********
but I feel the root rot and darken
without altar, water
or speech.
you walk in and
I’m here now
growing into a black stem.
you walk in and look
right at me
and I don’t know
where to begin.
but I found the
aperture.
you walk in and
look right at me and
my shiny white teeth
forge a new smile.
I begin to grow,
unfurl, hum
softly.
“datura moon”
you just have to begin.
you hold my hand
when I speak.
I am nervous inexplicably.
just existence is a trial.
count the candles.
set the rocks.
sip the Angelica root and
begin to drool an acid fire
into the bubbles.
I feel your chest behind me,
moist, throbbing.
in my waking hours,
I practice walking across a lake
with black boots.
it’s an icy sidewalk on
a ledge but I pretend
that it’s a long pond.
when he first comes around,
I notice my wrist,
then my jaw,
surrender.
I have an urge to burn the
house down first
but in a long quaver,
forget the nonsense:
the counting of the pulse,
the spotty mason jars,
my blood dripping on a red
throw blanket, laundry,
my childhood–effete,
mold speckled shingles,
my sullen dead father
and his one last breath
alone–we think–
sometime after midnight,
right before Christmas.
“the bath series”
I remove the rest of my top
and close my eyes deliberately
to show you the length
of each thorn.
wear my eyes like a hooked rose.
tongue pressed
against your chin,
my lips trace
your jaw I am softer.
having been tempered
and forced close:
you know,
darling,
let my teeth hit your lip
I have never
become divine without first
becoming storm.
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 back.
paint my lashes black
and they’re wet
and
shaped like little
bolts.
1.
deep breath.
I carry tempest in my
lungs, a cold black murmur
that hooks it hums
in earthworms and writhes
to surface after rains
winding street lamps to
devour them like dirt cake.
I hit the corner as
you are walking up.
the light goes out
and somewhere near
a tire screeches drowned
by the sharp inhale
you take when
a cyclist scrapes his tire
on a criss-crossed track
and spins into a tumble
that splits his helmet
on a bumper and someone
screams: are you ok?
(this city is full of
accident lately).
I stand still on
the flashing yellow,
not afraid but respectful.
your hands are clenched
in pockets waiting for
the red, face turned away.
I’d been walking slowly,
wearing cotton sundress and
consenting saunter.
a practice.
my hips are wide,
lips are pursed and
I am quiet, light and
diffusive but lucky for this
place mostly mired in
my own insides.
there are twelve dogs
with meat in their eye
nearby choking on their
collars.
I am wearing a blue alyssum
in my hair but
you will know me either
by my touch
if in enough of a rush and
close proximity to brush
an elbow with a thumb,
or the sudden sun I permit:
open laughter near your
chin, grabbing you
with force,
inordinate apology
for the accidental brush
and really everything,
moist I’m sorry spills over
my freshly-done, pink
velvet lips as we collide.
wait for green or
similar direction.
there are sirens in the distance.
I open my mouth
to say this city is full
of accident lately,
isn’t it?
you?
you will know me by
my fang-toothed smile.
“morphic resonance”
this was years ago.
the first time I told them about it.
sitting on the edge of the bay
on a borrowed blanket, vomiting up
an Everclear Slurpee
and peeling back the bottom
of his parent’s quilt realizing
I had covered the entrance of the
ghost crab’s home.
taken by the dirt under my thumbnail,
the coil of a plastic straw and
embroiled in my own
deafening philosophy
about the closing of the day;
the way it moved–
death,
like an itinerant wave that followed me
—and only me–
everywhere.
I coughed that up second
to tell him
the rituals were there to
keep me safe.
the tide crept back
and I heard him light a cigarette,
felt myself starting to drown again
and then his hand on my thigh,
nails in my skin,
then nothing at all.
pain subsides in very
miniscule amounts
of time
if you don’t
repeat the
story.
(do not repeat the story)
my head is eighteen visions a second:
someone getting their face smashed
with a brick, someone getting into
a plane, slicing the skin of my fingers,
budding inability to swallow (we’re there)
blood. blood. a girl that follows me
and only me, everywhere.
and matching the numbers to the proper
order. reorganizing mantles.
bleaching my teeth and
every inch of my house.
first, you have to feel safe.
I begin to build the glass
around me.
and turning to you again, I
implore you to pick a title and
stick with it. for me, I say
cupping your baby soft chin,
(despite your fear of frozen lakes,
we advise you when the time comes–
between Australia and Alaska,
Alaska will be more safe):
do you like warnings or do you
like to drown?
“warnings”
there you are.
Saturdays and the 1 pm
alarm clock on snooze,
the bare-faced evenings
in throw blankets;
languid, but there is still
a rabid tongue
between fits of sudden inspiration.
moved from sheets
to cushions
to sheets
to type it,
to showeronce a week
if you’ll allow yourself to feel warmth.
graze your chin, scalp,
untouched chest.
open your chapped lips to the sky.
feel the water rush your neck and
trickle down your navel
to soak your unseen toenails.
do not question anything
for those three whole seconds;
it is the closest thing to orgasm
you can manage.
it has been a tough change in seasons:
costuming yourself in grin,
(you’re vulnerable)
tights and boots;
an expansive blankness
still drives your body around
to pick up soy milk for coffee.
finish something you started.
there you are.
some cooing cobra.
the chills that almost ate
me: winter. several
in a row.
the darkness and
introspection of how
I’ve chosen to succeed,
lone and the two of swords.
thanking my institutions
for showing me how to carve
pure copper into
green or sharp to hold,
the likelihood that two things
look identical enough
to both be chosen,
that I will learn the
ways of mask
and holster,
unfrozen and
burgeoning.
there you are.
“rage” or “the fifth wave”
only two days ago
your hands circled my throat
to toss me on the bed.
still dutiful,
merely dotted with color,
I am 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
garish, still stands out.
it’s brick and
this building has no doors and
one broken window.
each time I run an errand,
these defects catch my eye
and I pay my respects in
photographs.
I’m trying to get my memory back:
stopping at each one,
trying to remember how the boulders
haunted too how the ocean felt
on my wasted ankles at dusk when I guzzled
vodka Big Gulps and watched the
white 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.
the way men have held me:
(invaded)
all claws of resplendent mortar
and cracking at the edges
even with the scrape of thumb.
I snap a picture of the broken
glass pane and the beginning of
the first layer peeling into
white; the fissure.
trace my finger
over a chip and watch
it flake onto the sidewalk.
snap a picture of
that with my boot
in the corner of the frame.
things to remember us
by: namely,
the way
things have
left me after once
holding me inside;
cracked, split,
unable to safely hold someone
inside
but repainted a bright shade
for the pleasant gazes of
unknowing passersby.
“doors (#3)”
where are your friends?
that’s a real good question,
sir. I’m crouched in the back of the ambulance,
deluded and almost paralyzed,
swaying like i’m on a ship
knowing the possibility of fainting is near
if they don’t keep talking.
I’m asking in earnest if they are gonna
kill me and he isn’t laughing but i do notice
the way he eyes me like I’m a
honey-dipped sweet on the long night shift–
palatable, soft,
without defense.
I’m then left in a wheelchair in the middle of
an electronic door, closing.
first I walked five blocks to get there
and he asked me four times what
skullcap was.
remember this part as it comes up again.
Im alone in the hospital
realizing you’re the snake they
warned me about and I’ve been
the well-worn carpet they walked on
to get somewhere then left
in an electronic door, closing.
male nurse pulls my shirt up
without saying a word to me
so my breasts are exposed to everyone
on the floor
as I’m answering for the seventh time
what skullcap is like
I had never said it to her
crying, six times before.
pleading.
just listen to me.
please.
it is hard to speak.
“ (and) Degradation”
I spent years
counting the silhouette
lines of my cell
on the wall
and twirling,
perfecting a
curtsy, repeating myself to
the bricks daily.
wear a bullseye–
sheer blouse, the outline
of the areola glinting
from their truculent marks–
tongue-tip spit and a bite.
I’m invisible in doses
when the maiden turns mother
but before that, I’m followed.
a car the other night and
the others on foot
yelling something about my legs.
when the mother is hungry
tiny shorts cuz it’s August.
my massage therapist placed
his dick on my hand
(again).
tiny breaths.
any complaint from the woman
being forced to touch a cock
while im bent over puking;
that memory always comes back
second, and so does
being fucked without
“literally any consent.”
is the way I say it to him.
drunk.
tiny ruffle in covers
passed out in his bed.
any affirmation that doesn’t start with yes
can no be an affirmation?
yes,
when it affirms your rejection of men
I have persistent, swallowed panic.
stomach problems.
the words histrionic
when I show any emotion.
inward disorder and
grief, heavy like
my dad is dead.
my brother is dead.
my house is lined with crickets, asbestos
and mold so the pets all had
tumors. squishy walls, broken trim
and no one will touch
the pipes.
my mom doesn’t remember the time we
watched the moon dance,
or the word for channel.
he wants to know I’m not faking it.
my first memory was me
being forced to try on outfits
for some guy
until he patted my day bed,
bent me over.
raped me.
he waves his hand
curtly and interrupts:
that’s why you’re so sexual.
as if I have never existed
without the shadow outline
of men surrounding me,
stone, corralling
and unresponsive
like bars to a cell.
and don’t overthink
my outfits because
sometimes I wear head
to toe sweats,
bare face,
hair freshly bladed
so there’s nothing
to grab, to hold
to bend.
“Rage”
light the fucking candle.
stare at the mirror,
a little past it.
what card do you see?
they ask.
I see the moon.
turn it over.
it’s the moon.
they do this all day long
to prove to me the existence of God.
I have a jar of oil, bayberry, my own spit,
blank check signed, prick from my finger, dash of
rosemary, rose petal from my dad’s
funerary placement (private, just us)
and my menstrual blood
on the mantle.
“I give it all to you.”
(I’ve done this before)
take my blood,
drink it like pomegranate jui ,
get drunk on my rage.”
turn over a card:
Justice.
just to prove things to you,
princess.
I wake up the next morning
bleeding again,
a week early, moon in Leo.
pour a cup full to her.
candle lit.
to the lion’s head,
drink up, love.
it’s pertinent you take it
one bitch at a time.
Justice.
the first thing you notice about me
is my smile, wide, bright like a star
and the second thing you notice
is the viper behind me.
the fifth one i call is Sekhmet.
“five of wands”
daturamoon.com 