creative writing

I’m caught in the middle of
two periods:
between black as death and
black as a violent
stormy day:

the kind that shut schools down,
threatens to take out
whole neighborhoods
with her incisive strikes of
roar and lightning,
emanating flood.
I suppose that would
make me in transition,
currently nestled
in a calm and mutable
gray.

It’s winter and I’m not
cloaked in night yet?
You’re taking the long way home;
passing by my
window for a peek of
my flickering lights,
my private worship,
my fire tongue
now burning itself to a
cinder, cooling with the drops
of pinprick blood
dripping down my
altar.
And I’m preparing to
skin the ash from myself,
drape in only white,
and twirl through these
cold months
with algid splendor.
I am seen by many
but never touched.

For you, given our
history, that seems very
advantageous, and despite
my proclivity for sudden flight,
my growing meridian wings,
something is keeping me
here.
Something is keeping me
floored, and despite my
recurrent lake coffin
premonition,
something is keeping me dry,
safe on shore
and alive.

“the phoenix”

May 14, 2019 0

i’m all
bramble and hair
outside of your window.
I look and stand still,
tall, like your atlas cedar.
my wounds are plastered to
the branches, little sparrows
peck at the flesh of my
open bleeding breasts;
I flower from a deep root,
and I am constantly
gnawed at.

I’ve been watching you cook things,
evolve in her kitchen.
you are becoming
something worth touching
for longer than minutes.
I’m devolving;
nails clawing at the stamp
in a fit of maniacal envy.
lower lashes leaking like
little pens
splashing on the loose leaf
when they should have been
dry like my jest and
planted lightly on your cheek,
when they should have been asleep
in your elbow, or deep
in your chest or dancing
like loose wisps of dandelion
and landing on your lips.
something worth touching
softly
for hours.

closed,
my body is tangled
in words,
skin is ripped at the seams,
veins are trickling low utters,
sighs,
some red hot lies,
stale adjectives,
big ideas about our reconciliation
delivered to your doorstep
in hopes you
remembered
the last time i moaned
under you,
letting out a little
m o r e

how i promised you
a little
more.

“the envelope”

May 13, 2019 0

all that glitters is usually filtered
unless God is involved.

this day, two weeks
ago, or so,
i’m lost driving into the
sun-soaked skyline;
her late afternoon sunset like an
ochreous fog drifting from underneath
God’s skirt as she lifts
I’m trying not to stare)
and shows me
what I could have had:
a heart exploding from arterial
confinement, daily hues of red cascading
into orange clouds,
or if it’s rain that day,
gray with yellow halos.
the setting is always obscured by
the passing climate.

I was hearing you say
“fuck”
softly and playfully near my ear
again. I know where you
stay now, and I know
I just want everything
too fast.
the sky is telling a story
of a very
slow and deliberate
inflorescence
fuck
and I am trying
to be more present.

but I just missed my exit
trying not to feel
the one am fingers
unzipping the jeans I fell
asleep in
and I probably
missed the point
long ago, but I am dreaming of
a reunion,
of delayed gratification,
a ball dropping,
a heart exploding in
your bed like a sunset;
perennial, without
finality or resistance
to its daily revolution
around the giant.

the way I am longing to
be in your ear whispering,
revolving around the giant in the
room between us;
yes,
keep going.

May 13, 2019 0

I’m haunted in several kinds of
cadence and burdened
with unmanageable lust.
I’m replaying the way
you never said my
name, the way I keep my nails
short in case I turn on myself
when I’m turning myself
on.
Someone has to touch me
at this point.

The way I begged
for you to send me a magpie
some mornings,
the way I long for it still,
it hurts.
The way in which I elongated
the word u s
so it looked bigger on paper.
I let it last
a whole year;
grow leaves, grow fingers
dotted emerald green with pink flowers
and then sorrel and bare,
baring its brown
bones to the birds
who perch in earnest search
of shelter so they can call on
one another in fight,
famine, or flood.
I watched us
drift to the floor
in detritus,
becoming
a new organism that grew roots,
that craved sun,
that lapped water and pollen and
seasons.
Letting it fall
in frost.
Letting it crown
despite the real
us.

Kiss me in the light of
these new found
bedevilments,
I lick the mirror
with feeling.
It is December and I am
already freezing.
I am relying on roots
for nourishment.
I am hibernating
and emptying.
All year, I am sturdy and foreboding
like a honey locust
dripping thorns down her spine,
dropping leaves all down your walk
so you will always be reminded of the
pine that encircled you when you first heard
my forest chorus:
the long form I wrote of
u s.
Look at me again and
again and
again: now
I am leaving.

I am chopped into several pieces.
I am becoming paper.
I am becoming waste.
I am becoming the spines of books,
archaic adjectives
that you chase to replace your
chilled silence with a word
that offers anything but
a returned question mark.
You thought that all devils
wore black and sauntered
and spoke coolly with promise,
but I am the devil
who wears anything
the world will offer,
including white,
and offers some
warm reprieve
like a velvet-lined casket
floating over the open
sea.
I am listening.
I am wide open
and encasing.
It was never us
I came here
chasing, I finally admit to
what I am
drawn to.

It is waiting.

“death”

May 13, 2019 0

im a stifled violence
unleashing the knife of my spine
inch by bloody inch
and im walking towards you.

my name is Circe.

I am God-drawn
and celibate
and obsessively
testing myself.
I look good
all smothered in your blood,
you look better
hanging from my bookshelf.

I am
scratching at your chest
and other places to let
the mice know
what I own
in case they forget
what I did,
who I am to you,
and come back
hungry for a hole
in that
home.

they cut across the black cat
lying surreptitiously
under porch rail
licking the flecks of skin
from her paw,
mistaking her for shadow.
they don’t cut
far.

they are mice
lying down
that are ripped
like the line of your
spine,
neck to base
in shreds.

you too are mine.

“the welcome mat”

May 13, 2019 0

Will you ever speak again?
Did a mouse steal your tongue?
Am I the cat dragging it back with an allusion to love
for the one who keeps her?
You never entertain me with your stories.
I never leave your crystal balls alone:
knock them about and keep them
hidden from you.

But I slaughtered that mouse.
Didn’t I kill for you?
Isn’t trial love?
A more violent truth serum
I offer than most; I rip answers
with my sudden eruption of flames
directed your way
but I leave some blue vervain
on the dresser to soothe you,
mention it’s good for clarity and
joint pain.
No burn salve, something
slightly bitter.
A final act of cruelty
and I bow in my miniskirt.

You chose solution in someone else,
and the lie.
I chose to withhold an antidote to your
meek eternity.
Had I said “I love you despite what you’ve done to me “
I know you would have stayed.

But vengeance tastes sweeter
than pride as you’ll soon
see. The way I devour,
the way I spit you back up.
The way I make you
taste yourself.
It’s titled
“Lilian”
and
“the way I make you
face yourself”
or

“How I write you in the story”

May 13, 2019 0

I am on my floor
in a sweeping bow,
in an off-white gown
I am wet with my insides,
out
there is red everywhere,
little notes to myself,
some written in charcoal
black on my left hand,
my old eyeliner pen:

rehydrate often:
we are at war here,
darling.
and
don’t grin,
it makes you look
desperate
and
I am doing all of this for book.
and one more
(you always repeat the same story)

do not repeat the story.

“eyeliner” or “(notes to self)”

May 13, 2019 0

fables of how we met and
false expressions.
i keep replaying “no” over
and over in my head.
my heart is a jungle:
vitriolic and slaughtering herself.
I’m a cage and my grief
always turns to rage
like acid turns to rain and
rushes through my spinal fluid
so I stand up straight.

I walk proud and tall and
wear your veneers like a mask.
I sneer at the creeks of
red beneath me.
all my men in pieces at my feet,
bowing.

“Hecate”

May 13, 2019 0

you can find me in complete silence
in the corner.
medicinal fingers curved into myself,
into claws so no one gets the love.
I’m triggered by the music and pacing
in 9.9 cubic square feet
of psychosis.
I’m feeling my nails dig into
my palm.
you say hello.

you can find me frozen
one week later,
woven in an opalite tapestry
spread across your floor.
I understand confession.
I’m Catholic.
I ask for judgment,
not counsel.
some retribution.
let’s make this clear.
let’s make this public.
I’m stuck in a projection
so you barely have a face
that isn’t my reflection.
at least I give you transparency,
moping opacity.
my veins are bursting with crisis,
with clarity.
you walk across my pubic bone
uncarefully.

you recognize me months later by the wallow,
by the
chewed straw in my hand,
the callus in my palm,
the bad polish job.
I tell you what love feels like
based on the time I first noticed
an open space between two
wants.
it was five seconds long
since then and now,
I’ve grown so much
I can fill your whole pocket.
what a fertile experience you are having
I see the grin of a horizon
upon us.
Look,
I’m reassuring,
I kept God,
as you rise above the clouds

this time, I made you
the sun.

“the light” or “the men who look like mirrors”

May 13, 2019 0

I used to be an empty room.
Now, I’m filled with things,
stored with things,
other people’s things and
so many things
to dust.

I spent the winter
dusting,
rearranging.
I spent the winter
lost in a learned childhood drawl
where I mumbled yeah,
uh huh, where I hid my hair and
pants behind my dollhouse,
where I was on all fours in a daybed,
where I was stuck inside a moment
like a picture
except it all moves past you and
you stand,
captured

watching him; his
excerebration process,
mine,
without anesthesia or
any explanation.
don’t touch me anymore
what becomes of disorder
when ignored,
when resolved?
unhinged.
remembered hair behind the dollhouse,
remembered yeast infections,
temper tantrums “without provocation”
they said.
remember you never learned to trust.

I started roaming giant sandboxes
underground
following the Atlantic’s soporific
siren voice
to find something that called to me
long ago.
Something vague.
Something warm.
I’m unwrapping the resin layer,
I’m coughing up the heads of dolls,
I’m moistening the cipher.
I’m coming back, I’m coming
back, bandages
off.
I’m walking forward.
This is how they’d rather have it.

I once was a space of
bright, blue lakes,
but now I’m
bursting with black magic.

“the unwrapping”

May 13, 2019 0