poets of wordpress

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”

January 6, 2020 0

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”

January 5, 2020 0

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.

December 15, 2019 0

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”

December 13, 2019 0

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)”

October 25, 2019 0

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”

October 24, 2019 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
eight 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 braids.

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”

September 20, 2019 0

smirk.

black lipstick and naked eyes and
lied about time when I asked her.
she looked at her wrist to
count the hearts but missed an
hour and she is
dulled,
not rusty but
blunt and I know
when she walked away,
her hand was

steadily sharpening.

“how guys save me in their phone #6”

September 18, 2019 0

perfunctory
and evil like a tease,
slow to build and
protected by sheer
want

an alarm.
a storm brims the coast
and you start writing down
anything you remember
about me.
I am undulating in great
tidal gasps; a siren
sights set on horizon,
humming low, humming
softly and
come in closer
splayed across the break.

your arid soul is thirsty for the
new oasis I’ve become
but your obtrusive leaps
are doused in hex
before they ever reach me.
you are responsible for
some of this and
I am responsible for
that.
my bed is soaked
and I am angry.
black in vengeance cloaks
in white to walk the streets
the way furtive angels might.
you send me butterflies
at night
to assuage me.
I return the offer:

I dress in wings,
suck the nectar from the
dusk’s flowers,
learn her tales,
twist into my final form:
a long nightmare,
black hairy legs and
two tagmata,
one long dry choke
at the stroke of
3:33 every
morning onward.
you spend the year immured
in poetry and pieces
of half finished themes

obsessing over everything
you turn to see.
over everything you thought you
saw out of your
unrelenting periphery,
how many twins do I own?
thought you
dreamed and wrote
down, unwind,
which moon did I come out of
and how many wolves
did I set free last night?
I become immune.

you become the
stranded calf in
my forest while
I spend the year
immersed in baths of
black obsidian and
forgetting what it
ever meant to
me.

“us, reversing”

September 18, 2019 0

the first thing I showed him was the callous
here look
and he licked it with his tongue
without questioning my need to
grip things so tightly
I’ve succumb to carpal tunnel,
arthritis, delusions of
grandeur and infancy.

“has anyone ever talked to you about splitting?”
is what the doctor said to me once.
I was twisting the straw
in my fingers, contorting my
face and confessing things,
sometimes i like to shoplift.

“Who is Catarina?”

sometimes I like to fuck men with wives.

“splitting is a phenomenon in which you sort of leave your body to allow another persona to take over.”

sometimes I like to punish bad boys.

“like possession?”

sometimes I like to peek at Christmas presents.

“no, more like split personality.”

sometimes I watch the mirror dance in candlelight
and wait for her to come in
I break men
like the swell that rises over bridges
engulfing islands with her mouth,
we break men with turns of
tides.

“the journal”

September 18, 2019 0