poetry – Page 25

my interest was
social experimentation.
it’s why I went to college.
I wanted to be educated on the ways
to manipulate small crowds
and because of my naivete,
I did not realize at first
that my interest in slightly
sociopathic
behavior was a reflection
and that I find,
truthfully, serial killers
to be undeniably weak
in their compulsion.

they are artless megalomaniacs.
you could just as easily garden
with the same amount of torrid wonder.
learn to grow nightshade and then
plant it all over town
in places where people smell
flowers and pick weeds for each
other.
but these are men and
they have to be known.
I’ve always had to cross my
legs.

Mrs. Shepherd said you
cannot bet on things that talk,
Sarah, when I interjected to
share my observation that
the same formulas can be applied to people
when presenting with the same patterns over time.
they would be seen as a fixed event
because they have not wavered in
reliability yet.

another time I stated calmly to
my ethics class that the best way to enforce
a law to ensure it gets a message across
is to just begin enforcing it.
if you believe in the death penalty
the best way to slice it
is to make a black and a white clause;
no matter what the circumstances,
calculated homicide will put you
in the electric chair and then they
wouldn’t quibble so much with semantics.

the first girl to shoot her hand up
was the most riled by my
callous eyebrow lift and when
she presented to me a law and order episode
where the murderer was a child,
I said kill the child.
“events #1”

February 2, 2020 0

I believe in overflowing
chalice. you believe in
holding space for growl
and distance and
your wife at night
or your girlfriend,
whomever.

you watch me lay the
dill in bowl, line the bed
with tourmaline.
run the bath with
chamomile and yarrow oil.
it’s all for nothing,
you found me but
I am full of tincture now.
the best defense is
to cripple yourself
like victim, quilled
with a shaky lip
but quilled and
squared.

what you catch about me
is the amorphous not
the heartbeat and to be
fastidious requires
no real feeling
but constant poking at
all possibilities,
pausing with the probable
but still lusting.
almost thirsty for your
deluded thoughts,
your dilluted candor
that you say is grace
but you have bitten more of
your tongue today,
and you are now quilled
and squared in another woman’s
corner
what you meant to say was

there are some voids
that
are so insatiable you
collapse with the craving instead.
I walk for miles:
slow and black and
hungry like that,
reaching.

I am game.

“Datura Moon”

February 1, 2020 0

I’ve been learning
performative emotion
to keep the ones I’m fettered
to warm, and to feel their
slippery manacles tease
the tops of my feet
like feathers as they pull
me.
paint my lashes black
and they’re wet and
shaped like little
bolts.

we watched fireflies and I
licked your earlobes,\
tried your fingers on
while I played with truths,
denied them.
felt your chest pressed against mine.
we clanked with ease
and I took in the scene of two people
unclothed and unseen
underneath some crescent
in your backyard
without friendship between them;
without people between them and I dared
to stare in a way that endures more than
deciduous planting.
I broke at the

not now
you spoke back
with a masculine fragility
I had never known envied,
tried on later with pants,
unplucked eyebrows
and alone.
you became all red and
graceless, I became an unwatched bull
headed to your porch,
snorting and you were
bare faced and guarded in all the ways
I have yet to learn.
I’m so obvious:

a scarlet blaze that starts with a joke,
two bodies parting,
an unreturned question that ends
with a sharp exclamation,
annihilation of something.
ends with a reminder from someone higher
to stop destroying something
to eliminate one part.
I am a wave of coercion
pulling you in and under
when I should have been
patient;
when I should have been laid in the grass
gently next to the ant hills
where you can learn my thighs,
breasts,
spine,
toes curled without injury;
when I should have been pausing to notice
there are no people between us;
when I should have been gracious,
with you and bare-faced,
or wet cheeked.

I remove the rest of my top
and close my eyes deliberately
to show you the length
of each thorn.
wear my eyes like an arrow.
with my tongue pressed
against your chin,
my lips trace
your jaw I say
more softly
than before:
you know,
I have never
become divine without first
becoming storm.

“Scorpio”

January 31, 2020 0

kitten ears and painted whiskers
tumble down my block in rows
rehearsed
in leotards and black lace gloves.
yowls float through
open porches.
TV taught them how to meow\
for Kit Kats Snickers Almond Joys
male applause.
one bends over to tie her shoe
and seduce the nearest father;
he eyes the crevice peeking through her
black tights.

I’m dressed like Glinda the Good
Witch and hovering in a sing song
way, throwing out
Peanut Chews and
I burned a sigil for this
she wants attention from her own father:
a photograph or upward twirl,
burning torch,
purr in his lap while he strokes her hair
without fetish
or just acknowledgment that she is the prettiest
girl dressed up as space cat,
those others are unoriginal, just regular
cats, he says I love yours best
and pats her on her head
and there is no offense taken.

she will grow up to be even smaller
than she supposed:
silent enduring still,
not awake in her own power,
her own body
like a stillborn tiger:
expelled with a tear,
coated in the blood of her mother’s
screams as no one prepared her for the
slow cooked torture, ecstasy,
that followed expelling something
parasitic and omniscient,
a future rival.
she lands on the floor
fetal,
the thing no one wanted
without even a congratulations! bouquet
or a lotus to symbolize
finality.

we aren’t worthy of those feline
endowments
thrust upon us when we are playing
mole carcass on the doormat
aborted from our burrowed holes
for something more vociferous
to grab onto and finish,
our kinship; the lions.
we are nothing like our ancestors.
our virile mothers
who know nothing of preening,
who care nothing for tail feathers.
they take what they want.
they don’t grovel at their fathers’ feet.
they honor the slaughter,
the one they started
before the harvest and pay homage
to the sky for the water provided
before they stuff themselves
with vision.

we lack vision.
we just paint our nails black,
and dress like witches,
talk shit;
start shit for derision.
and we keep turning to our men
for forgiveness when we are wayward
or won’t marry them
or stand up when they
crush our necks and they
say the rope is coming next.
we should be
stuffing our faces with the meat they provided,
learning fillet knives,
smiling like shovels and
burying them.

“Halloween”

January 30, 2020 0

I value freedom most.
I wander
in both eyes and body
always collecting
but devoted to the last,
even fixated
but also loose with most
acquaintances stressing
compromise, meaning
yielding to my rule
and enjoying breaks,
enjoying screaming.

favoring
opportunity over floor,
I value the sky and
currents more than houses.
the ephemeral in
our lives while also walking
three inches higher than I am,
on tiptoe,
touching things,
making threats in the air
when angered and
you say I am

for-mi-da-ble,
a bit virulent
is how you say it and
before we seek the advantageousness
of everything, it’s Friday
and we are
processing hard truths.
the way silence hits
mostly and my hand
opening, the spontaneity
of losing things.
tell me,
where do you keep
your pocketknife?

life is rushing and swamps
with its shades of
blue; azure
(you name things)
sky, or cobalt fluid
or nightmare
like a wall of nail polish
you’re reading every
dressed up inch of you.
your rehearsed malignance.
your wry contribution
with your cocked smile
to hide your jealous
sulk.

the moon moves
from womb
to waste
to task those
unsewn wounds
and you embrace things now
with reticence
but you’re open to the epitaph
scrawled across the rock hard
eyelid
temperance
that means patience,
my Venus in Leo
is running.
you made him carve something else
across
your eyes that night
on Jupiter:
I remember everything.

but you didn’t want to be
so right and you didn’t really
ask
for things, usually
you just opened a door
and walked in but
you made it clear
as you rummaged through
the closet smelling him,
you are always someone’s
secret. you are
unconditional when furtive
but frigid and passing
like a northern mist
otherwise.

“venus in 12th house”

January 30, 2020 0

I wish I had more words for
“terrorized”
tossing jumpers from my dollhouse,
that may have been where I learned
to cut my hair like my brother
but I first
learned how to get undressed:

the boy in the bed asking
me to try on something that
slips off and
now I’m in tight pants
and loose sweaters and
just another verse
picking at its stitches,
grunting from the dark and
taking educated guesses at the Rorschach blot
that spreads across its skirt
when she is strut.
but writing with a vocal fry;
a sort of deflection, uptalk and
cadence, downplaying
it with rhythm as you
try to capture the moment
you were knees first on
a pink and white daybed
as he showed you all the ways
to take it;
passive pistil,
this is what men want;
humiliation of
all the little violations
that add up to today
without one strong word
or accurate verb
to describe the way a knife
sticks for a second and you moan
the wrong way.

what sounds better to you?
I say over coffee, trying to
finish some titles,
possibly in love but also
possibly

.“besieged” or “PTSD”
or simply
“raped?”

“the act of naming things”

January 30, 2020 0

I read a note out loud to myself:
everything that is really hard
is going to save your life
and a blackbird landed on the branch
outside my living room
window.
still, their eyes small and
sharp
waiting to dive,
waiting for the buzz of cicadas
to start again.
that reminds me,

I say in my head,
i’m emaciating.
I take a sip of water.
starved from the looking
without touching and
I want too much
has many meanings.
I read the words aloud again
and pour myself a thimble
of almonds.

it is first that I craft the lie.
I begin to charm him:
untie a ribbon from her
rib cage and kneel,
bind his wrists together
and lick his inner thigh.
do you believe everything I say?
I stare intently when I
ask things.

and then you become the
braced masochist
and I become
the looming hit.

“maelstrom”

January 29, 2020 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
eighth 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 bed.

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 #8th house”

January 29, 2020 0

the boys I rescued
and turned to saints;
their features outlined in
filthy thoughts I

let them touch me with
rinsed fingertips,
watch them take great pleasure
in stroking the arches of my bare feet;
my callouses holding proof
of the miles I have walked
to hug the west.
better than my own docile traces
of lust pressed against them;
my own famished touch
as I dip into my cleft and whimper
because I can’t come big enough.
that sweaty heart of male violence,
male wants,
eroticized guns,
learn the art of being
enthroned in your
sex.
those biceped tongues,
those blue black nights where I fuck to get the
battle out so they don’t
accidentally drown a garden
they were supposed to love.

other nights I do it hard,
grip the keys and shout sometimes;
let the room fill with copper, lick myself
from the chain,
taste my own
domination;
my submission to myself and
let you understand the dangers of
eroticized pain;
the art of being bled
for your sex.

smudged lip gloss
on their bare cheeks,
hosts
my undoing.
teach me how to love like war
my persistent
bleating
inner child,
hands out and
crawling to you,
barely fed, swallowed by
red lonesome and
under you,
next to you,
over you,
overdone,

but yet still a shadow
at your nightstand
waning in your rising
sun.

“the martyr” (#7)

January 29, 2020 0

I am giant:
strong legs, flexed tonsils,
tight back from climbing your forearms
to get to your mouth. my nails are
filed and
scratching at your chest
on the way there to let your home
know what I own.
I compromise but I am
never quiet.

I’m full of bargains:

one dollar books and
yesterday’s makeup,

hair knotted with
century old lesions and
previous engagements so I
shave it off every chance
I get.
try to forgive myself for
such large displays of
arrogance.
you want me to comfort you in

cadence and
I obey it
deriving satisfaction with the way
my voice sounds
as I practice inflection surrounded
by mirrors
ending my prose in pointed questions
you will have to answer,

the pleasure of seeing my mask unfold
on screen i’m paralyzed in heat
so I often freeze when confronted
but in between I leave
sweet, murmured ellipses
all over your body.

but know
I’m a noose so tight
you try wearing me
like a loose fitting garment

or just one hard day’s night,
I might flinch and

Milo, I might hang
you.

“Scorpio in South Node” (how guys save me in the phone #5)

January 29, 2020 0