Tag: read women

 

seventeenth set is most definitely
about you. I diverge
from any given task
when I am suddenly feeling

heartbroken
and really I do hope;
the crux of all disappointment
is the expectation and I want
(is an understatement)
to be seen without pressure.
I hope you find all this gaucherie
amusing.

I find it excruciating
to long and wait,
to even stand
near a thing I admire.
I like starting things,
putting them out.
penalty.
ree-per-cush-in,
the easiest thing I learned
was the alphabet and how to 

string sounds together
like narratives,
to read.
ree-purr-cusi-sion
is what I crave.
my mother rushed me to
the sink at five years
old; I laid my finger
flat on the side of
the metal barrel,
it was full of leaves
and burning.

as we removed evidence
of the crisp and
precipitous October,
my mother noticed
my gaze, said “Sarah,
do not touch it” and then
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, armed with words,
a hot knife
and all warmed up,
having sliced through
tendon before  and you just
suddenly
seeing me form the language
of concision,
the succinctness of
one scream:

crisp and precipitous,
 and you just
suddenly
soft like warm butter.

“repercussion”

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I want to believe that good
things happen to good people;
the missing garage,
the missing shed,
the missing money.
I want to wave my hands over
my ancestral nothing
 to show them
they’re wrong.
I can’t shake the way a woman
abandoned my grandmother in a
Hungarian orphanage.
the way my mother told me
that was the way of the times,
the way I’ve been expected to thrive:
my grandma learning English as
she arrived,
my grandfather watching his mother committed
to a hospital, young,
signs of dementia,
his father running,
him only speaking Polish
upon arrival. I want to
believe that they knew
without language, simply
the first way they held each other
at night.

and I want to stop crying.
my friend says, they always come
back and I have evidence of it too.
I lost a hundred dollar bill
the other day and laughed.

it means nothing to me now.

 

“grief part 6”

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I’ll remember you as a
long desire;
intangible, a
carnation sunset
leaking out of me.
And the keeling over
later, the aftershock:

cramp, the bite
in self preservation;
survival and the
slow repetition of
phrases cementing
the indelibility;
the dormant  rage in
prophecy.

you only get pregnant once.

then I become the squalling
daughter and you
become the thorn.

“Liliana” or “grief pt 8”

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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”

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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”

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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.

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”

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“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”

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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)

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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)

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the first thing you notice about me is
the way I saunter
even to grab a ginger ale from the cooler
               “it’s my favorite.”
brush you, smile at your friends
and kind of swarm them
like an imposition
starting conversations about the
ludicrous state of things always alluding
to my prescience without
saying anything
you’ll say its the smirk I
 mastered not the crowd.

but then I retreat.
but then  I linger near the
exit the rest of the night with the crumpled straw
 in my hand
and the temper on my tongue
contained,
my earlier rage not expressed
or not handled as boldly
as it deserved to be;
the proclamations
the exits

I like way you held my hand
and said my name.
       my name is artemis.

sometimes buildings just catch on fire.
you say I always crouch with a
bow in hand.
            “I’m just nervous”
and that when I am lying I look away really
fast so you can’t see the sneer spread
and you know
I fucked your friends
and you know I’ll fuck some more
and you see me on the screen
 my name is Artemis.
parting lips, combing bangs,
practicing inflection as I said
I would.

you said you’ll always remember
the way I laughed LOUD
and so sudden
    touch his shoulder
like you were the funniest man in
the room.
and I’ll always remember
the way the door frame dripped
and bled to one sorrel-orange.
no, it’s not that you said yes.
you said “ok”
kind of folding,
tempering and allowing
which is the way I like
my men to lean.

I walked across the welcome mat
throwing matches as you swept,
the windows becoming a
 carrot color and me
disappearing.

“how guys save me in their phone  #4”

 

(13 odes to CKacyrek)

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