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you’re wild eyed and
doleful and
absolutely beautiful;
an encumbrance to my chastity.

you mention my smile
is bright and sharp,
threatening to steal the star’s
twinkling thunder.
rocks come unraveling but I’m focused
on the way your
mouth talks about me.
you move closer and I
move behind something.
three billion comets crash the sky
but I’m focused on my knees,
how they feel and how they
look in moonlight.
my mouth is a river of whispers;
body deep blue and
impenetrable.
your crystal eyes flare when you
talk.

Look up!

the moon has caught fire.
your hand retreats from my lower back
and I glare at the adversary
that has stolen a second of my night,
a second of attention away from me.
today is special for two reasons so
I stay crouched and
the sky flares like jaundice and I
retreat to a past life.

I look like a year ago Sunday,
like a shadow of a hugless child,
a big, bawling bowl of acerbic bone ash,
like a forest fire fixed in a flicker
caught in a speck of my dead brother’s eye.
I look like a mirror of someone
watching her own upsurge
of implacable sorrow.
sorry, I let go of his hand.
I’m always so sorry.
so hurriedly racing memories against my
own borrowed time;
so sharp and sore and
mostly unheard,
so tangled in pieces of us.
so now what?

so now you play mortar:
you keep it together
so I can finally come undone.
I’ve always got running shoes
and an idea
and one rolling tear I’ve got to get
away from.
so very torn,
so splintered and hefty,
so tempted to hold this
just as it was that
final Christmas
but I’m too
slippery palms and
soft-eyed and strident and
sidelong gazing and first uncontrolled movement
of the century that renders
me suddenly
I have to tell you something.

absolutely
inconsolable.

“lyrids”

May 13, 2019 1

the way he held her
persisting,
somewhere close.
sliced himself some days;

let her out to roam free in my bedroom
some mornings
so I’m wrapped in wet sheets,
dissuading gaze,
I’m always waiting and
instead of sweat, praise in primal moans;
it was the way I held on,
foreboding
to the last bit of his scent,
to the worn corners,
to the post for stability,
to the both of them.
red,
painted blood red and in heat,
weak

amends of self preservation lost
in the latest incision he made
with his teeth
and I am left with bite marks
lining the inside of my thigh
in the shape of a smiley face.
and he is calling her right
now.

“Venus in Leo in 12th house”

May 13, 2019 0

restraint is an art
I intend
to master

but my jealousy is erupting
into fits of flowers:
yellow roses for the look,
it means friendship
jasmine for the scent I wore,
one vine of honeysuckle to
to bind you to summer where I was
wet and still and your personal
swimming pool you could
wade through,
catch some respite,
use.
I’m sending her a bunch
with no clear note
attached:

(forget||forgive||forget
them)

the scent is drifting through your
bedroom and the bouquet is
sitting there, getting sun
at noon and
much like the way I sit:
cool,
carefully arranged
and full of
tiny thorns waiting
to be grazed with cheek
or thumb.
waiting to be praised.
waiting to be
buried.
waiting for the stems
to be cut carefully
and braided
through your lover’s
hair so when you lay
down in the park
and hold her hand
and kiss her neck
and let your face rest
on her shoulder,
you are reminded:

you can smell me
everywhere.

(the red book)

May 13, 2019 0

miseries I keep:

seasonal allergies,
pictures of me thin
and tan and
glowing
at seventeen.
dormant addiction.
overwatered plants that are never
bringing buds to blossom–
never springing back.
shards of broken glass
in the carpet
somewhere missed ;
then in heel,
then too late in trash.

insatiable sugar cravings and
the cavities they take,
insomnia and the
quakes of sobs
repressed but twisted
into nightmare at the
first minute of rest.
the first taste of irreversible loss
(my brothers ashes swinging
from my neck),
a hex in teeth and
ideas of you glancing towards me,
towards us,
just that once.

me,
back turned
at the time.
me, always clouded
in black.
me,
opening my mouth
and releasing it.

“memory”

May 12, 2019 0

I derive so much from one word.
the license plate that careened into the pole
instead of me that night read
“ prisons” and
I knew instinctively how he felt and
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 and
my twelfth house
of self undoing.
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
and

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 watch the lights
change.
you are holding selenite in your pocket,
standing where they
are now sitting and wilting
in screams, the way you asked:
one more chance please

you snap and they lose their
breath just like that.

“prisons” or “Venus in the 12th House”

May 12, 2019 0

show me how to be an angel,
sky,
I think I’ve been there
before before I found
what my hands can do
when they’re not pressed together
anymore:

bring donuts for the office.
offer silence in embrace,
holding space or advice
if they say help me get through
it with action.
paint houses, mend fences.
pull the nails from my true love’s feet:
I placed them everywhere and
I make contracts,
real amends means I wish you well
and won’t ever
contact you again.
smile openly at strangers,
hold the door and inner weeping.
stop repeating anecdotes that expose the
dark recesses I’m engulfed in so I can
stop
passing this on so I can
save face, space for
longing, mystery, idleness.
it’s the surprise that I can’t take.

I invite them to dinner:
ask them to bring a favorite song,
one dish and
a defect they love.
I like strings and female wailing;
chords that are long, surfeit with
unrequited love.
I want it to sound like a heart that’s starving
for admission but will take it slowly
with a snare drum.
I apologize profusely for how bright my
apartment is these days.
I know you expected something darker,
I say,
but I prefer a blinding scripture to the days I
waded in shade and open constriction.
they understand the situation,
my indifference and malignance.
they offer me some gifts to assuage
me and I waste the night
with demands, scrutiny,
verbal inspection:

show me all the books you love.
recite your favorite lines.
I think the world is crawling with caged geniuses
that got lost along the way;
are you a lonely prodigy?
I need to see your insides;
palms up to show
you aren’t hiding anything.
are you the predator or prey?
do you believe in martyrs,
more importantly,
do you believe that the devil vets the saints?
I’m no killer, I promise, but I’m not the easy way.
do you believe in chance?
I once watched my fate unfold across my eyelids:
two parties coming together in black and white,
a future that was possible but someone whispered:
it is better to ruin this thing.
I believe in lessons.
I believe in dormancy.
there is no such thing as a mistake.

they show me teeth, piano, films:
Begotten.
I laugh, I’ve seen it:
I show them the drugs I bought,
my darkest cackle and matching garter.
show them a dozen ways to trample gardens
with a notepad.
do you see how I can write the future?
look, I planted bombs everywhere.
I show them demolition.
I show them scribes can craft the wicked.
I show them altars, smitten
eyes and a tongue that’s wound around
the Earth.
I show them what my insides look like:
wounds and trillion year old dirt and
I light three candles,
wear them like a rope.

have you ever let a thought just pass?
one interrupts as I dangle over his
crown.
let me down.
and I repeat to him what I meant to say
the first time we met to explain the danger
of restriction:
it is nothing,
time a longing
and I wait.
I say

will you teach me how to wait?

“ricochet”

May 12, 2019 0

it’s the feelings I can’t take.

I can’t sit still.
you never sit still.
I don’t take breaks and
I can’t rest and I can’t stop
once the frantic pacing begins
and today is special, it’s a
double moon day and I knew it
before I woke up.
it’s a two of swords day.
it’s a double shower day where
I try to cleanse myself
obsessively without confessions.

now I am sad about two things:
the way I let things go
with grace
that I can take a bath
about and mourn publicly
because anyone would expect that
and then there’s the more insidious thing:
the way I ruin things privately,
what no one sees
with grace
to stop myself from
sabotaging everything,

there are men in this town
who know me.

(the red book)

May 12, 2019 0

this is the edge.

that place we walk,
that line we pace
where we are crossing borders
but we aren’t ready to let
go of the hand on the other side.
a tightrope and I’m a leo
so I want you to see me
learn balance,
learn control,
learn poise in public agony.
there is no point without an audience.

so here comes the men.
the men.
the men.
the men.
and so begins
the slaughter,
dripping red,
the men.
me, my insides;
them, their insides,
us together in a swirl of
chaos of my choosing.
the three phantoms beholden
to my unceasing confession.

“And why do you tell these men
things long after they’ve left?”
my therapist asks.
tell the truth.

(Because I miss my fucking brother)

But what I say is much longer.

“the men”

May 12, 2019 0

then it’s flowers and unexpected showers
but it is day longer, sun higher,
you are not mired in the date of departure
anymore, and you forgive the monsoons.
your sensualizing emotions present themselves:
the gloss and black tips,
hips in sheer nylon,
a gentle sway.
sometimes it is unseasonably warm
and you have to hold your cardigan in your hand
but you have managed a smile
and some sense of buoyancy
and dragged someone along
with the sleeves of
your unworn sweater.
you get lucky:
they want to take the
long way and you have a tendency to
suddenly rush things.

you are both broken
doe and the trap laid
for their arrival.

“ambush” or “pisces in the 8th house”

May 12, 2019 0

too be fair to be myself,
no one made it easy for me.

I didn’t one day wake up
in a fit of terror,
I was raised to be reactive
and scared and I sucked my thumb
until I was thirteen.
that’s called an
oral fixation.
I have a predilection for filling
silence with phrases so
I feel heard and I drink tea all day
to keep my mouth busy.
my jaw moves on reflex.
I have an oral fixation.
I spend a lot of time chewing straws
and licking my lips
and you always draw attention to your mouth
they say and I have an
oral fixation.

so when I returned to the definition:
a fixation is a persistent focus of the id’s pleasure-seeking energies at an earlier stage of psychosexual development.These fixations occur when an issue or conflict in a psychosexual stage remains unresolved, leaving the individual focused on this stage and unable to move onto the next. For example, individuals with oral fixations may have problems with drinking, smoking, eating, or nail biting.

once more, I returned to this phrase
I had written and rewritten again:
how many licks does it take
to get to the center of an attachment
disorder?
I turn to my therapist and say
sincerely,
I can’t keep anything out of this
mouth.

“the oral stage”

May 12, 2019 0