Tag: poem

she talked to me all day
 in riddles and I welcomed
 her gentle incursion,
 the way she enunciated certain
 things and said y’all
 and quite frankly charmed
 while armed    broke men with a
 chain or a flash of knee
or surreptitious motive
 and I held steady
 with one open eye
 and crossed arms
 and no plan to move
 in either direction
 when she asked if I still
 favored her.

not a single person in this town
 knew her and not many
 elsewhere.
 if it were up to her,
 she said,
 she’d disappear without a trace
 into the ocean
 or a foreign life
 leaving a legacy of
 riddles and ghosts that
favored her but not one
 in a bed, or
 several chained in a
yard not able
 to break through the
bushes to door.
 yes, I still favor you.

wore a veil,
 wore a shrouded smirk and
 moved wide but
 never wanted anyone to
 recognize her face.
 in the sun,
 became a mist
 wafting wearily
 through rows of houses,
 blocks and noting
 trash, and noting straws,
 noting needles,
 and a penchant for
heart.
 in the dark,
 a trace of flame
 from distant candle but
 never here.
 still,

 ok, howl.
 if you placed her in a cage
 full of rocks and
 sunk her to the bottom of
the mariana trench with enough oxygen
to last her the swim back up,
 she’d find every school,
 hold the middle,
 let the sides be eaten in
 her disguise,
 ride their backs back up,
 wash up on a dolphin
 at your feet, half dead,
 blue, freezing and with an unctuous
 grin just to prove
you still favor her.

“Saturn in Scorpio” or “how guys save me in their phone, reversed”

0

“I have no future plans,” I began calmly.
      I am arms outstretched
walking nowhere but with
ardency so
I am labeled,
whimisical and manic
like a wound up
fairy, the character that
keeps the music box

spinning
that leapt from its
little gold coiled post
sprinkling glitter,
growing nerves and
ankles that bend flat
to walk to run to
crawl

people like me because I have no plans,
am honest about it, and
have wings that carry weapons.    I
hear in a distance
   someone repeat it

I use intimidation as a tactic to seize opportunity


Well, I also use black magic

“seven of cups”

0

I drove through
all of middle Earth
to get here;
to lean into the sharp points
of middle hurts.
in true poet’s parlance,

 I am rehearsed,
death, reverberating.
nothing but
kamikaze and the
soot palms that steer it,
practice typeface.
I smile to show you
some white.
I’ve got my cat suit on:

solid shoulders, strong,
curved back and a heavy head
that is full
      a blue cracking
heart to match.
I say where?
and you say
nothing.
smile to show you
my canines.
I come over wearing
 everything I own:

a pack that stalks
and stays together in lunge,
a freshly oil-stoned
suit of knives and
the bled-dry opaline
home that I nest in,
my cozy coronation robe:
my clanking vest that
announces my arrival to
your home.

it is me
wreathed in
all my men’s
bones.

“Hecate” or “the red book”

0

I believe in wormwood,
dried root,
my brother’s ashes
in a silver heart or
a ceramic urn
locked in vase
locked in mirrored chest;
a chant, a poem.
datura when the time
is right.

sometimes I do ceremony,
sometimes I just let things pass.
we do that for others,
carry our grief quietly,
bury things deep
within ourselves.
but sometimes in a fit,
I spill over.
tell you everything.

you said
I like to swim
so I am braised with razor;
become a carnation lake
at your feet and
you said rain–
I like gardens.
so I condensed and
waited to show off my new arms
lined in fresh alyssum.
my cycle     I always meet them in
winter
where my only
light is moon.
my flowers blossom
under the chilled night,
drip a dark nectar and
I am thirsty and
you already know–
I believe in
altar.

I believe in overflowing
chalice.  you believe in
holding space for growl,
holding me with
distance.
you watch me lay the
dill in bowl, line the bed
with tourmaline.
run the bath with
chamomile and yarrow.
I am full of tincture now.
I can move like a jaguar:
slow and black and
hungry.
I am hard to see that way.
you said
I am game.

you’ve been watching
jaguars move,
you’ve been memorizing motion,
I drape myself in constellation
so you can better see me,
storm so you can better feel
me and I traipse across the forest
floor waiting to be found.
my tonsils growing
chelicerae,
my rib cage growing legs,
my bottom becoming fat
with thread and
I know what you like
and I know that
you are game.

you are writhing
game in tiny, tiny
snowflake threads
hung far above the
ground.
 switch places
I become the woods
encircling your howl.
you become the kicking,
breaking patch,
the river marked
by footprints, then
lost, then drowned.

in winter
it is long and dark
and hard to contain
myself
gorged with nectar
hidden by
the wind.
sometimes we do that for
others: hide our
spines.
you watch me prey;
sip the drip of
the effulgent crescent
bulb I worship.
you become the shivering
deer, caught fly,
gutted bunny hooked in

jaw.

I become the
scorned red bath,
the woods,
the bottom.

 

“datura moon”

0

“Strength does not have to be belligerent
 and loud.”

I derive so much from one word.
pull from it.
it’s the synchronicity that
binds me and
the license plate that careened into the pole
instead of me that night read
“ prisons” and
I knew instinctively how
he felt.
tonight I’ll do:

a spring equinox meditation.
brush my teeth.
cut grapefruit for the morning
and ride the waiting out.
pay homage to my Pluto
and my Pisces in the
eight inning.
my Venus nestled in her
vindication, her frequent
illicit engagements kept dark
in that dusty
twelfth house,
but she found a clean mirror and
she is undoing her braids.

i’m becoming a panacea of my own:
memory, tincture, flowers everywhere,
the fuss of first love never leading anywhere but
here in another meditation
on the river walk.
draw my poems out of the older sutures:
undo, redress, pamper the wounds .
think about it.
send you a letter.
remember the way grief sits,
unsettled, right after dusk,
right under your chest,
right under your breath:
a blue river from your fingers.
send you that letter
with my wounds
pasted
 in the margins.

reminding you to
think about it

pay homage to your Venus.
she is out
casting cars into ditches
while you cautiously wait
for lights to
change.
you are holding selenite
in your pocket
but your fingers still
curve and you are still
smirking,
standing where they
are now
sitting and
wilting
in screams,
it was the way you asked
in a bit of a curtsy:
one more chance 

but you snap.
and they lose their
breath just like that.

“prisons” or “Venus in the 12th House”
or

“how guys save me in their phone”

0

smirk.

 black lipstick and naked eyes and
 lied about time when I asked her.
she looked at her wrist to
count the hearts but missed an
hour and she is
 dulled,
not rusty but
blunt and I know
when she walked away,
her hand was

steadily sharpening.

 

“how guys save me in their phone #6”

0

perfunctory
and evil like a tease,
slow to build and
protected by sheer
want

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.

“us, reversing”

0

the first thing I showed him was the callous
 here look
and he licked it with his tongue
without questioning my need to
grip things so tightly
I’ve succumb to carpal tunnel,
arthritis, delusions of
grandeur and infancy.

“has anyone ever talked to you about splitting?”
is what the doctor said to me once.
I was twisting the straw
in my fingers, contorting my
face and confessing things,
 sometimes i like to shoplift.

“Who is Catarina?”

sometimes I like to fuck men with wives.

“splitting is a phenomenon in which you  sort of leave your body to allow another persona to take over.”

sometimes I like to punish bad boys.

“like possession?”

sometimes I like to peek at Christmas presents.

“no, more like split personality.”

sometimes I watch the mirror dance in candlelight
            and wait for her to come in
               I break men
 like the swell that rises over bridges
 engulfing islands with her mouth,
 we break men with turns of
tides.


“the journal”

0

 

only two days ago
your hands wrapped around my throat
and tossed me on the bed
 and still dutiful,
I am on my way
 to pick up a bag of cutlery and dishes
 for our house from the front porch
of a stranger’s
when I stop to admire the cracks
in the side of the building.
the wall is coral, faded but still
garish, stands out.
 it’s brick and

this building has no doors and
one broken window.
these defects in the painted halls
lining my new city catch my
eye each time I run an errand
 and I pay my respects in
photographs      stopping at each one,
trying to remember how the boulders
 haunted too      how the ocean felt
on my wasted ankles at dusk when I guzzled
vodka Big Gulps and watched the
white crabs roam the bay.
watched myself dissolve into
the bits of me and can I remember
how the sunset looked draped over both
 tide and flatirons,
hold two things at once
without favor?
how it feels to lose several
small countries you claimed.
I’m invaded.

these overcoats that rot
hold space;
 there is natural beauty
 here but it shines brightest
 in demise.
 these bricks are painted to distract from
it’s true inability
 to keep a home  safe like
the way men have held me;
hugged with their claws,
I cracked at the touch     put my rosy shades on
 I only see them
 in their handsome sway.
I snap a picture of the edge of the broken
glass pane and the beginning of
the paint peeling into
white–the fissure.
I trace my finger
over a chip and watch
it flake.

how they left me.

“doors #1”

0

my knees hurt from walking the line
between prophecy and
presence as I stomp the
concrete for miles.
I’ve been dreaming of fish everywhere.
I am going nowhere;
only getting older so
sometimes I need a second
of stillness   rest
or I suddenly need to stretch
my calves on the railing
and I stop in the center.

it doesn’t matter if I hear them,
I always turn around and
two or three or a
lone man step around me.
once distracted, now
astute, upright
without visible panic
growing my back into a knight
and I keep pace behind them.
a gargoyle with cat
ears and a smirk
and I can walk for miles,
a giant keeping stride with
the beat of legs in front
of me.

watch

women move like machines
too.

 

“catcalls”

0

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑