Afleveringen
-
The soul singer, she was shot
and my father cries because
she looks like me and I
look like my mother,
although he leaves that last part
out.
We drink red wine
until we can’t help but talk
about the way she had to crush
the bones of love again and again
until they could not heal
and infection forced him to give up
and let her go
free.
I will choose my lovers better
I will not lose myself
for them to be.
I will not be my lovers’ debtor
nor punish them
for loving me. -
Let the stones fall from my wet mouth in
Gentle heaves, for
They have pitted themselves
Too deep, and too long
Rotting out my guts to blackened soil
Some even swelled and split with seed
Took root, and climbed to curl inside my throat
Like the rigging of a living ship.
I purge the poison only, or
I try-
It’s hard to account for everything that’s lost
When morning comes. -
Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
-
After three years of cutting teeth
Unable to evolve,
We sit in the river, trying
To meet each other,
Finally.
On this, the last night
Of our grand game
Of House, which we have always
Played to win.
I mean to encounter you,
To push through the skin of mind
And know the flavor of your thoughts
Before they’re shaped like words, but
I am too busy tightening
My stomach, making myself smaller,
Easier for you to hold on to
Even as the current
Tugs me away. -
I move to fill
up space. I am moved
to make full that which
hungers.
By age ten, I loved
to climb down into the caves and press
my body to the cool sandstone that has
forever smelled of fertile silence,
between the breathless black
jaws of some unclaimed tomb
no bigger than my own living
vessel, I would
rest.
The earth himself would hold me
within my body’s borders,
tuck me beneath his tongue to
smother my unyielding urge to gobble
up stagnant spaces like a rabid dog
who can’t bear to waste a drop
of this free life.
When you left
I did not stay
on my side
of the bed. I swelled
out like the tide until I took
up this whole ocean of quilt
I pour
my blind and gaseous longing like wet smoke
into the awkward pits at dinner
parties, disguised in a charade
of mirth, playing the hysteric fool to
unite strangers in their incredulity-
it was meant
to be a gift.
They say life is not perfect
but the craving for life is
Perfect.
It was meant to be
a gift but all too often I swallow
up the many timbred voices that compose
a well-cultivated room,
exhuming and exhausting myself as
a black hole must exhaust herself from kissing
the mirror again and again
until lipstick mars the emptiness
that gazes back at me,
filling me with her
craving. -
Published in Atomic Flyswatter Vol. 1, 2020
Withered and acrid
are these stinging-nettle boys.
Their shallow, blackened sneers cuff my ankles in red lace
and my mother, pitiless, shrugs the blood away
having clearly given up on my
wearing shoes.
I ran by night,
from what I did
not know.
By that first pillowing of dawn I found
my legs etched raw,
as if by dying captive men that count the days
on walls of tide choked caves,
and prison cells
and on the ribs of tombs
when one gets mixed up in that unsavory business
of being buried alive.
They scored my skin to play a round
of tic-tac-toe to pass their time
incarcerate, and still
I sing only
of their thorns. -
Published in Indicia Literary Journal, Volume 4.1, Winter/Spring 2020
The butterhung wind licks summer skin like sugar dog tongues,
golden as the space your belly laugh once
carved out of this very room.
Now I rent it out at storage rates.
Meanwhile, a man jumps off a bridge.
he is on fire.
These days you look like a grave
that something is trying to crawl out of,
and I am addicted to the darkness
between worlds.
So here I am,
back to pick my teeth with perfect bones
nestled among the corporeal
undercarriages of my mother’s
parrot tulips.
I buried you,
yet here you are. -
It was Jung’s Red Book. The boy is irrelevant. Published in Atomic Fly-Swatter Vol. 1
You thunder, silver-tongued
about your alien planet
like a junkyard guard dog,
dislodge thick snarls from your throat,
taste the rusted air for fear.
I do not know the climate here.
I do not care to-
this wasteland is too crowded as it is,
there is no place for me to rest
among all these damn mirrors that reek of
restlessness and
wine.
If only I could close my eyes
and let the ancient howl of your spirit’s storm
engulf me,
make me have to remember
to breathe.
But I do not know the climate here.
I do not care to. -
For Barbara. Published in the spring/summer issue of Newtown Literary Journal, 2020. My father beat on the walls like a
prisoner, while his mother
hung chunks of herself out to dry as if she were
venison, a Hail Mary still wet on her
lips and the maps
God drew standing out blue
across the backs of her wind-weathered hands.
I memorized them
baby-powder musk and all
while she read me to sleep with her
voice so small, when I was still
The Problem,
when I was still an accident made
by someone else,
and not yet by my own
mistakes.
Perhaps I am like her.
She would shoot the moon
in every hand of hearts, but still
they say she was
crazy, too.
And beautiful in red.
She loves God
like an addict; she sings about it
all the time.
She loves me, too
though she caught me stealing wine
last summer at the
reception.
Maybe clean on the surface
isn’t the same as
perfection. -
A poem in which I love from afar
The ghost of your jaw still burrows,
All teethskin and scruff
Into my neck, savoring the milky velvet
Virgin cove behind my ear, an offering
That tugs a hungry purr up from your gut
As one might pull a briny, netted crab out of the sea
Up, up from the depths
To splay luridly upon the rotting pier, gulping down
The last of that insidious left-handed snack
I used for bait.
Your breath arches my back-
Or should I say, the memory of your breath.
It teases me with messengers,
Coming disguised as the kiss of the sun
Through the crowded bus’s window,
As the heaviness of my hot shower, and as
My own hands, tracing the effigies
Of love you sculpted into that bit of earth
That makes up my collarbone, seeking to stir
Up some electric dust that settled there, humming
When you pulled magic from my skin with fretted hands
And washed me in my own surrender.
What a relief it was to disintegrate
Loosely as a smiling corpse,
Cradled by the flaming pire
Of the branches of your arms;
I did not suck my stomach in.
I sit in busses and in showers
In ecstasy’s echo,
Letting my head lol back indecently
As an August peony, a plum
And realize fiercely that we are still
Making love, just no longer
Skin to skin.