poem – Page 38

then it’s flowers and unexpected showers
but it is day longer, sun higher,
you are not mired in the date of departure
anymore, and you forgive the monsoons.
your sensualizing emotions present themselves:
the gloss and black tips,
hips in sheer nylon,
a gentle sway.
sometimes it is unseasonably warm
and you have to hold your cardigan in your hand
but you have managed a smile
and some sense of buoyancy
and dragged someone along
with the sleeves of
your unworn sweater.
you get lucky:
they want to take the
long way and you have a tendency to
suddenly rush things.

you are both broken
doe and the trap laid
for their arrival.

“ambush” or “pisces in the 8th house”

May 12, 2019 0

too be fair to be myself,
no one made it easy for me.

I didn’t one day wake up
in a fit of terror,
I was raised to be reactive
and scared and I sucked my thumb
until I was thirteen.
that’s called an
oral fixation.
I have a predilection for filling
silence with phrases so
I feel heard and I drink tea all day
to keep my mouth busy.
my jaw moves on reflex.
I have an oral fixation.
I spend a lot of time chewing straws
and licking my lips
and you always draw attention to your mouth
they say and I have an
oral fixation.

so when I returned to the definition:
a fixation is a persistent focus of the id’s pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier stage of psychosexual development.These fixations occur when an issue or conflict in a psychosexual stage remains unresolved, leaving the individual focused on this stage and unable to move onto the next. For example, individuals with oral fixations may have problems with drinking, smoking, eating, or nail biting.

once more, I returned to this phrase
I had written and rewritten again:
how many licks does it take
to get to the center of an attachment
disorder?
I turn to my therapist and say
sincerely,
I can’t keep anything out of this
mouth.

“the oral stage”

May 12, 2019 0

freedom is a cage of
smudged windows
or it is the knot of fervent caterpillars
sliding through my intestines
soon
spilling out onto the floor,
washed in symbol, incubated;
destroying their cotton packages,
when the day is warm and facing them
tearing through the tether,
unbridled,
unimpeded exodus,
transforming into grand ideas
and taking off
like a storm.

May 12, 2019 2

when I found you,
I was in the mood for some
analgesic touch & rub and
I have always heard beneath everyone’s
duplicity or backpedaling or
hidden words in tongues that tribute
to love that is not giant,
but quiet.
not so enormous that it takes me
but the plain way desire wears itself
on people’s faces and
the plain way people hold me
even if for seconds,

I felt that.

I felt timid or dizzy
in its presence.
I felt like I finally heard you
when you said,
just wait.
I have written and rewritten the
same phrase for years,
if not in a document, my hand
or carved a tracing of it on
my new, fresh Baphomet thigh
tattoo because bondage is a
fit I wear:

restraint is an art I intend
to master. I always bud in denial,
rejection, stomp my way to your
cloud and let it rain,
let it pour,
love exists with or without hope
let it flood all over your place.

restraint is an art I intend to
master, but what does that mean?
not to demure, but to
grow in body, warmth,
way.
it means, fall.

fall easily.
fall.

fall.

don’t ruin it with vocabulary
or anxious gesture
so I am letting my hair grow
full and unruly like a mane
and I am inking every inch of
space on my skin
like a map and I am
crying in flower beds again
but I am smelling them.

I remember every dream and the one where we met,
where we met,
where we met,
and now,
love exists

I face a mirror.

“the act of restraining things”

May 12, 2019 0

I was in a house with a girlfriend,
packing. we needed to prepare to get out of there.
there was a flood coming
but earlier I was in my hotel room somewhere else,
in a wig that had become my hair I wore it so much,
it was really me and I was thin, I looked thin.
they always say I look thin.
dancing in front of the mirror and not scared
that at any moment I may see a ghost.

I looked like a ghost: pallid face and wan body and I just
moved autonomically. I kept dancing and suddenly in a fit,
I threw myself out into the hallway and ran across
to your door where you were not alone and I thought better of it and
turned back towards my place, where the door was not only unlocked
but slightly ajar, ready to welcome me back.

and it wasn’t until today that I knew the three,
assuredly. their names and what they meant to me.
restraint is an art I intend to master and
a flood was coming, feelings are the secret masters
of me.
I have never been quiet about it.

“dreams #3”

May 12, 2019 0

there is no difference
between love and liberation
and some were born saints,
you say as you help me
in the mugwort bath,
the smell of rose and geranium
circling the tile.
I plucked the petals and dropped them
one by one for aesthetic.
not free of indulgence, but
patient your fingers make
stems in the water
and I guess I am waiting
for something.

“the swell”

May 9, 2019 0

I learned to say this phrase most often
to God in prayer:
give them all the light and love
and whatever they may need. if what they
want and need are the same thing,
please, don’t hold back:
give them everything.”

the phrase
abracadabra literally translates to mean
“I create as I speak”
and with patience,
even an active fault line will
root new trees.

I drape myself in effulgence:
white bulb,
blue black shade covering my eyes.
a walking half moon.
plucked my eyes out
to avoid seeing what spell can
do to the meek,
what weak blood
hex can squeeze
from a stone.
I am no saint,
I tell you.
I’ve collected
beryl droplets of text
from the back of
your throat.
abracadabra.
I am santa claus
shimmying down the chimney
each night.
I am a knife in a dark room
following another knife
to his prize.
I am delivering it.
you know who I am
inside but I’m changing
shape, becoming spectral,
coalescing
into coffins.

the litter isn’t enough to change
so I’m buying house plants
to welcome fresh life into this house.
cacti look like your middle fingers
in the morning.
the cat eats the tulips but
she leaves the sunflowers be.
I host orchids when I am feeling
extra ambitious,
watch them die
with a soft, sad
browning.
mostly I have surrounded myself
with roses. in my garden
of goddesses,
I make offering.
there’s too much oxygen in here,
I think.
it’s mostly coalescing
into coffins.

I’m choking on particles of
corn soaked cat piss,
the expensive kind of litter that can be
thrown right into the toilet,
and clusters of thorns in
my bare feet,
a little sprinkle
of pollen on my nose.
my floor is covered in stem
decay and this bed
is just a graveyard
doused in dead
blossoms.

I say it’s over
loudly and I hear the
drag of a
chain.
it’s Monday and I
am asking you to leave,
and you are learning what
truth can do.
what spell means.
abracadabra.
you’ve been watching me bow to
altar, you’ve been watching me
pray.
you’ve been asking for
something too.
It’s Monday, I wake up
and all the songs are about you.

I never write about blossoming but
i’m seeing inflorescence in
dejection,
in the form of wormwood
creeping up my throat,
taking hold of nearest hopes
and igniting.
“Monday, and all the songs
are still about you.”

May 7, 2019 0

(Stop and bow to silence.)

You hold me the way the soil
holds the bones
of those we’ve learned to mourn
in private:
eternally & quiet
with an airy tightness:
the way the heavens hold the pious,
the mob holds the riot,
the way the ocean holds all that falls below
that deep blue surge of
sea.

I drag you under to show
you what I’m made of.

“squall”

May 7, 2019 0

shredded letters I tried using
as fertilizer,
grow something from our
sudden valediction:
calendula,

jasmine to lighten the darker parts
of my libations;
the ones that tease my hair and
take me pull me under the bath
water gently
as I kick and try not to
scream.
violets, honeywort, scent of honeysuckle wafting
from the roach holes,
mugwort to get my blood moving again.
Easter lilies the cats shouldn’t touch so I
hang them from the rafters
and let the leaves fall brown
one by one;
let the paws scatter the ashes of that,
mice, my previous
laurels.

cheery dandelions burst from
the cracks in the linoleum and
I keep a bromeliad at the doorway
to protect me with her spikes;
self-effacing, straight and strong unlike the
hard, twisted ways I grow to be.
orchids to wilt in too much sunlight when I’m
doting myself to death,
a bouquet of roses to give my daughter
when she becomes moss
in someone else’s garden,
feral evocation an arboretum
started at the ankle. or
a whole cherry tree,

rooted and I can chop
it down to gorge.
something sweet to chomp
while I’m choking down
the acidic no,
extra pillow space.
my place: curtains drawn,
devoid of moons.
my place:
curtains open,
enveloped in
the new full sun.
my place,
giant cobweb stuck with
stem and black succor.

I prepare the dried lemon balm
in the mason jar,
two cups of hot water,
watch the window blanket itself in white flakes
of anesthesia,
embrace the change in seasons
openly without any phone calls,
any text, any hexed
postcard,or really,
much incident at all
considering our history

“perennial”

May 7, 2019 0

lightly doused
in cramped atmosphere,
I am cradled by my
gnawing contrition.
I am a well of sadness
contained by anger.
your hand is in mine.
you are stroking a painted thumb,
this nail polish is called kerosene
smiling openly.
I return the gesture:
show my unkempt life in off white teeth,
sore tongue,
gums as red as love.
someone gently rubbed glitter on my
forearm to make me
*pop* a little more and I
meant to respond.
my heart is a brass bell,
frozen, staid,
caught between two
hungers
my hair is up and partially mussed,
dark auburn when there’s sun.
I don’t wear my brother’s ashes
around my throat
anymore.
I think that’s more telling
than I let on.

today is partly drizzle and partly
made up in my head.
you stand taller than God and I
shrink; gothic in a mixed
drink and someone else’s
dress wrapped around my hips,
daydream of someone else’s
rough lips picking at my thin skin,
someone else’s orgasm
propping up my knees,
someone’s meek kiss carving diamonds
on a weak spine
that is atrophying
rapidly.
on a bleak night,
I almost turn thirty
like this.
someone taps me,
asks me for a light.

my hair is half down and
covering my eyes.
my feet are bare,
rooted in mud somewhere near
a soggy paper plate
that has a dot of frosting on the rim
scraped from a cake
that probably read
congrats on breaking indigent!
but we devoured it without skimming
as if ten plus years of
bohemian arrogance is anything to celebrate.
I should be dead.
I should be erupting by now.
I feel disproportionately large
for my soul but growing smaller
by the sip.
you are muffled laughter and
showing another woman the view from the balcony,
holding space for her pain in a way
that romanticizes internalized rage.
I am watching.
I am the dark breaking sky
who forgot how to storm
so she just lightly pours
another flask full.
my chest is broken and brass and
coughing politely.
“Ahem.”

I point to the moon
and start running.

May 7, 2019 0