigned orgasms,
our chary romance
that look wets & red hot but
feels like blue-black denial
like the sky I admire during
my psychotic December.
I’m manic and
I warm iron grates like the gaseous sun.
I’m a big, bursting ball of red-hot fun.
You’re libidinous but glued to
the floor and a
cool steel gate made of
gray imposing bars that stay shut
all year long.
How do I make love to that
without pricking my finger
on a strand jag
or rusted lock
or melting you so much with my fiery stardust
you’re just a mush of could have had?
but now you really can’t.
(oh, now you really run)

Where do I put my hands
or my head
or my mouth?
My ideas, my legs
my gaze.
My arms have nothing to wrap themselves around.
We’ve hit a steel ceiling.
Plan B,
you said,
was our only option.
I cracked my abdomen open
again
to please another man
that from a distant looks like
mirror, or a sunset
with no color
and feels just as bad.
I’m reeling and keeling
over.

Now, despotic lover,
now that it’s over,
now that it’s gone,
where can I put my feelings?

“Plan B”

May 17, 2019 0

I remove the rest of my top
and close my eyes deliberately
to show you the length
of each thorn,
the length of each arrow.

rose garden behind
each eye, the sky is
lined with bolts and I
have never become divine
without first becoming storm.

“full moon in Scorpio”

May 17, 2019 0

I have a low murmur that reaches
street lamps and cracks them
with it’s under snarl
that runs naked for miles
seeking something with a
warning and I hit
the corner as you are
walking up.
the light goes out
and a tire screeches
and a cyclist tumbles
and this city is full of
accident now.
you will
know me by my
fang-toothed smile.

you will see the smirk
open wide in the sun
into an open-mouthed
gutter.
you will call yourself
mine and line your bed
with rosary to
stop me from coming
but I’ve already
been invited.
I will be around and
you will be
in tears by
the end when

you remember the
agreement;

revenge is an interesting game,
how undiscerning rage becomes
when it turns red
the story begins
as you remember everything
again.

when you remember everything.

“morphic resonance” or “notes to him” or “notes to self”

May 16, 2019 0

you,
thorn in my rib and
absorbed in my
fascia,
sharp in the introduction
but dull once picked.
you tickle my spine
without bloodshed
but left a trail of detritus
for me to pick through.
for me to sift.
find what’s yours,
what’s ours,
find it somewhere.

me, I sink into your elbow,
lips a bobbing knife;
seasoned and slow,
blunt but steady,
cutting deeper with each
grin.
I am patient,
learn the swerve
of each artery.
lick your neck.
lick your fingers.
cut you open
with each flick.

we are curved into each
other two indolent
house cats striped with ribbons
of the other.
trimmed claws but
voracious and reaching
cautious with each lunge,
each obstructed mile
in our separate paved
jungles,
tame and
crouching.
tame but
longing and
finding what is
us.

us, scratching
at each other’s scabs
to remember how to
hunt.

“us”

May 14, 2019 0

My bones cut like an oasis in this room
and you have decided to live
in the shadow
of the hallucination
that promised shelter.
I promised you
I’d stay hot
but you never thought
it would come
so dry,
so big and abandoned
like this.

“the desert”

May 14, 2019 0