Tag: writers of wordpress

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”

 

0

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”

0

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”

0

     “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”

0

we are sharing visions.

during our forced intermission,
I became a lantern and
my own crucifixion was
paused to grow my
sparkling spine sharp like
sudden beams of light
shining
on your morning sex and
I walked forward slaughtering
everything hidden with a
 wave of my hand, focused
eyes    incantation, scribe
and text      I having been reborn with bone
 like wand, am luring rooks
for guns and ;
turning mice to men
with a flash of tongue
and then turning men to wolves
to find him.

the queen is fat now
gorging herself with army;
the war you begged for
and are bound to get
 is here on time.
I gather every friend I know
and share my plans
for combat
 enticing each one
 with a different reward.
this is the queen you
|asked for:
acerbic communist,
generous with her
violence, but you?
you will know me
by my sharp interjection,
sport–you?

you are
Persephone’s
final futile hours
picking berries in the
garden,
sniffing tulips absentmindedly,
        nevermind the bees or sunset
plucking lilies from the water,
watching the ripples form circles
around your fingertips
and then you’re
screaming at your flowers
being swallowed by the ground
  switch places
an earthworm bit her and said
as Pallas emerged with reminders,
a sello from the water,

floral crown and
speaking in her native tongue:
ways to blow direction,
ways to conjure storms.
oh, here it is again,
that little lie about choice
she goes with her knees
falling through the earth,

but she goes and keeps
her head above that dirt,
what’s a curse to those who
know the power
of reverse?
you.

 

“the magician (reversed)”

2

 

I have two constant insatiable needs:
clarity and validation and I
usually get neither.

my only true constant is my suffering;
that is how I relate to others.
my suffering is a secret comfort
because it allows connection.
we only know feelings by comparison;
yours, mine, ours.
this defines humanity–
our perpetual hunger,
our perpetual processing
 about the matter,
our reaching hands,
and the inevitable suffering
 that follows.

 

0

your house was yellow.

my house was blue and
a ten by ten box;
a cage and me trapped,
torn between watching them
pack up their stuff
from their own pact to self
and me, dripping virulence,
pushing them out.
we needed a spark,
I pounced and

shortly after,
 the railing tumbled on my
sprinting ankles,
the basement rattled and the
floorboards dropped
filling the place with the kind of emptiness
that is so dense
 it smothers.
smoke smells a lot like
 ticking minutes
if we scented time the way we
spray each other.
I hear a bark.
hope the turtle remembers how to
duck and cover.
the cat’s sure got it.

remember me as a black-winged fury
hovering over your bed at night because
 there will be nothing left by dawn
except some burning blue
cedar wood and a cheap comb
that found its way buried in the dirt.
the photo albums gone,
dusty cookbooks charred,
vanished remote controls stay hidden
and the asbestos and fiberglass ceilings
imploded despite our fear that was the
thing that would kill us.
I am left with a cancer
that gnaws through the joints
like packs of rats chewing through cables
to take the attic back.
and I need this.

I really miss your hands on me
and the convivial cluster of caterpillars
that swallowed the bark
the day in the orchard
when you held me in sullen incubation
before the devastation of the forest,
before I made way for us,
the start,
the parting and somewhere
an empty crib stays unfurnished.
someone starts an engine.
the varnish is melting and so am I.
         God gave you a chance and
              an unfinished smile.
a smoke alarm malfunctions
mocking your reluctance
to just grin and bear it,
to just open up your arms
and catch me when I jump;

                but first here comes the fish tank

catch me with all the fit I threw.
we all look like burnt books
blowing in the breeze
 and now, I too,
am wafting with the exhumed memories.
before my legs even hit the dew,
you watch me dwindle to a million floating pieces
in the cradle of tar black trees.

 

you see the contract ascertained a certain
ephemeral appeal
and I’m too thirsty to complain
about anything but the heat.
hold your breath and wait
for some other current to take me.

                    baby

there are no exits.

 

“chrysalis”

1

 

it is the sun streaming through my
bay-sized sliding door windows
and the white capped mountains
framed within them
that I will miss most
 in winter.
today I have
 a piece of paper and
a dozen dead things wilted
in their vase
to remind me.

 

there is a touch of red
sprinkled around the glass
 that browns and sets as dry
on the sill in
my small uncurtained bedroom that
 I pace
when I have too much on my
mind and today they

remind me

life is a patient rot
to tomb, a gauntlet and
fluid so I  better keep
 moving.

life is a patient
gut to get to
 wound     it was April
on Earth Day when I wrote
My Brother Is Dead
in the back of a notebook I would never
look at again.
it would be the thing thrown away
to make room as I packed the car
two years later in the most frigid
 December, my partner,
the weather, the frost of us and
I was in my big brown jacket
that absorbed me in
synthetic down and
I’m twirling the stem of a
decaying feather
of a real dead sparrow in my pocket,
 the lyrids
are crowning across Colorado as
I am responding to
a nod, someone asking
was he your only brother?

 

I repeat the question in my head.

 

yes, he was my only brother.
it is much easier to disappear

but the house moved with
me;  from freeze to open
like an unattended mortuary
moved to resurrect itself
 after years of
neglect and

did you know,
the bones given a soft lick
will sparkle white
  like fresh-caught ivory
 and once it feels the brush of
mouth
will file any joint to tip
with tooth
and gore the things that touches 

it, that holds it
near to chest or
safely in its palm?


as it shreds the flesh from
crown to feet,
someone says to me,
with sincerest sympathy

and I fall into a fog.
I repeat it in my head:

 

was he your only brother?

 

as I pass a trashcan,
fumble   make room in my bag
for lipstick.

 

“the sympathy card”

0

i’m turning another year and
I’m looking for checks,
counting my reasons for staying
or for running the other way.
I have overdue things.

recycling and wrinkles
 and Kombucha bottles
pile up
like the hairballs on the floor.
I avoid without cleaning sometimes.
make a zig zag to the door
where I cast spell:
the fits of importunity,
little raps at my neighbors door
       sugar, that’s all
that make me wish I had chosen the life
 of a mendicant
but my knees always hurt.
I have unchecked messages everywhere:
voicemail reminders and
grandma’s leukemia is pretty bad and
I’m rotten and everywhere like
 her snaking liver spots.
Mom bought me a new chain to carry him on.
i’m allergic to anything that looks like silver
but doesn’t hold its weight,
including nickel-painted gold
so I’ve gotten good at tearing things apart
to see what they are
 made of.

and the red spots line my throat,
white dabs of cream and my
strapless dress     taking out my earrings to dance
with the new one who laughs with
Delphic intention,
and I’m obsessed with the way men
strangle anything dear to them.

I got a new mural and icing lips
and white teeth.
no mercury caps unless you include
my orbiting lips.
dream of Christmas, cinnamon buns and
 him choking out an
“I love you”
with my color by numbers.
I’m remembering hugging an unnamed kitten and
trying to hold onto
this feeling.
I didn’t get impermanence,
just a new bike every year
to run away from home.
and suddenly my phone chokes out a reminder
 that the living are
hunting me.
  here we are.

my heels in the dirt, his hand in mine,
 smile
I say for no one.
nail polish named kerosene and
gums as red as love.
my hair is auburn in the sun
and today is partly drizzle and partly
made up in my head
      congratulations, baby, you made it.

wet cheeks and leftover streamers
and trick candles
and weak knees when I’m
bobbing to the rhythm.
polaroids on the table and
 girls that try to
tell me secrets.
I tell the sky all the things.
   I’ll show you all the films I like

we barely talk.
we watch films.
he finishes
on top of his fingers
and my wrapping paper.
i’m half asleep
but full of sugar
and thoughts like a
wadded piece of past
shaped like rope
tightening
and

I wake up in his forearm
biting through his moles
to get to you.

 

“ the birthday party (26)”

 

0

finishing the blue book

sparkling explosion of
cellophane and champagne nails
tickling birthmarks down the
back.
fallen glitter eyeshadow
dance on a throat:
roving crescent moons
from everywhere a lip hit
and pieces of gold dust
rolled off my nose.

bare mattress,
a girl licking a cheek and a
bare tear
sort of near.
hearts like lava
fill the blue gray cracks.
ghost stories and berries in bed,
mouth filled with laughs.
I’m in an afghan
sinking my teeth into a shoulder,
straddled with bare feet
and bravado drips from every
inch of me
     and what else?

I’m somewhere else.

 

11.

0

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