Tag: read women

when it came to me
you said I was all
  muscled positivity
as if I didn’t hang myself once before;
as if I didn’t try to tell you

how cavernous a grin is,
or anything at all.
even though you are never sure I won’t
find that perfect bedsheet knot
or not or a razor
 or a kitchen knife
or a drunk night on the freeway and I’m
headfirst in the cement mixer
but I made it out of that
in jail but alive and I am
always palms clasped and grateful.
you say   you pray
with FERVOR  as I finger the locket,
my brother’s ashes clasped
around my throat
and I hold onto
 that same little lie
about choice.

I let go of the wild lavender
 sprouting from your toes through
the hints of splattered paint.
there’s a meadow in your abdomen
coaxing foxes from their
holes    your knees knock mine,
sudden sting         close and sharp
  the way memory sits on your skull
then pulled back
 how you held me
far away sometimes;
making wind happen
blowing kisses from the pines.
the bath is on, I’m cold.
you always say
I’m cold.
I beckon to the side:
you and I are from the same
arctic sky.
help me in so I feel
the frost of your fingertips
trace me;

my broken back to you now.
my nails are brown tipped and filthy
from digging myself out of my ancestral
grave and I’m spattered in the ,
sweat from a hard night’s day,
walking alleys, stalking shadows
and you’re truly unremarkable
 these days save
the mosaic of carpenter’s paint,
 some gray cement
garden: no flora, no fauna,
and even God told me to pause  
and rest on my previous laurels
before I get carried away.
but i’m a martyr for this,
God,
I crave repercussion

I become a
yawning, clanking watering can
 spritzing your open lips,
dolling up your stolid ground
to birth your stories:
pollen murals out of micro gestures,
extinguished longing that suddenly reignites and
I’m grabbing cattails from the gales to
 comb out the tangles of your childhood
    tell me about your father
fistfuls of mud    planting seeds in the
 tiny cracks around your chest that my own
sharp-toothed grief left when you
muttered the first
no  and I stepped a few
years back.
freedom will teach you how
to stay in all new ways.

there is no difference
between love and liberation
and some were born saints,
you say as you help me
in the mugwort bath,
the smell of rose and geranium
circling the tile.
I plucked the petals and dropped them
one by one for aesthetic.
not free of indulgence, but
patient   your fingers make
stems in the water
and I guess I am waiting
for something.

“the swell”

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She walked slowly towards the house. A transfer of guilt must be achieved, she recited in her head. She was moving her fingers, clutching at the bottom of the jacket. The straw lost somewhere, she kept moving her fingers to mimic cradling it. A transfer of guilt must be achieved. What was the rest?

It was the second polar vortex in four years to hit the city this hard. Pounds of air stood packed around her so she felt boxed every step.  She couldn’t see. Snow fell all around her and because the wind whipped her face with each violent gale, she was also forced to look down. Forced to crawl upright, she could only feel her way through: the knife-life breezes, the sting right below her eyes with every movement, every touch of sleet against her skin a slow-drawn slap. Every snowflake bruised her; it’s touch burrowed hard beneath her cheekbones and lingered.  She was red faced and trudging.  Her eyes were brimming with tears that wouldn’t leave the bottom of her lids. It is freezing. They were frozen there. A transfer of guilt must be achieved.

Her eyelashes were coated in snow and she could hardly make out the building in front of her. Being drawn to the light in the window, she floated like a black moth to the driveway. As the girl stepped closer, she could see there were candles, maybe a soft lamp, burning in the upstairs window. Everything else was dusky and had the stale feel of abandonment. The house was coated an ashen gray color by owner or night, tall, protruding but with no bright awning or curtains or mailbox or car. No song wafting through the howl of the storm. There was no sense of welcome but it was her only option. Let it be a party. Let it be jovial and light inside. You can deceive yourself into believing anything just so you’ll participate.
 About thirty feet from the door, her body was suddenly struck with sensation: panic. This is respite. Stillness creates panic. She stood still and let a shiver take her; let something pass through her. The future was here and it was portentous. She grabbed the sapphire amulet around her neck. God, give me strength. Pausing at the top of the yard, she allowed her breath to come out slowly, deliberately and with planning. What do I look like? She was draped in all black but blue in her flesh; pallid and chattering. She was a ghost in a cloak. Blue like ice. Blue like river. Blue like the ash-filled locket. Give me warmth. Her breath was slow and deliberate and planned. The girl was pacing herself in stillness instead of step.

Before continuing, she allowed her body to stay there, frozen from foresight and weather, in a posture of complete surrender. She was upright and floating allowing the wind to carry her up the short driveway to the door. There was no effort to shovel. The driveway was packed with snow too. It had taken her several steps to get from car to driveway and several more to get from driveway to knob. The door itself was plain beige without number or knocker.  There was nothing spectacular here. Looking around once more to confirm there was no one else on the block, she held the locket with her bare fingers and set her teeth together to quiet them. She was a shadow in the doorway. .My breath is slow and deliberate. Her hand balled in a fist, she began to raise her other arm as she fingered the silver chain.  I am breath. I am breath.  She tightened her fist. B r e a t h e. She was muttering. I am safe and protected in white light. She exhaled. God, give me grace. She began knocking loudly, feeling her jaw clench and her respiration stop, the last of her crystallizing in air.

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I’m done spitting on your face
 and on my way
 to pick up a bag of cutlery and dishes
 for our house from the front porch
of a stranger’s
when I stop to admire the cracks
in the side of the building.
the wall is coral, faded but still
garish, stands out.
 it’s brick and

this building has no doors and
one broken window.
these defects in the painted halls
lining my new city catch my
eye each time I run an errand
 and I pay my respects in
photographs      stopping at each one,
trying to remember how the boulders
 haunted too      how the ocean felt
on my wasted ankles at gloaming when I guzzled
vodka Big Gulps and watched the
ghost crabs roam the bay.
watched myself dissolve into
the bits of me and can I remember
how the sunset looked draped over both
 tide and flatirons,
hold two things at once
without favor?
how it feels to lose several
small countries you claimed.
all I see are metaphors
and I’m intruded.

these overcoats that rot
without dismay hold space;
 there is natural beauty
 here but it shines brightest
 in demise.
 these bricks are painted to distract from
it’s true inability
 to keep a home  safe like
the way men have held me;
hugged with their claws,
I cracked at the touch     put my rosy shades on
 I only see them
 in their handsome sway.
I snap a picture of the edge of the broken
glass pane and the beginning of
the paint peeling into
white–the fissure.
I trace my finger
over a chip and watch
it flake.

how they left me.

“doors #1”

“doors #1”

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it’s Friday and we are
 processing hard truths
before we seek the auspiciousness
of everything; before we rest,
pay altar on Sunday
like
:
sometimes some things
just aren’t meant for you.
it’s true, the blur,
 life is rushing and swamps
with it’s 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,
every feeling to decide
what to bathe your magic
tips in tonight.

with or without your
undivided presence,
your inquisitive fantasy,
the moon moves.
time heals all those
unsewn wounds and you embrace
things now with reticence,
but you’re open to the aphorism,
to the temperance,
to the tombstone epitaph
you made him carve across
your eyelids that night
on Jupiter:

I remember everything.

everything you grow to love,
 you lose.

“xxx”

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you’re shrouded
in caricature of self
under pressure:
embosked in

 crouching vines,
 twigs and berries, my clothing
 and your permanent frost that
molds you into something
statuesque–a snowman frozen
in my front
yard but I’m suddenly feeling
myself so sun,
so warm,
arms wide open,

cherry lipstick,
leper with no island and a
strong want for community.
need to touch your fingers with
my tongue,
audacity,
some ire,
some unresolved bleak black,
and I’m mad at God for every season
that brings the buried back.
I’m not over it,
I’m batshit and
I’m terribly bereft.
I’m hot
they say.

you’re melting a
little and I keep talking about
myself to fill the space.
I used to be
 a vacant room
 but now I’m full of
places,
suspect,
other people’s things,
vindictive trust and other people’s prayers;
the hurt of how they wear me once,
or at night or in their head
and then hang me like
an amulet above their door
to gawk at, clap at,
ask for favor like I’m God’s
only walking angel and really
i’m full of enmity and
you and I are both full of
me.      pinch your carrot nose
and wait for the high noon
rays to hit your coal smile
so you become the puddle
at my feet the thirsty
dog I leashed laps
quietly and you asked me.
what do I long for?

the cloying puffs of air
near my ear saying
come here and
the weather changing.
i’m adding a hat to your costume when
a man taps me on the shoulder.
he wants to ask what’s become of the
others that came before you
and I want to get to the
bottom of it.

“the sun”

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I’m the fairest thing that ever happened to you. I know because I once saw the whole thing.  You could say I asked for it.

 “God,” I began.

 I was centered in sigil. My spine was straight, although I usually slouch. I usually admonish myself for taking up too much space on my couch; even alone, even in privacy, I shrink. This evening was different. I felt propped by something and sitting up, breathing softly, not nervous and with intention. The gasping I am used to transmuted into long, deep inhales; long, thrumming exhales. That night even the callous on my palm where I lay the plastic straw I can’t let go of, can’t stop twiddling as I walk around the city, felt soft.  It felt healed and my hands smelled like cherry blossom from the lotion I rubbed on my knees as I took care of myself, my needs, for once. Once a day, I drink water and rest. Once a day, I pause to smell a honeysuckle. Once in a while, I cease compulsion to drop the straw, pet a dog, move on.

I was melting; suffused with the moonstone resting on my lap, becoming waxing crescent. I was becoming spring. Dust around me tickled my shoulders to remind me: We are here to help you breathe. I immediately became breath. The room rocked like a cradle and I was swathed in her gentle nightlight. I was enveloped. Call the dust what you want, the noise what you want: dirt, fantasy, demons, guides, saints, Lilith and her coven (I light candles to all kinds), they were there that night using my forearms, using my hands, using my throat to sing. My diaphragm rose and fell with ease. God. I asked for breath. Breathe. I became breath. I became nestled in large silk strands.

 “God,” I waited and then started again.

 I let the fire in my chest build with each name I said until I could feel the slow burning rise to full flame. I waited until I could feel the full pounding of the floor dropping out, until I was hovering in air, until I was on the cloud. It’s the pyre I’ve been waiting for: the charred ribs, the suckled breasts, the ghosts that waft out of the ropes. I waited until I knew who to ask for; until I heard someone say it.

 “God,” I started again, and let it be known I was not in fear, I was not shaking, I was not anxious. “Whose answered prayer am I?”

 There is no trepidation. You only enter with one affirmation. You only enter with perfect love and perfect trust or you do not enter us. I waited.

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nice figure.

sharp glances,
obsessed with her wrinkles in
passing window.
thirty three years old and can’t seem to
thwart her own self persecution,

said she liked ass play
and pegging and
doing things in pieces.

“how guys save me in their phone”

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I am decked head to
toe in rosary and sapphire
ashes, free of any
previous attachment;
hidden by feathers,

shielded by sigils,
the bark and the strand;
the one line of web
 that catches the moonlight so you
know what trap you are walking
into as you land.

I am striped like a tiger
with the arteries of
the other in
another insurrection and
I am bathed in night
so you only see me
when I drape myself
in stars, become
a roving constellation.
together we
are better like
 a pack:

taut-backed:
 hold our curves
like jello axes,
my mouth is sometimes
sandstorm
then suddenly
wet.
little storm and waves, a
flood     we are bright eyes and
hearts like meandering cannons,
step soft and low like lions
or snakes in the grass.
our chipped nails hold prayer, tongues,
the clipped wings of our grandmothers.
we are here.
we are clawing at your porch
and oiling the glass in silence
to wind up your banister
without notice   teeth out,

sliding under sheets,

look

 
        i’ve got an apple for you to bite.
breath like gentle reminders from God
               now, now, learn to be amenable
feel the uneven pulse that vengeance wore;
the way I lay and devour your
sword; the way I become naked
and big and magnetic like Jupiter:
suck it in and
throw it back out at you;
mangled, a new form you can’t
manage anymore.
pausing so you understand the difference in
revival and survived
as you lean into every
sharp point I can provide.

glint from the knife reveals
an untamed eyelash:
unpainted and short and straight
with might.
we are partially cloaked but baring
 light smiles,
wayward breasts you can’t touch,
wild right,
a heat between our thighs that you can’t
 hunt, and it’s close enough to

smell,
to taste,
to lick our days to waste.
we are wearing the masks of
unlectured howls,
thorns plucked from our ribs,
a blood crusted march,
a cold and ancient
 vendetta.
we are arrows:
lit and pointed.

we, my sons,
 are coming to get
you.


“the matriarch” or “the other us”

 

 

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I am protected.

I am wet and giant
and shaking from the
waves.
I am the midnight ocean
 birthed from the absent sun
taken over by the
 full moon’s rage.
I am 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 continent 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.

 

“reversing” or “us”

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