poetry – Page 36

Will you ever speak again?
Did a mouse steal your tongue?
Am I the cat dragging it back with an allusion to love
for the one who keeps her?
You never entertain me with your stories.
I never leave your crystal balls alone:
knock them about and keep them
hidden from you.

But I slaughtered that mouse.
Didn’t I kill for you?
Isn’t trial love?
A more violent truth serum
I offer than most; I rip answers
with my sudden eruption of flames
directed your way
but I leave some blue vervain
on the dresser to soothe you,
mention it’s good for clarity and
joint pain.
No burn salve, something
slightly bitter.
A final act of cruelty
and I bow in my miniskirt.

You chose solution in someone else,
and the lie.
I chose to withhold an antidote to your
meek eternity.
Had I said “I love you despite what you’ve done to me “
I know you would have stayed.

But vengeance tastes sweeter
than pride as you’ll soon
see. The way I devour,
the way I spit you back up.
The way I make you
taste yourself.
It’s titled
“Lilian”
and
“the way I make you
face yourself”
or

“How I write you in the story”

May 13, 2019 0

I am on my floor
in a sweeping bow,
in an off-white gown
I am wet with my insides,
out
there is red everywhere,
little notes to myself,
some written in charcoal
black on my left hand,
my old eyeliner pen:

rehydrate often:
we are at war here,
darling.
and
don’t grin,
it makes you look
desperate
and
I am doing all of this for book.
and one more
(you always repeat the same story)

do not repeat the story.

“eyeliner” or “(notes to self)”

May 13, 2019 0

fables of how we met and
false expressions.
i keep replaying “no” over
and over in my head.
my heart is a jungle:
vitriolic and slaughtering herself.
I’m a cage and my grief
always turns to rage
like acid turns to rain and
rushes through my spinal fluid
so I stand up straight.

I walk proud and tall and
wear your veneers like a mask.
I sneer at the creeks of
red beneath me.
all my men in pieces at my feet,
bowing.

“Hecate”

May 13, 2019 0

Because we all go back and forth between the things we want,
the things we need,
the things we are right to own,
things we renege or
can’t ever have;
the now,
our future,
the garbled past
re-written to include more details;
each other’s intemperate tics,
each other’s suns and angry Saturns,
each other’s wasted fortunes and
last dead pets.
Each other’s turn ons,
buried talent.
Each other’s conversation starters.
Each other’s boredom and
perpetual hard ons
for longing.

Conversations with yourself
where your self aggrandizement is honored
in your head;
where your victories take lovers,
where you are the empire fist with the
tight grip on slipping sand
and I’m still an apparition
stroking your cheek,
reading the lines on your hands.

I chose a fruit tree over you because
I was starving.
I had an intention.
I believe in nourishment,
self preservation,
monastic devotion.
I sit with my bellyache.
You believe in pulp cages
taking the shape of
flesh and you can just
eat yourself out.
You sit with my face
in your lap.
The sun is shining.

I keep thinking we can meet somewhere
else.

“the orchard”

May 13, 2019 0

you can find me in complete silence
in the corner.
medicinal fingers curved into myself,
into claws so no one gets the love.
I’m triggered by the music and pacing
in 9.9 cubic square feet
of psychosis.
I’m feeling my nails dig into
my palm.
you say hello.

you can find me frozen
one week later,
woven in an opalite tapestry
spread across your floor.
I understand confession.
I’m Catholic.
I ask for judgment,
not counsel.
some retribution.
let’s make this clear.
let’s make this public.
I’m stuck in a projection
so you barely have a face
that isn’t my reflection.
at least I give you transparency,
moping opacity.
my veins are bursting with crisis,
with clarity.
you walk across my pubic bone
uncarefully.

you recognize me months later by the wallow,
by the
chewed straw in my hand,
the callus in my palm,
the bad polish job.
I tell you what love feels like
based on the time I first noticed
an open space between two
wants.
it was five seconds long
since then and now,
I’ve grown so much
I can fill your whole pocket.
what a fertile experience you are having
I see the grin of a horizon
upon us.
Look,
I’m reassuring,
I kept God,
as you rise above the clouds

this time, I made you
the sun.

“the light” or “the men who look like mirrors”

May 13, 2019 0

I used to be an empty room.
Now, I’m filled with things,
stored with things,
other people’s things and
so many things
to dust.

I spent the winter
dusting,
rearranging.
I spent the winter
lost in a learned childhood drawl
where I mumbled yeah,
uh huh, where I hid my hair and
pants behind my dollhouse,
where I was on all fours in a daybed,
where I was stuck inside a moment
like a picture
except it all moves past you and
you stand,
captured

watching him; his
excerebration process,
mine,
without anesthesia or
any explanation.
don’t touch me anymore
what becomes of disorder
when ignored,
when resolved?
unhinged.
remembered hair behind the dollhouse,
remembered yeast infections,
temper tantrums “without provocation”
they said.
remember you never learned to trust.

I started roaming giant sandboxes
underground
following the Atlantic’s soporific
siren voice
to find something that called to me
long ago.
Something vague.
Something warm.
I’m unwrapping the resin layer,
I’m coughing up the heads of dolls,
I’m moistening the cipher.
I’m coming back, I’m coming
back, bandages
off.
I’m walking forward.
This is how they’d rather have it.

I once was a space of
bright, blue lakes,
but now I’m
bursting with black magic.

“the unwrapping”

May 13, 2019 0

you’re wild eyed and
doleful and
absolutely beautiful;
an encumbrance to my chastity.

you mention my smile
is bright and sharp,
threatening to steal the star’s
twinkling thunder.
rocks come unraveling but I’m focused
on the way your
mouth talks about me.
you move closer and I
move behind something.
three billion comets crash the sky
but I’m focused on my knees,
how they feel and how they
look in moonlight.
my mouth is a river of whispers;
body deep blue and
impenetrable.
your crystal eyes flare when you
talk.

Look up!

the moon has caught fire.
your hand retreats from my lower back
and I glare at the adversary
that has stolen a second of my night,
a second of attention away from me.
today is special for two reasons so
I stay crouched and
the sky flares like jaundice and I
retreat to a past life.

I look like a year ago Sunday,
like a shadow of a hugless child,
a big, bawling bowl of acerbic bone ash,
like a forest fire fixed in a flicker
caught in a speck of my dead brother’s eye.
I look like a mirror of someone
watching her own upsurge
of implacable sorrow.
sorry, I let go of his hand.
I’m always so sorry.
so hurriedly racing memories against my
own borrowed time;
so sharp and sore and
mostly unheard,
so tangled in pieces of us.
so now what?

so now you play mortar:
you keep it together
so I can finally come undone.
I’ve always got running shoes
and an idea
and one rolling tear I’ve got to get
away from.
so very torn,
so splintered and hefty,
so tempted to hold this
just as it was that
final Christmas
but I’m too
slippery palms and
soft-eyed and strident and
sidelong gazing and first uncontrolled movement
of the century that renders
me suddenly
I have to tell you something.

absolutely
inconsolable.

“lyrids”

May 13, 2019 1

the way he held her
persisting,
somewhere close.
sliced himself some days;

let her out to roam free in my bedroom
some mornings
so I’m wrapped in wet sheets,
dissuading gaze,
I’m always waiting and
instead of sweat, praise in primal moans;
it was the way I held on,
foreboding
to the last bit of his scent,
to the worn corners,
to the post for stability,
to the both of them.
red,
painted blood red and in heat,
weak

amends of self preservation lost
in the latest incision he made
with his teeth
and I am left with bite marks
lining the inside of my thigh
in the shape of a smiley face.
and he is calling her right
now.

“Venus in Leo in 12th house”

May 13, 2019 0

restraint is an art
I intend
to master

but my jealousy is erupting
into fits of flowers:
yellow roses for the look,
it means friendship
jasmine for the scent I wore,
one vine of honeysuckle to
to bind you to summer where I was
wet and still and your personal
swimming pool you could
wade through,
catch some respite,
use.
I’m sending her a bunch
with no clear note
attached:

(forget||forgive||forget
them)

the scent is drifting through your
bedroom and the bouquet is
sitting there, getting sun
at noon and
much like the way I sit:
cool,
carefully arranged
and full of
tiny thorns waiting
to be grazed with cheek
or thumb.
waiting to be praised.
waiting to be
buried.
waiting for the stems
to be cut carefully
and braided
through your lover’s
hair so when you lay
down in the park
and hold her hand
and kiss her neck
and let your face rest
on her shoulder,
you are reminded:

you can smell me
everywhere.

(the red book)

May 13, 2019 0

miseries I keep:

seasonal allergies,
pictures of me thin
and tan and
glowing
at seventeen.
dormant addiction.
overwatered plants that are never
bringing buds to blossom–
never springing back.
shards of broken glass
in the carpet
somewhere missed ;
then in heel,
then too late in trash.

insatiable sugar cravings and
the cavities they take,
insomnia and the
quakes of sobs
repressed but twisted
into nightmare at the
first minute of rest.
the first taste of irreversible loss
(my brothers ashes swinging
from my neck),
a hex in teeth and
ideas of you glancing towards me,
towards us,
just that once.

me,
back turned
at the time.
me, always clouded
in black.
me,
opening my mouth
and releasing it.

“memory”

May 12, 2019 0