Tag: women who write

I am  God-drawn,
celibate,
obsessively testing my edges
and binding myself to
new conviction;
my need for fluctuations
in behavior,
lifestyle and mood.
baths are my only sanctuary.
my only drop of still                                                    

in  a particularly icy winter.


begin bleeding with
every new moon
and begin thinking it means. 
something. I begin lighting
the sky with votive &

recitation. begin pouring
the blood brinmed cup in the bubbles
with angle, slight motive:
an offering–me; any time
or any way she likes
forever.

you say: define haunted.
I named them all.
starting with the first one.


starting with the first time
I felt wanted by God.

“lilith”

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Apples are hard to eat now.
Bread too and other things
aggravate the throat.
But loss no longer devastates;

imperfections no longer force me
into cessation—
breath, existence, love.
I could try again.
Loss no longer floors me.
Suffused with so much grief,
time brings turning
& often material things.
the locket hanging back on the mantle
front and center.  I don’t
have the letters but my head
without caffeine remembers and
time brings
maturation.

What I’ve always needed:

the deepest place I can go is
completely still.
Still, you don’t mean a thing to me,
nothing means a thing to me.
When I speak, its merely compulsion
to expel whatever memory of feeling
lingers.
And love?

I want this thing gone.

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  “I have no future plans,”
I begin 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
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.
I’m big,
and have wings that
carry weapons. 
  I hear in a distance  someone repeat it
      you 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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in Boulder,  it was called “Unity.”
I was invited once by a girlfriend
and stayed.
we talked a lot about
life and mysticism,
the way currents showed up
for us at the right time
and I wish I had documented more.
like the Gratitude meeting,
I stayed with groups that forced
everyone to share.
they went in a circle.

I sat among them, mostly
men, always mostly men:
young this time.

I once remember sharing
how manipulation used to serve me
and a guy that I had reached
out to about death,
because my brother had just passed.
made eyes at  someone.
I was still waiting for his response.
tuck the errant hair
and look around
stopping at no one in particular.

at the risk of being
labeled calculating, I still
liked being seen. 

“unity”

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all day long

I vacillate between intention

and immediate withdrawal;

my habits, my beloved

hermeticism and the double meaning of

everything.  I’m

ambivalent about every choice

I’ve given myself.

even in completion,

I shrug.

let the wind take me.

“ January”

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“love?”
flick the ash to my  right side
ive taken up spliff again.

I’m walking the block with
my syncopated thoughts.
the beat is long chord
& repetitive.
there’s a specter of a man
in my headphones
at all time and today he wants
to know what he means to me.
I tell him.
“I want love
unencumbered
by actuality.”

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been picking at my lip
again. old childhood
habit–squeezing
corner of my
mouth for minutes at a time
so it forms into a blister.
digging my nail into the blister
just for the feel of it.
sometimes poke it with a safety pin
as i stare into the mirror.
watch it get fat and black.

my mother called it“pleasure pain.”
masochism is a desire for salve,
relief from the pain  and often
finding yourself blindfolded  in a
blade-lined hallway.
  you gotta feel your way out.
the little girls say.
he’s also  saying a lot so
I just nod a lot.
besides the impulse to
jump off a bridge every
day, I am not totally sure
why I am here.


“do you have any plans to hurt yourself?”
he asks in earnest but in a way that
he never looks directly at me.

im hot and walked for miles so im
a bit stuck to the vinyl,
sweaty and squirming but otherwise
pretty, presentable and
what’s done is done.
but I don’t say anything.
just shake my head
and bite my lip.
lift my thigh slowly to
feel the stretch of skin
and pray for some other
thing to take me.

or for the little girls to stop
but they’re snickering now.

“Belladonna”

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for some of us,
freedom was a legend;
a cage of smudged windows
a foiled pine for everything.
crippled twirl,
pace around the apartment
with a wand in hand,
repetitive crescendo in head,
tennis elbow from the instinctual
bend.

or the sudden broken glass
on the porch, the
knot of fervent caterpillars
sliding through my guts and
prematurely spilling
out onto the floor,
dissolving into pools of blood
like little girls ripped in pieces
in the midst of a tornado’s whirl
when they should have hid in the cellar,
waited patiently.

incubated until  the day is finally warm
and facing them,
tear through the tether
unbridled in exodus, unimpeded
and ready to transform into grand ideas,
take off without interruption
like the little girl’s
nascent scorn; 

now grown,
an envoy of acrimony
and the blue-black tones of
home, I pause here to ask myself
before I commit to the
flight,: what does metamorphosis
really feel like? 
there is a visceral reply:
  my skin
tearing at the thread of
each inside, each wound
and stretching wide
for me to see,    wide
enough to case the sky
and black inside turned
outside;  now
black each wing of
bone and vine,
black my eyes and
black the sea I shoot
from; everything I touch is black
like me,

and I can see for miles.

“transition (pt. 2)”

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my hands are currently stinging,
ungloved and pallid and I do
this daily, these walks with my hands out.
I never wear gloves and I never put them in my pockets.

often times I blink,
realizing I’m not somewhere I thought I was.
sometimes feeling I’m back on a street
in Virginia.
kids always watch me. 


they’re the only ones that see me muttering
under my breath,
fingers curved then moving
like I’m counting
my thoughts as they digest
they smile.
they don’t think the same as adults
and can see secrets. I’m crazy. I change my route mid route passing them,
deciding suddenly to get coffee from a different place.
I  had been to the other place three times this week
and I don’t want anyone to know me.

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to seek me meant
pleasure in ineffability,
a loss for words perhaps
out of fear of my retaliation
and to remain hidden
from some parts of the depth
of me and from the world with
me. I prefer the furtive
curl against another.
the unutterable and silent
worship
drives this depth
and the others and
you and me
like rifts adrift
like that, the moment
I turn my head.
I like to live,
eat, sleep alone
and move the country
this way; solo,
home
a solitary war
between
picking up impulse
and
deep, deep reflection
upon impulse
control.

I’m so sensitive
though
that if I settle into
think and spread
the cards like a fan,
I’d feel it out
in five seconds
eyes closed.
show me,
she said.
show me one year
show me two years
show me three years.
flip it and
it’s the King of Cups,
again.

plus I’d pick the right
song to match.
get the numbers to flash 3:13,
my lucky bet. “duplicity”

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