vampire is my baddest,
most lustful need;
my need for everything.
I grow sharper as I walk,
as I cut through little groves of
mirror yous, trying to withstand
it.
I become an amethyst
at first sight of
you, opening,
unraveling each sharp edge
Of the hedge of the
labyrinth whirling above our
heads.
I didn’t create this myth,
but I did begin it.
“Lilith”
we did gestalt chair therapy
and something called
“parts therapy”
in an effort to rectify the wrongs
I felt from childhood,
and the way I walked,
crooked, hunched a bit
like
I was always remembering something:
either a feeling
or a future and
trying to get nearer
but also, barbed,
alert yet
oblivious to any real danger
coming my way
because my spine was made of a
Tyrannosaurus Rex.
it rode the whole back of me
as I pranced along towns.
when i see her,
she has wings and she is twinkling, sort
of glimmering wherever she goes.
her hair is shaped like
a mask, and her eyes are bright
green,
slitted,
she is wearing all black.
she has put a spell on
a whole group of men,
walking through the
city with her hands out
and humming to her
stations.
touching thighs,
touching arms,
waiting for invite
and crouching.
sometimes covering her mouth,
hiding laughter.
and then sort of
bowing with an accent,
saying thank you
so much.
what did you ask me?
what does today feel like?
it feels sharp,
hidden like a cobra
but fast and willful
like a pierce
that ends you.
or is it the force I’m forgetting?
how a beast can survive
devastation and with no knowledge of
your history or sentiment about them,
ravage you with
one bite,
pulling you underwater,
twisting you as you bleed
into their teeth,
every limb suddenly free
of burdening socket.
“the alligator”
i make confession.
im suddenly angry and
crying, i cant stand the way
things turned out.
i am free.
i lived an insular, classified life
that no one ever saw and
no one ever validated
and every struggle i had
came with the parable
that it is indeed very
lonely at the top.
you are the epitome of
head so heavy from the
crown.
i have culture, have expanded,
am eager to self bandage.
i am a smile that is
bereft and breath that
is bated, waiting, holding
like i understand my own
precocity
75,000 miles deep.
like i understand the depth
of me.
you are talking to someone
who taped a mirror so she
couldn’t see her aging face,
the way i never learned to line
the top of my lids,
the way i gorge on lust
and cake.
i am free of vanity,
not mistake.
i do not care.
i do not care.
i get my hands back.
when they ask why you are crying
at the ground full of straws,
don’t bother answering.
look at your hands and praise
them. leave your sad
face alone.
finishing the blue book
sparkling explosion of
cellophane and champagne nails
tickling birthmarks down the
back.
fallen glitter eyeshadow
dance on a throat:
roving crescent moons
from everywhere a lip hit
and pieces of gold dust
rolled off my nose.
bare mattress,
a girl licking a cheek and a
bare tear
sort of near.
hearts like lava
fill the blue gray cracks.
ghost stories and berries in bed,
mouth filled with laughs.
I’m in an afghan
sinking my teeth into a shoulder,
straddled with bare feet
and bravado drips from every
inch of me
and what else?
I’m somewhere else.
11.
The things I’m naming:
ways to feel unsettled in transition,
states and the way the birds landed
on the trees outside my window.
all the while thinking people
should just understand,
like they had your history with them.
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? was I that difficult
to decipher? me,
always shaking in some corner
then blasting off,
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
and inedible,
unused, unexamined
any further.
put everything I own in trashbags
and toss it out.
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.
I’m acidic quite actually.
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,
the run, the game.
If there is truth that people never
change, I guess I am stuck somewhere
on a trail
walking.
“nothing”
It just started where it started, an ending. That’s how things usually spark: the motion of getting up from the table, lowered head so you only see the eyelid, the silencing of gesture and voice and argument. There’s nothing left to say. You remember that painted eyelid.
You remember the back of someone; black slicker, lined in polyester, practical, utilitarian, good for rain and snow and gray, cold days and you remember it because it represents the deepest part of them; their practicality and planning. Pragmatic even in display, they were fact-based, ruled by thought and precise in many ways. Always wearing sneakers. Always wearing layers. You remember the interminable door slamming shut as your hand flies off the knob and you leave her sitting there, not stunned or surprised but gently mourning in the capsize.
“Would you say I’m frank?” she asked me.
That uneven smile and eyebrow and posture. Her constant vacillation between sainthood and possession that she spit at me in fragments, expected me to consume it, volley back, hold it, remember, care.
“Yes.”
.I’ll remember her inquisitiveness and quiet generosity where no one saw and with no explanation, I saw, a life she tried to save. She will remember me by my one-word answers and the canyon they tried to fill. But I didn’t expect to see her like that.
“Do you believe everything I say?”
The room was full when I walked in, quiet. Because I was late, she ushered me in and told me to keep my voice down. I had expected to be turned away but this was my second visit and I meant well, didn’t I? I had just started this treatment to help me with my insomnia, help me wind down in the evening, help me sleep. Life was ok. I had dreams and hidden feelings and pictures. Still had a pocket of violets and a row of soothsayers following me.
“Yes.”
They were all women there and oddly, all had the same short hair, the same fall comfort clothes, just hoodies and jeans and sneakers but I saw her first. There was no need to scan. She wasn’t wearing a hat or anything to cover her hair and I realized it was the first time I really saw her; head twisted only slightly away from me but mostly straight and supported by the chair, needles sticking out of her jawline. Eucalyptus filled the room, hints of lavender, low light and is this what it always meant, the next time we are forced to face it there will be no defense between us. I read there will be light. I read the word befallen. Sometimes I practiced dictation too: moved by a carelessness but hoarding when the nymph is gone, still enraptured by the sight. She was long, lean, her collarbone jutted out from underneath a very thin striped sweater that favored her. It was kind of how I remembered: unembellished and ordinary but shining in its plainness. She wore no jewelry. She was taller than I expected, thinner too, and simple, not like a beige wallpaper or some other muted adornment but something bigger even in the background. Her cheekbones were high. Her clavicle jutted and she was paling but olive, not milk white, not quite tan, Her neck long as I imagined. Her breathing slow and she looked content to be there. It felt like I was suddenly invading.
Not plain, no, and not ordinary just a spectacle in its honesty. Maybe it’s brave that shows, triumph, skill survives like a Renaissance portrait that lasts decades in the museum for its representation of the time; the light the artist was able to paint into the picture peeking from the corner, dull blues and grays and a very fine wine-burgundy. It’s a dark painting but it lights up the room; no sun just that one light in the corner. You pass it and you pause every time. Analytics and video tapes demand it stays in that museum. Mostly black with a few people looking up, following the cloud. You’re admiring what they were– the vividness of the devil’s outline, black against black. It’s all you can see.
A smile began in the corner of her mouth and she stretched her fingers. I saw nothing in her hands. Her nails were long and red and her jeans had holes in them. She held nothing in her hands eyes shut, the mouth falling slightly open, relaxing. I didn’t look at her feet as I turned away. What an incredible yearning for loss we face. If only to stay there that day of passing her without a word, head down only to turn around to watch her turning around too and later demanding explanation. Leaving, if only to stay enveloped in the sight of her resting with needles poking out all over her face, her neck, her jaw, her wrists. To stay in winter, in our coats, watching the Earth break into a rift and separate cliffs so all you hear are echoes. A heavy yes falling to the bottom. The portrait of the townspeople hurried to the shadow, gawked at by millions a year, never removed for its classic parable. Not a glittering, but a dimness yet the center of the room. Beware of what you seek for it is seeking you.
Just say yes and step into the consequence.
this is fresh.
like when my cat’s claw gets stuck
in my fingertip or when I
bump my elbow on the armoire
he let me keep.
things only last for seconds unless
they are eternal like
God’s choir,
mass extinction,
our howls like bells
like doom
like fate.
I try to tell too many
that this has happened before but
never with the same
patterning; the cavern
patience that’s filled with
liminality me in the
tub and dreaming.
I have no fear of the color
hazel or unmade beds
or the way you let your fingertip
trace my thigh’s Baphomet
as you turn to me
and say
this will never end.
I bet you never say a word.
I’ll grow to equatorial proportions
and bellow.
I have no fear of
mirrors, men,
mirages or monsters.
I have no fear of depth.
I have no fear of flight
or landing, heat
or frozen streams.
those talons.
those waves.
those headlights.
I have no fear of death.
you? you will know me
by my sudden strength:
silence and never seen
again the same way.
“the red book (revisited)”
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”
“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”
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