Tag: poetry

how to lean into the sharp points.

you can shake your fist at any
foaming coast but her
break remains unscathed,
her scorn in
waves,
her calm in
 tides,
wet snarls pacified in
moon-swept stages
depending on the time of month,
the climate or the
stage.

you are barefoot:
some pedestrian gesture of
 worship.
shrine.
avoiding the shells and
ghost crabs that litter the beach
at gloaming.
you’re wild and roaming
 again seeking to slice wrists
with guilt and urgency,
pretension,
steal the scissors from his girlfriend’s
pocket.
                    what’s it like to be a hypnotist?
take a seat.
notice your veins rock,
glisten with munition.

life’s a seething blade
and you wear yours deep in your lungs.
the ways you have learned to assuage
are more permanent in placement
if you face it when you
say it.
write it on the page.
have them sing it with
vexation.
have them say it out loud and
curse themselves.
you watched your hands become tributes
to iniquity so you ask your feet
to become your fingers
now,
nothing from your mouth
going forward.

watch your toes curl in the sand
before you start wading.
you are practicing the dying art of
self-restraint.
you are practicing
prayer, overdo
amends.
you are seeking a quiet rest
inside of  yourself.
you are seeking the
 sudden wreck
that laid you.

 

I.

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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.

i begin to charm him,
untie a ribbon from her
rib cage and kneel,
tie his wrists together
and lick his inner thigh.
someone asks
and then?

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

“maelstrom”

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this is fresh.
like the last word
someone said
or you losing to find
old photographs
of you unsure of
yourself in a graveyard
set to the mountains
at sunset like you couldn’t
imagine not being there
or having that.
because it was there it was outside
and you were there.
the last time you look at a place.
the space between states,
the plane ride to your
brother’s coma
this is fresh.


this is the last time you’ve ever
seen or heard from someone.
my cool affect, my rehearsed
temperature that I am clutching,
I watched waves take things away.
do you know how close i stood to the water
that day?
the sky was black and full of lightning,
swollen with compulsion.
a tropical storm touched the
ocean and on instinct,
 it swallowed itself.
 my aunt screamed,
came to grab me and
carried us both up to the house.

i cried about a flip flop
drifting in the current on the shore,
begging her to go back.
you can’t tell anything
about a statue
except it’s resting form
 but i have experienced forty,
 maybe more,
 deaths.

cool
but if you ever saw the contents of
my purse: the twisted straws,
the clutter, lists of
things to get or hold,
you would see
 that peevish child
taunting the ocean’s
grip and dashing,
longing for her
endless swaddle,
 invincible in
execution and
carried. 

“the bay”

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it is the sun streaming through my
bay-sized sliding door windows
and the white capped mountains
framed within them
that I will miss most
 in winter.
today I have
 a piece of paper and
a dozen dead things wilted
in their vase
to remind me.

 

there is a touch of red
sprinkled around the glass
 that browns and sets as dry
on the sill in
my small uncurtained bedroom that
 I pace
when I have too much on my
mind and today they

remind me

life is a patient rot
to tomb, a gauntlet and
fluid so I  better keep
 moving.

life is a patient
gut to get to
 wound     it was April
on Earth Day when I wrote
My Brother Is Dead
in the back of a notebook I would never
look at again.
it would be the thing thrown away
to make room as I packed the car
two years later in the most frigid
 December, my partner,
the weather, the frost of us and
I was in my big brown jacket
that absorbed me in
synthetic down and
I’m twirling the stem of a
decaying feather
of a real dead sparrow in my pocket,
 the lyrids
are crowning across Colorado as
I am responding to
a nod, someone asking
was he your only brother?

 

I repeat the question in my head.

 

yes, he was my only brother.
it is much easier to disappear

but the house moved with
me;  from freeze to open
like an unattended mortuary
moved to resurrect itself
 after years of
neglect and

did you know,
the bones given a soft lick
will sparkle white
  like fresh-caught ivory
 and once it feels the brush of
mouth
will file any joint to tip
with tooth
and gore the things that touches 

it, that holds it
near to chest or
safely in its palm?


as it shreds the flesh from
crown to feet,
someone says to me,
with sincerest sympathy

and I fall into a fog.
I repeat it in my head:

 

was he your only brother?

 

as I pass a trashcan,
fumble   make room in my bag
for lipstick.

 

“the sympathy card”

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my notepad is open
and my hand is smudged
with ink, the lists.
the things I’m naming:

ways to feel unsettled in transition,
states, or,
I mean the way they wave
as you drive,
and the way the birds landed
on the trees outside my stained-
glass window.
all the while thinking people
should just understand
like they had your history
with them and
feelings.

my mom once hung a “feelings’ chart
on my door
so I could circle the face that
most resembled mine.
was it envy driving this
appetite? me,
always shaking in some corner,
full bladder,
crumbs on my lips,
dictating, taking,
moving everyone to room
to game.

 

I don’t talk much
sometimes.
actually sometimes I
let my mind molder
like an untended peach,
just growing brown and soft,
unused, inedible,
 unexamined any further.
put everything I own in trashbags
and toss it out.
   it’s called a cleanse.
I do this every year.

but in malice, the brambles
that i’m tied to,
dauntlessness prevails,
action, cardinal,
bitter.
they always say i’m bitter.
give me coffee,
watch me run in circles,
flash my tongue.
what it’s like to rule like queen:
favors coming at you and people
trembling in their seats,
the gluttony, the theft,
the power
What do I want?
and at your leisure.

my leisure:
the growth between getting
and having,
if there is truth that people never
change, I guess I am stuck
 somewhere on a trail
walking.

“the long walk”

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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 my history.

“perennial”

 

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i’m turning another year and
I’m looking for checks,
counting my reasons for staying
or for running the other way.
I have overdue things.

recycling and wrinkles
 and Kombucha bottles
pile up
like the hairballs on the floor.
I avoid without cleaning sometimes.
make a zig zag to the door
where I cast spell:
the fits of importunity,
little raps at my neighbors door
       sugar, that’s all
that make me wish I had chosen the life
 of a mendicant
but my knees always hurt.
I have unchecked messages everywhere:
voicemail reminders and
grandma’s leukemia is pretty bad and
I’m rotten and everywhere like
 her snaking liver spots.
Mom bought me a new chain to carry him on.
i’m allergic to anything that looks like silver
but doesn’t hold its weight,
including nickel-painted gold
so I’ve gotten good at tearing things apart
to see what they are
 made of.

and the red spots line my throat,
white dabs of cream and my
strapless dress     taking out my earrings to dance
with the new one who laughs with
Delphic intention,
and I’m obsessed with the way men
strangle anything dear to them.

I got a new mural and icing lips
and white teeth.
no mercury caps unless you include
my orbiting lips.
dream of Christmas, cinnamon buns and
 him choking out an
“I love you”
with my color by numbers.
I’m remembering hugging an unnamed kitten and
trying to hold onto
this feeling.
I didn’t get impermanence,
just a new bike every year
to run away from home.
and suddenly my phone chokes out a reminder
 that the living are
hunting me.
  here we are.

my heels in the dirt, his hand in mine,
 smile
I say for no one.
nail polish named kerosene and
gums as red as love.
my hair is auburn in the sun
and today is partly drizzle and partly
made up in my head
      congratulations, baby, you made it.

wet cheeks and leftover streamers
and trick candles
and weak knees when I’m
bobbing to the rhythm.
polaroids on the table and
 girls that try to
tell me secrets.
I tell the sky all the things.
   I’ll show you all the films I like

we barely talk.
we watch films.
he finishes
on top of his fingers
and my wrapping paper.
i’m half asleep
but full of sugar
and thoughts like a
wadded piece of past
shaped like rope
tightening
and

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

 

“ the birthday party (26)”

 

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lightly doused
in panic:
the atmosphere,
the violin,
the food, it’s
everything.
I am scared, shaking and
 cradled by my
gnawing contrition.

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
on a bleak night,
and I almost turn twenty five
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.

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 hear
them say, still waiting
for my matchbook.

I point to the moon
and start running.

“the birthday party”

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seventeenth set is most definitely
about you.
i hope you find my gaucherie
amusing.

i find it excruciating
to even stand
near a thing I admire.
i like starting things,
putting them out,
my parents rushed me to
the sink at five years
old; i laid my finger
flat to feel
what leaves feel
right before they fall.
right as they hit the
burning metal trashcan
in my backyard
as we removed evidence
of debris and a precipitous
October,
I touched my finger
to the flame.
it was the brilliant orange
that drew me and force,
contained like that
right here in our backyard.

shapeshifting to a final
face like
me, a hot knife
and warmed up,
having sliced through
tendon and you just
suddenly
soft like warm butter.

 

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i go on a smolder binge.
lick my lips
like you are licking me
from inside
the lens
my lips are drier
 than they look,
pursed slightly,
fuschia with a hint of quiver,
black corset with the straps
 pulled down to reveal
soft breasts and
rock hard shoulders
used to baring the brunt
of the pain they
spill to me
and expect me to carry. 

I trace a broken nail
over the length of my clavicle
to remind the camera
I have been touched
before.
he says my eyes are “bright”
and pauses for impact.

they are traced with
 sharp blue pen
smudged with charcoal and
unblinking, wide open
ready to receive and a very
false articulation of how
 I actually feel
when touched.
as if a question appeared,
I answered,
    I am usually shut tight,
     braced for impact

thinking of finger-filled nights,
someone else’s on mine,
sternum pillows,
tonight im
missing hem,
torn stockings,
dirty feet and unkempt nails
with grime underneath
picking at the past.

its perpetual,
a haunting you can’t
name,
your death or
is it everything in
between?

“vanity”

 

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