Tag: spilled ink

 

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 believe in overflowing
chalice.  you believe in
holding space for growl
and distance and
your wife at night
or your girlfriend,
whomever.

you watch me lay the
dill in bowl, line the bed
with tourmaline.
run the bath with
chamomile and yarrow oil.
it’s all for nothing,
you found me but
I am full of tincture now.
the best defense is
to cripple yourself
like victim, quilled
with a shaky lip
but quilled and
squared.

what you catch about me
is the amorphous not
the heartbeat and to be
 fastidious requires
no real feeling
but constant poking at
all possibilities,
pausing with the probable
but still lusting.
almost thirsty for your
deluded thoughts,
your dilluted candor
that you say is grace
but you have bitten more of
your tongue today,
and you are now quilled
and squared in another woman’s
corner
what you meant to say was


there are some voids
that
are so insatiable you
collapse with the craving instead.
I walk for miles:
slow and black and
hungry like that,
reaching.

I am game.

“Datura Moon”

 

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I’ve been learning
performative emotion
to keep the ones I’m fettered
to warm, and to feel their
slippery manacles tease
the tops of my feet
like feathers as they pull
me.
paint my lashes black
 and they’re wet  and
shaped like little
bolts.

we watched fireflies and I
licked your earlobes,\
tried your fingers on
while I played with truths,
denied them.
felt your chest pressed against mine.
we clanked with ease
and I took in the scene of two people
unclothed and unseen
underneath some crescent
in your backyard
without friendship between them;
without people between them and I dared
to stare in a way that endures more than
deciduous planting.
I broke at the

not now
you spoke back
with a masculine fragility
I had never known     envied,
tried on later with pants,
unplucked eyebrows
and alone.
you became all red and
graceless,  I became an unwatched bull
headed to your porch,
snorting and you were
bare faced and guarded in all the ways
I have yet to learn.
I’m so obvious:

a scarlet blaze that starts with a joke,
two bodies parting,
an unreturned question that ends
with a sharp exclamation,
annihilation of something.
ends with a reminder from someone higher
to stop destroying something
to eliminate one part.
I am a wave of coercion
pulling you in and under
when I should have been
patient;
when I should have been laid in the grass
gently  next to the ant hills
where you can learn my thighs,
breasts,
spine,
toes curled without injury;
when I should have been pausing to notice
there are no people between us;
when I should have been gracious,
with you and bare-faced,
or wet cheeked.

I remove the rest of my top
and close my eyes deliberately
to show you the length
of each thorn.
wear my eyes like an arrow.
with my tongue pressed
against your chin,
my lips trace
your jaw       I say
more softly
than before:
you know,
I have never
become divine without first
becoming storm.

 

“Scorpio”

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kitten ears and painted whiskers
tumble down my block   in rows
rehearsed
in leotards and black lace gloves.
yowls  float through
 open porches.
TV taught them how to meow\
for Kit Kats   Snickers Almond Joys
male applause.
one bends over to tie her shoe
and seduce the nearest father;
he eyes the crevice peeking through her
black tights. 


I’m dressed like Glinda the Good
Witch and hovering in a sing song
way, throwing out
Peanut Chews and
                I burned a sigil for this
she wants attention from her own father:
a photograph or upward twirl,
burning torch,
purr in his lap while he strokes her hair
without fetish
or just acknowledgment that she is the prettiest
girl dressed up as space cat,
those others are unoriginal, just regular
cats, he says I love yours best
and pats her on her head
and there is no offense taken.

she will grow up  to be even smaller
than  she supposed:
silent    enduring still,
not awake in her own power,
her own body
like a stillborn tiger:
expelled with a tear,
coated in the blood of her mother’s
screams as no one prepared her for the
slow cooked torture, ecstasy,
that followed expelling something
 parasitic and omniscient,
a future rival.
she lands on the floor
fetal,
the thing no one wanted
without even a congratulations! bouquet
or a lotus to symbolize
finality.

we aren’t worthy of those feline
 endowments
thrust upon us when we are playing
mole     carcass on the doormat
aborted from our burrowed holes
for something more vociferous
to grab onto and finish,
our kinship;  the lions.
we are nothing like our ancestors.
our virile mothers
who know nothing of preening,
who care nothing for tail feathers.
they take what they want.
they don’t grovel at their fathers’ feet.
they honor the slaughter,
the one they started
before the harvest and pay homage
to the sky for the water provided
before they stuff themselves
with vision.

we lack vision.
we just paint our nails black,
and dress like witches,
talk shit;
start shit for derision.
and we keep turning to our men
for forgiveness when we are wayward
or won’t marry them
or stand up when they
crush our necks and they
say the rope is coming next.
we should be
stuffing our faces with the meat they provided,
learning fillet knives,
smiling like shovels and
burying them.


“Halloween”

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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 have no future plans,”
I began calmly.

 I am arms outstretched
walking nowhere but with
ardency so
I am labeled,
whimsical and manic,
a troubled woman
not to marry and
like a wound up
fairy, the character that
keeps the music box

spinning.
until it’s boring:
the repetition,
the posing,
the pink smile and
matching slippers
leaping from her
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,
resplendent teeth when
writing sonnets to the men
and a sense of fury when
reflecting on affairs.
big,
have wings that carry weapons.    I
hear in a distance
   someone repeat it
I use intimidation as a tactic
to seize opportunity
well,
I am blessed with delusive
lips and
 I also use
 black magic.

“seven of cups”

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