Tag: writers

 

I’m done spitting on your face
 and 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 still
garish, stands out.
 it’s brick and

this building has no doors and
one broken window.
these defects in the painted halls
lining my new city catch my
eye each time I run an errand
 and I pay my respects in
photographs      stopping at each one,
trying to remember how the boulders
 haunted too      how the ocean felt
on my wasted ankles at gloaming when I guzzled
vodka Big Gulps and watched the
ghost 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.
all I see are metaphors
and I’m intruded.

these overcoats that rot
without dismay hold space;
 there is natural beauty
 here but it shines brightest
 in demise.
 these bricks are painted to distract from
it’s true inability
 to keep a home  safe like
the way men have held me;
hugged with their claws,
I cracked at the touch     put my rosy shades on
 I only see them
 in their handsome sway.
I snap a picture of the edge of the broken
glass pane and the beginning of
the paint peeling into
white–the fissure.
I trace my finger
over a chip and watch
it flake.

how they left me.

“doors #1”

“doors #1”

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one day I had a dream
you bit the head off of a blue jay
 and spit it back into her nest.
when I asked why you said:
To prove you will never leave me.

here I  am,
on command about to run
across the canyon and I
laugh real loud in my
skin tight
dress:
the one cut real low in the back
in the shape
of an obtuse
triangle;
jarring contrast to my
scared-straight spine
but I still
slouch.
I twist the straw into crooked pieces
and tell myself things:
make sure they know
you are having
a real good time,
show your teeth,
hearty laugh
with belly and mouth and your
lips are stretched to the limits like your
social apathy.
show your full moon eyes
and hide.
hold your tonic like a wand;
fall asleep
inside of yourself
in the middle of
everything and wait for
the night to break.

later, he will show
you photographs
to prove you were
there.
if you are lucky,
he notices the story
dripping from your
eyes, the door
opening, the splash
of scarlet on your tights
as you replace each page,
as you become the
walking lake flooding
the wake that held
you, and he becomes
the witness that love
is a quivering knife.

“tributaries”

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sparkling explosion of
cellophane and champagne nails
tickle birthmarks down a
back.
fallen glitter eyeshadow:
roving crescent moons
dangling off a throat
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 what else?

I’m somewhere else.

11.

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I drove through
all of middle Earth
to get here;
to lean into the sharp points
of middle hurts.
In true poet’s parlance,

I am nothing but
death rehearsed.
Death reversed.
I am nothing but
kamikaze and the
soot palms that steer it,
a blaze of worst thoughts,
typeface and colossal remorse.
I smile to show you
 some white in this
hot, red place tonight.

I’ve got my cat suit on,
solid shoulders, strong,
curved back and a heavy head
that is full of
it    a blue cracking
heart to match.
I say where?
and you say
nothing.
Smile to show you
my canines.

I come over
wearing everything I
own: a pack that stalks
and stays together in lunge,
a freshly oil-stoned
suit of knives and
the bled-dry opaline
home that I nest in,
my cozy coronation robe:
my clanking vest that
announces my arrival to
your home.

it is me
wreathed in
all my men’s
bones.

“the red book”

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I’ve always been drawn to sentences:

spent sunrise picking at
 covered clots      carpet soaked with
unsheltered heart:
profuse and spilling drops that
take years, nights of picking and
other forms of self harm
but eventually amount to
one abrupt and disconsolate
 flood.   I’m upright,

soaked in streams,
copper rivers and caged
in sore body and
the newest sun.
smear some blood from my thumb
as I pick up my phone to
 take a picture of my torn knees
in the rising dawn.
find a filter first.

“sepia”
to cloak my embattled joints
(hide your armor)
before I send you the veiled snapshots
about it.
I’m not obvious in
torture.    I’m not
obvious in scar
but I have spent
previous lives hung and
spurned for your enjoyment.
      define retribution.
when you finally see me
again, I’m a smirk on a lynx
 peeking
through a grove of bush:
dead quiet in pursuit,
low to the ground
holding steady for
pounce.
you will feel my jaws
land before you feel the beat
of my pulse.

if I am anything first,
it is a woman
of course.

“lilith”

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for some of us,
freedom was a legend;
a cage of smudged windows
and insatiable longing,
a crippled twirl, 
 pace
around the apartment
with a wand in hand,
repetitive crescendo in head
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 like their wild brothers
anchoring in the moisture of a soft,
hemorrhaging sarcophagus
before they soar;
destroy their cotton packages
and hatch into thin air.
when the day is finally warm
and facing them, they
tear through the tether
unbridled in
exodus, unimpeded
and ready to transform into grand ideas
and take off without interruption
like the little girl’s
scorn;

now grown,
an envoy of acrimony
and the blue-black tones of
home and I pause here to ask myself
before I commit to the
flight,: what does metamorphosis
really feel like?  
ask for knowledge,
wait for the visceral reply:
  my skin
tearing at the thread of
each inside, each wound
 stretching wide
for me to see,    wide
like an orbit
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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when it came to me
you said I was all
  muscled positivity
as if I didn’t hang myself once before;
as if I didn’t try to tell you

how cavernous a grin is,
or anything at all.
even though you are never sure I won’t
find that perfect bedsheet knot
or not or a razor or a kitchen knife
or a drunk night on the freeway and I’m
headfirst in the cement mixer
but I made it out of that
in jail and alive and I am
always palms clasped and grateful.
you say   you pray
with FERVOR  as I finger the locket,
my brother’s ashed clasped
around my throat
and I hold onto
 that same little lie
about choice.

I let go of the wild lavender
 sprouting from your toes through
the hints of splattered paint.
there’s a meadow in your abdomen
coaxing foxes from their
holes    your knees knock mine,
sudden sting         close and sharp
  the way memory sits on your skull
then pulled back
 how you held me
far away sometimes;
making wind happen
blowing kisses from the pines.
the bath is on, I’m cold.
you always say
I’m cold.
I beckon to the side:
you and I are from the same
arctic sky.
help me in so I feel
the frost of your fingertips
trace me;

my broken back to you now.
my nails are brown tipped and filthy
from digging myself out of my ancestral
grave and I’m spattered in the ,
sweat from a hard night’s day,
walking alleys, stalking shadows
and you’re truly unremarkable
 these days save
the mosaic of carpenter’s paint,
 some gray cement
garden: no flora, no fauna,
and even God told me to pause  
and rest on my previous laurels
before I get carried away.
but i’m a martyr for this,
God,
I crave repercussion

I become a
yawning, clanking watering can
 spritzing your open lips,
dolling up your stolid ground
to birth your stories:
pollen murals out of micro gestures,
extinguished longing that suddenly reignites and
I’m grabbing cattails from the gales to
 comb out the tangles of your childhood,
fistfuls of mud    planting seeds in the
 tiny cracks around your chest that my own
sharp-toothed grief left when you
muttered the first
no  and I stepped a few
years back.
freedom will teach you how
to stay in all new ways.

there is no difference
between love and liberation
and some were born saints,
you say as you help me
in the mugwort bath,
the smell of rose and lavender.
I plucked the petals and dropped
them one by one
for aesthetic reasons.
not free of indulgence, but
patient   your fingers make
stems in the water.

“hurricane”

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things I like:
symmetry and
the act of naming things,
the synthesis of dream and
disorderly thinking,  and my bout
of many hidden rituals
like a drunk blossom,
full and suddenly
noticed

“Leo”

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I was so broke
and depressed.   sometimes I forget
that. it was the depression that was pinning me
to my apartment after you left;
keeping me locked there
keeping me imprisoned.
I let someone use my old Access card to pick their
lock so it did come in handy
after all.

I’ve put on no weight but I’m
satiated and all security is an illusion.
numbness had me
making more terminable plans
with bathtubs
bu some small joy always carried me:
my cat Alize,
always and

a used and discarded turquoise shelf
I found when I was out.
I hung it loosely on the wall,
 without commitment and the wood
became immediately blackened by my incense cones.
the corners splintered and were
 dripping rosary,
 rarely dusted and topped with pictures
of my deceased:
Nana, Papa, Anselm Hollo,
other clients, friends I knew
in childhood and
unknown cousins,
guinea pigs,
first dog Pepper,
my first dead brother
or third dead uncle.
always drink or suicide,
something tragic when it comes
to my family but
I’m still here and
 brave, I think.
in a few different ways
but I want cleansing

so I tear it from the wall,
I’m stripping the floral siding
with my fingernails,
peeling the paint back to white
 to present to you
a dusted start.
I wear black skirts with lace
lining for the cats,
rain boots when I go out,
drawn shades with a smirk,
and nothing when you start
to come about.

6.

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you are God-drawn,
celibate,
obsessively
testing yourself and
binded by conviction.

you are wrapping yourself
in your lovers’
unhinging,
your lovers’ veins,
your lovers’ disdain
for the way they scream your
name into the pillow
and you’ll be around
come never.

you are distant.
you are giant.
you are waving your hands
in the air and calling it
time magic.

oh, you are quiet in your cave,
becoming whatever you say
you are.
becoming whatever you say.

be careful what you say.

“the magician”

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