datura moon

I step on wet cat litter
on the way to the mirror
and ignore it.

my feet are bare,
my knees are tired,
my legs are still spent from cartwheeling down your block
all summer: bruised, broken spindles
of scabs and bravado.
I’m ignoring the gravel
under my toes.
I’m plucking my eyebrows.
I’m picking out tights.
I’m meeting someone soon.

I try on several lipsticks;
take my time with each palette,
each gloss, each burgundy line
of delusory affection drawn into
a wide, wolfish smile.
I’m nude for a while
in front of the sink;
my dry hands are
unwashed but I can smell flowers
on my nails as I tease my split ends
into hair bigger than it is:
rosewater from the quick spritz
to my face to pace myself
when I feel the urge to
go back in time,
erase and retrace things in
illusive reception,
name them things like
us or
enough so I learn how to
stop.

unfitting for grown women
and I’ll continue to falter:
cut my hair unevenly
to the nape of my neck without
sexuality,
be incorrect
and often
without attachment to its correction.
take my time with mopping things,
take my time learning ruby liner,
onyx lashes,
diffusing for a while.
spit in the faucet without washing
the couple spots the stream missed
and I stay waffling between color schemes
and themes of conquest.
I remember the years of unnamed longing
and I scream as I
suddenly soften.

heels are the last to go on.
they’re uncomfortable but I
like how tall I am as I prowl past your place
so you get one last double take.
I clack over the litter without a glance back in
its direction on my way out the door and
if I’m lucky,
if I am very lucky,
I’ll teach my daughter how to shapeshift her way
to knighthood without compromise.
without insertion.
she can keep her crooked breasts,
her imperfection,
her relentless gaze towards furtive weight:
martydom.
her overused adjectives that she breathes
even in her sleep,
works into every passage;
how many times can one really be amenable or
replete? but I am
and often.
and sorry, how many times she is sorry
when she meant to say nothing,
when she meant to say don’t call me or
yell I’m starving.

my love will have a cradle and a blanket and
a mobile with the planets hung crookedly and
carved into the center of Jupiter
hovering far above Earth,
her mother’s favorite emblem of luck and
expansion,
with a butter knife and an old eyebrow pen
the only poem I felt strong enough
never to rework:

rest girl,
you do not earn your birth.

12.

I am protected.

I am wet and giant
and shaking from the
waves.
I am the midnight ocean
birthed from the absent sun
taken over by the
full moon’s rage.
I am an alarm.
a storm brims the coast
and you start writing down
anything you remember
about me.
I am undulating in great
tidal gasps; a siren
sights set on horizon,
humming low, humming
softly and
come in closer
splayed across the break.

your arid soul is thirsty for the
new oasis I’ve become
but your obtrusive leaps
are doused in hex
before they ever reach me.
you are responsible for
some of this and
I am responsible for
that.
my bed is soaked
and I am angry.
black in vengeance cloaks
in white to walk the streets
the way furtive angels might.
you send me butterflies
at night
to assuage me.
I return the offer:

I dress in wings,
suck the nectar from the
dusk’s flowers,
learn her tales,
twist into my final form:
a long nightmare,
black hairy legs and
two tagmata,
one long dry choke
at the stroke of
3:33 every
morning onward.
you spend the year immured
in poetry and pieces
of half finished themes
obsessing over everything
you turn to see.
over everything you thought you
saw out of your
unrelenting periphery,
how many twins do I own?
thought you
dreamed and wrote
down, unwind,
which moon did I come out of
and how many wolves
did I set free last night?
I become immune.

you become the
stranded calf in
my forest while
I spend the year
immersed in baths of
black obsidian and
forgetting what it
ever meant to
me.

“reversing” or “us”

at least I give you transparency.

even when I’m moping, I’m dancing
in songs of satin
rippling with sob and shimmering
deep bright with
the sky’s opacity.
I am combusting: a
flood of recourse and
you are
drowning, immersed
in capillaries bursting with crisis
and then immediate clarity.
my hands let go of the
flood I’m cradling.

you watch me move
like a snake across your
ceiling draped in shifting
constellations
you have no choice but to
memorize and I’m wearing
the crescent as a crown and
your ears like a gown
and someone else is full of warnings
gutting rabbits
in the garden.
each night I go to God and ask
                                   for favor.
                             in the morning, I remember
                                       one line.

I hand them back their most
prized possession:
a page, one line;
one at a time
wrapped in
flakes of
shrimp and you
told me you were

STARVING.

“aquarium”

they couldn’t take the
wanderlust,
the exhausting sadness,
all day naps,
three week periods, and
not even a fake smile but
always a goblet.
moonshine as promised.
I was a little
overgrown gerbil:

dependent, sitting in my cedar-scented
piss in a lounge chair in the backyard
picking pine needles out of my knots;
hollow but for some force fed
swallows,
rum-coated water,
stale lines and organic vegan pop-tarts.
a shriveling income and
hooked in my dejection;
my lifeline,
my blooming red moon.
centuries of howls and hands like
needles doping me
so I’m easier to ride,
and my braided tongue
lolling,
trying to unwind,
just licking up all the
shit
you fed to me.

with love,
you said.

“best wishes”