A soft place

After/while reading Judy Grahn's A Highest Apple, recommended by a teacher, I wrote the poem far below and shortly after, while continuing Apple, read the below excerpt which interacts most serindiptously with my poem. Don't you think?

from Pat Parker's GROUP:

now
there are new lessons
new teachers
each week I go to my group
see women
Black women
Beautiful Black Women
& I am in love
with each of them
&this is important
in the loving
in the act of loving
each woman
I have learned a new lesson
I have learned
to love myself
______


A soft place

A soft place for women to be exact
many soft places for many women
many soft places of my own for women
for my own woman
for my own many women
(for I am many women)

I am many women having many soft places
Many of which many women do touch
For the many women that I am
have also touched other women’s own soft places
For there are many soft places inside
each woman’s women

How we touch each other softly
Soft to soft till softer how we move
how many of us how many places there are

What Goes In

Woken without paint/on my face I leave it
Naked/all but for the meteor around my neck
Something in the air/ today’s a breeze
On my legs/ what goes in/must come out rain clouds

Try unlearning verb tenses/ with cows in the tub
Toes curled in hot water/Sound of stars in my tea Astralgea
That it should rain for days/ what comes out
Must be God in an eyelash

Dream Walk

The mushroom / In the forest
On the mountain/ Wilted/ When I touched
Was a dream/ Never touched
Kept down/ The trail/ Dried leaves
Snake promises/ Bare ankles
Kept moving/ Through/ To light

A clearing/ Where red poured/ In my hair
Down/ Something from sky/ Seen—
A couch house planet / Growing down
Took last face/ Raised my squinting
Goblet to sun/ Died/ I with light all over

Was a dream there/ Became real
Further down/ Fallen oak/ Plank rope
Tight-walked/ Out to ivysea
Below’s crowd/ Of air/ A penny splashing
After breath/ In the wrong lung/ Went
I died/ Was a dream/ The third time

I kiss never

I kiss never

I leave light at night/ Outside my door
The fence turned on / Caught electric

Never thought I’d be here / Kiss 30
Never thought I’d live / Below ground / Light hungry

Was always / Day by day / Here I kiss
30 sun-rotations/ A lone press

Snail spirals to my ear/
The silence of oceans / Inside

For Mia Zipata

For Mia Zipata

August 25, 1965 – July 7, 1993.
The lead singer for the Seattle punk band The Gits
who was raped & murdered by Jesus Mezquia.


_______

Your rapist your murderer—
A fisherman fond of ankles in rivers
Of the caughtsun thread cast
Of ripples quiet going
His mind a raft

Any trace of river left
Inside that last pair
You pleaded for air with
White knuckles on the cord
Around your throat
Hands fond of tug & thrash
Did you wonder
About fish thrown back

A fisherman who once hung by baby feet
Wrangling viscera-covered
His back slapped for first breath
His mother who named him Jesus

Jesus who positioned you
Arms out on pavement
A human cross in early July
To mark his name by

______

You bluegrass child who grew
Where horse tails flicked eye corners
Pulled flies from your hair’s briar
How they swarmed even then into what
You grew

Double jointed Onloan-from-the-universe-child
A brother a sister who unlearned your shy
Each time you kissed the mike
Threw back your head to sing
For a second skin to take it all in
A little easier

_______

To think of the chance crossing
The 2 am intersection of that clashing duet
The street’s orange light
The music in your ears
The field you never knew Your last

To think of faulty batteries that could have
Cleared your ears to gravel’s sound
Or of one more last song before that
Or of the sleepless walker who chose
Left instead of right that night

To think of the makings
The tuned arrangement that would play
Your three am scream soon recorded on paper
Your last note Your instrument in someone’s hands
Hands we want Out Of the composition
Before you violin-screamed
Into the off-staff of stars

_______

Should leave it there they say
Let soften the brutality
Cauterize facts how he did
How he cut the air from your lungs
With fishermen hands Wrung the cord dry
After he raped you

The beating that would have killed you they said
The beating if not the strangling if not the raping
The beating of your heart let loose
Your blue rivers hitting air
You who never left the room
Without erecting each goose-bump-pillar high

_______

Did he know by the way the streets shook with scream you sang
Know by the strength you kicked you fought
Did he taste salt on your breast as he bit
Know your humanity when he left you
Eyes closed Out Of your body

That slug’s trail across skin
Where his mouth had been
That ten years later would bring
Only one kind of answer
Jesus

Inside Boxes

Saturday, June 5, 2010
Inside Boxes

A year after my last post, a poem written yesterday:


Inside Boxes

How the dust settles on
toilette bolts door hinges window panes
The trail of skin cells
winded to the margins
Those flaked wisps

Through air holes and light slits
the sketched rustling of inside sweepers
gathering evidence
into piles every second sunday
the scales cleared away

This Vaginal Day

This Vaginal Day

To the cab driver who said he’d buy me a car
if I’d have sex with him
Exactly how many times humming
with your dick in my mouth
does it take to buy me a hybrid
and can 5 missionaries be traded
in for 1 ass fucking
and what is the going rate exactly
for a Sunday morning cab ride
where I am not propositioned for sex

Later on the subway 2 young girls
in thighhigh skirts & a man
who touches them in ways
3 times their age
Pinches the youngest
she smiles says stop
& 50 tongueless watch

Later walking the street
home where orange light falls
I’ll not have music
in my ears these sounds
Feet on pavement
The keys of each step