Tag: poem

I start taking wagers on who
shows back up first
knowing it’s wrong to bet
on anything that talks
and quite frankly,
you can’t,
Mrs. Shepherd told me in the 12th grade
during AP stats, still proud I aced that
class but you can’t stop
a sociopath
from never feeling again,
can you?
I say to him.
I have a Smith and Wesson.

but I add
people think angels can’t have
 guns and
 that’s not true,
hand him the weapon.
we just can’t fire them.
hold it.
 get comfortable with it.

pink collar says
PRINCESS, I’m wearing
antlers and a dirty blonde
wig.  mock latex bodysuit
that rides my hips and
I am
only half bitch
three inches from you
on the bed and
half loading bb bullets
in the cartridge and
plainly  drawing up
variables marked
xxx.

laugh out loud
cuz they
don’t really get it yet.
it’s not just execution.
it’s not just
having the arsenal
but where to put it.
pull back my curtain,
show him the basket
with the blue calcite,
the burned scripture,
the crown.

“formula #1: inference”

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the first thing to go
is emotion.
that’s why I gave away

my clear Garfield mug
that was impractical in size,
made for child’s juice
and reminded me of my first home.
I cannot take everything every year.
you know, moving every year
precludes you just lose things.
you cannot survive harsh conditions
and also be struggling with
some kind of emotion,
trying to name the fluid
mood swing, you needed to 

think and     snap out of it.
it was easier to manage the complicated
process via fable.
but
it was not easy to communicate
any needs,
desires.
the first thing to go is
emotion.
could not carry all of these things
and had adult sized mugs to begin
with.
you cannot survive any attack
while hysterical.
histrionic,
I practice that word.


I cannot pass up cravings.
I am on my fourth cup of coffee
walking to the El,
paranoid and running through all of the scenarios
in which I will die,
planning my escape route for
each one and having zero emotion
or hope.
the second is hope.

to go I mean.
the first thing to leave
is all feeling and the
second thing is
hope.

“second wave (grief)”

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you are only as sick as your
secrets the old man says
and I nod emphatically
like I found them and
am going to unabashedly
review my inventory
right here but
well

 I have just
applied a fire engine red
gloss to my lips before
walking in and
I didn’t know this was just
for men, readjusted myself
in the middle of five.
I’m all black
monochrome
and partially velvet,
hostile,
internal,
set out for departure
since arrival.
my friends say I have a
clever  way of falling up
and the ones I fucked
said anything
but easy
but taste like strawberry
which gets me in the door.

I start by confessing
that I shoplifted the kombucha
that I am drinking
cuz I honestly
just have to start.

“doors #2”

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ah, a whole day of cravings
curbed. feeling lighter
drinking coffee out of
blue and white porcelain cups,
how it sustains and suppresses
an appetite.
I am cataloging
food as it relates to money.
the less I eat.
the more I save for
other things.
I do not tell my partner
this; merely produce
cash for electricity,
merely thin myself
like I’ve always earned
to be a paper waif.
just kind of
feather.

realize that my bank account has
nothing in it for the third time in
my life.
the way I cradle the welcome
gifts from his mother,
these dishes, these pots:
all bright tangerine or
carnation yellow, and
red bowls.
red plates.
orange sequined quilt
across the bed.
she decorated the place while we were out
“making meetings.”
hung a portrait of a pineapple.
I felt the edges of the sink,
slightly damp and saw
something else.

I hated the stairs that cut through the center
and the backyard, too small
now lined with green safety fence,
chicken wire, he held up to show
me.  ways to keep the cat
safe inside.
now I am
replicating the house.
the way the stairs cut the
center and steep.

months later, I will
pluck out all of
the crabgrass in the tiny
backyard by hand, no gloves,
appreciating how quickly
my skin calluses,
the encasement for my
straws but utilitarian today,
productive today,
making things happen today.
the way I threw away the
windchime and its broken shells
littering the ground like it
meant nothing to me:
a childhood emblem I’d
had since I was eight,
tossed in a large black
carpenter bag.


all the ways I’ve entered
contracts on a whim,
the things I’ve collected
and the interminable slam
as I show my thorns,
me? I’m removed from
that space beginning again
to talk to ghosts
in the corridor
remembering
every step I’ve ever
taken; steep,
knees fractured,
ribs protruding.

“doors #1”

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first, he showed me the block.
waved his hands over black ice,
concrete, gritted
      you know how to make things work

I stepped carefully as he walked
several feet ahead of me.
we did a loop between two identical
intersections and stopped in a booth so
he could pay for the affection:
a vegan milkshake to soften
the contrast between two
nearly identical snow-lit
worlds; two winters in two
time zones but one was green and blue
and foothill-lined
and this one hung in the air:
gelid, tense, a dense and
mutable gray that changed from
partially cloudy to baiting fang
but what is more concerning is the
space between us
I slurped the vanilla coconut cream
from the plastic straw without making
eye contact or anything known
and he laughed at the things
that just rolled off my tongue
in allayed fits.


  it was January fifth,
the middle of a
polar vortex and I hadn’t seen
the center of the city yet,
or west or anything but
Kensington.
I kept mumbling about the
loose trash with no cans
and he smiled, irritated at
my constant observation.
unsure of how to handle
my turbulence in
fractured vocabulary
that I would
eventually learn to craft
and bank
but my nose was running so
 I spent the evening
in silence wiping it.
trembling  

cradled in his iron abdomen.
he mistook each tremor for the chill
settling in; a new house
that is, and I could feel
every sheath around me
crack like I just sprinted,
hit a frozen lake with my
cannonball skull heavy from
the weight of the unending pendulum
    think think think

and pieces of me began
to drop,
sink   
and what else?
(this is my 12th house)

 I wake up in his forearm
biting through his moles
to get to you.

“first wave/grief”

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January 5, 2014 and we
have arrived in
North Philadelphia
and the first thing I notice
aren’t the trashbags
lining the blocks or the
Auspicious Coin Laundry Service
sign boxed in blue lights
but the way you don’t
seem to look at
me much
and the way I seem
to blend in with the
tan upholstery of the
passenger seat
even though I am
wearing a red turtleneck,
coughing, asking
if this is where we are
going to live and practicing
pronouncing
K e n s i n g t o n.
mired in the habit
of saying everything I think
to you without
expectation.
of tapping a finger on
my thigh. of checking
clocks, twisting a plastic
straw in my hand,
fading.

sobs building
in my chest;
emergent waves
pounding at the
sternum like
irate knocks
then
fading.

“hypothymia”

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I am thinking of culpability
as it relates to
feelings towards me.
 I am thinking
you’re thinking
what’s the probability
I still hold grudges and
what’s the likelihood
I save a thing that any
man has given or said to
me, but we also have to examine
formula so you
reverse and see the way

 

I move at night first.
foremost, you have to
ask yourself whether my stasis
is truth or lie, and if all
perpetrators love getting
caught what does that mean for
us? and starting to feel myself
dissolve into the walls,
I become
first so large I cannot be unseen,
and then with a snap of
my fingers, a panel
blending in like camouflage
with the cracks along my walks.
I could not stop myself
from seeking; even in
chill, I could go from one
end of town
to the other.
like a slow exhale.

when the city closed the
streets for the pope,
I walked from Frankford and
Allegheny to 30th and Market,
having also biked it first.
even though we lacked the
snow capped hills,
something about spending an
entire two months
watching for black ice and cars
 even at red lights,
hearing them skid,
thrilled like the slipping
 over jagged rocks.
 and being watched daily
by a nemesis and every man in this
town really made it feel much
 more weighted
and at such a shifting
ponderance. there were
glades of icicles
to wade through,
my hamstrings so strong
 towards the end of
February, my fingers
like wrinkled rulers
measuring the space
between neighbors,
the circumference of
baseball sized holes in
windows, the sting of
locked knobs,
and

crippled by the straws
I clutched ungloved.

 

“February/February/July”

 

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I have three cuts through
the devil on my leg
and a small bruis
 to the right of it,
a large bruise on
my left thigh and
when we met,
you had a large mark on your
right arm that looked
like someone had grabbed you
and I don’t know where
I got it.

you are careful.
I am unsure what to say.
I don’t either.
I gesture to myself,
I mean to mine.

I begin to tell her a dream.
he begins to tell me a dream.
I am in the middle of a forest
and she is in front a fire
and all she says is
wait, be careful
what you say
and holds her hands up.
she kind of walks towards me.
she is young but
but like also like her child.
like she is her daughter.
she is walking up,
she is wearing a long white
pj gown and has long hair,
hands out saying
be careful what you say.
and then I just wake up.

and then wake him up.

“datura moon” or “the story of us”

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“We have, I think, great terror of pain, and consequent resistance to what it can teach.”

–Louise Gluck

freedom is a cage
 of smudged windows,
or it is a knot
in my stomach,
wriggling.


I dream of white frogs
at night in pools
covered in tea lights
and women swimming ahead
to cavern and I
feel caterpillars
washed in symbol,
 incubated, sliding through
my gut, inching
 their way from corporeal
packages when the day is
 warm and facing them,
unbridled.
when the wind is favorable

my unimpeded exodus
through speech
prevails;
from chrysalis to
window, cracking
pane and tracing spit
like slug on glass
to mark the gust
that carries.
from gut to
chest to
windpipe:
carved.  how screams are
rushed when pushed,
or just when they finally
meet the Earth
as voluble flutter
that maims itself
to form.



“Arachne”

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I took myself
to the welfare office,
not even getting lost as
I’m prone to do.
          why can’t you just figure it out?
I live right down the street.
it took fifteen minutes.
my shorts are stuck to my thighs,
and my neck is drenched.
I wipe my forehead with my hand
to her disgust.
“It’s unseasonably warm for June”
I begin and elucidate the drawl,
smile to beg for my Access card back
 but here comes the recalcitrance;
she asks me for something
I don’t have and I
smacked my lips the wrong way
so I snacked on my servility
 inch by inch as I
inched my way
 back to our place.

months later,
I lose a diamond necklace there.
there is nothing more satisfying
than losing things or
shaving my head or
throwing away the clunky pepper
 spray that women wraithed into chains
and hung from their hips
as if fear and trepidation
 and weaponry have
ever kept me safe.
someone told me failure is perspective
but all I see are cops
 pinching women with latex gloves
and all the little shrubs
 that line the block look like
workers shaking their heads at me
      leave
or,

get on with then.
I am  throwing coffee grounds
into a leaky cardboard box,
our first CD is scratched  and
on top.
I’m on a bed that lifts
with one giant sigh
and no top sheet and
no frame.
they said risk meant courage
and I say you fucking
left me here
into your voicemail.

I’m eating sprinkles with a spoon
in a freshly inherited
two story townhouse.
It’s the sixth of June
so I got weeks.

“grace”

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