Thursday, December 24, 2015

The gravity of what happened

Out in space, the tears
don't fall
down her face :     t h e y   f l o a t
around the eye that cries, the ear

that hears someone say:   I see your   p a i n
like I see Earth from far far
away :  the pain/the earth-- both
as round, as blue as they say


Sleep, like a mother

Sleep always pulls me back
hard, back into itself:

(a mother
trying to pull the wail:
shrill, extension-of-self back inside
her body: mother who wants to feel
alive again: life kick
inside harder
each day: wants to feel a second heart
thumping inside her cocoon-
of-bone-cocooning-bone--
her baby a dream she wants
to make something
beautiful out of Darkness,
she wants to make something
beautiful without having to try.)



You use your hands like your mother

The memory I can not place, can't finger with my beautiful
hands, a man once said, you use your hands
like your mother, took years to understand my hands used
to pick, pick on self, on skin--
musician I create silence, sensation
to the microscipic tune of picked raw
picked liquid-red.

My wife gloves me to break
me as though I were a horse unridden,

a child again-- the discomfort of clothes
scratched on skin till I can go on
without a body I've never liked
a barrier between me and my naked
touching of the world. He was right,

like your mother in that silent picking
way I've watched her pick off bites
till the scab and bleed, re-scab, re-bleed--
finger-dance she's done
without thought of pain (the held-note
she holds to in the background)
those days sky is wholey grey--
grey, coupled with Silence that bears,
presses out amplified Ache
she closes her eyes to
kick into a swallowing sky.

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Overkill

I am reading a poem about a God on the bright
rectangle of my phone-- squinting from white
light when I hear the sound: one lone
shot echoes down the hill I say a prayer
for the deer, downed with eyes still open
blinking water. Without my eyes I see her
this poem overlapped by this dying pain
that grows, about God, about God being alive
in the form of a fag-- not a stick bundle
but a person who has been taught to hate
himself, hate the way he grows to be
with a man swells and swollen it's
all too much for me, I put down
the phone light all I can see
is the deer, the deer who in this moment
is dying on the ground, the leaves
around her she never saw coming,
too young to fear people the way
she should, I draw circles
with my pen, over and over go
the same rounding line till the circle
becomes a sphere, becomes
two spheres (so neither sphere
is dying alone) the deer is sinking
down now into my throat, chest:
this is how we go on living inside
each other, these times the worst/
best we kill the innocents, the easiest
ones first, put their heads on
our wall and leave their eyes open
so we can be dead when we look
into them.

Monday, December 21, 2015

A Meditation for God

Let's light lamps, sit on a warmed
blanket in the presence of earth-breath
puppies, sleeping with necks crossed
over each other. Let's send a letter back
to God, knowing we could never compete:

     Thank you for holding my hand
as I breathe, you are like a candle to me:
in your presence I hum in light of your
flickering silence, I am safe. Your love
is both shield and sword, both in light
and dark, you shape-shift your love.
I live when I feel close to you. You change me
and make me new again and my joy
in each discovery is the fossil I find
buried in effort's dirt.

     It is hard not to imagine you human:
it is the human in me you forgive. You are
in every where and thing I feel you near
in the sound of rain the roots and I
collect you and curl in the satiety of you.
I feel you near when ear presses to her breast
I hear you inside the cocoon of her bones
around muscle: you have created
something so beautiful that through her
you bring me to knee with closed eyes, 
and a gratitude swelling for all she is,
all you are.

     I feel near you in the eyes
of others-- other creatures, other humans
who like me breathe to know you, remember you,
recall, call out for you. (Surely you know
if you press us in the right place, we will sing
and fill the holy cave with blue notes
of ache and praise.) You are like the
song our mother sang to us in womb:
you are both the womb and the song
we know from Universes ago,
we return through you again and again,
swaddled in your holy echo.  

Saturday, December 19, 2015

What is to be learned from ash

Floors creak, the attic sounds
swollen and swelling: I am quite haunted
by myself. I want to bury seeds
into my very real knees, sprout gerber daisies
to spruce the place. I try not to remember
the scarlet rows, bruises I once inflicted
on thighs and wrists where skin was paper:

I am haunted with how
do I forgive myself written on the ceiling in ashes
that fall into my eyes and answer:

the Forgiveness will happen gradually-- a sprinkling
of salt into the folds until a day it's happened : saturated/ you will float
in water you will no longer wound yourself like a clock who needs
to be wound. It will be an Aegean kind of existence-- the salt-forgiveness
so dense you're wombed
again. This time quiet. --No padded thud of fist: no absorbed
anger. You know nothing, again : you know everything, sizzle
new knees, eyes form and all is cloud, halo and edgeless
you rest your comma-body below her rib. And the world is paused for you
to be let in. The ocean is unknown by you yet you are a part of
its blue-filled, holy goes on and on, silver spirits flick
through your endless yet contained inside the borders of your mother-land's pulsing.

Thursday, December 17, 2015

Migration

Rough-- as in a manner that lacks gentleness.
Violent. Rocky.

“Last night's migraine was rough (pitted, sandpaper)-- stretched
into the new day, throb of
a star in my brain wants out, as if it could
pulse its way through the pit of my skull.

what are you trying to teach me, God take the pain away

but the wretching till my head splintered open and I prayed

Light, you know I love you but please don't touch me now,
cloaked myself in a box of darkness to the lone sound of the pain's beating
heart:

Saturday, December 12, 2015

She's a doll

she misses pine cones    beach wind she misses
soft carpet beneath heels and food she misses grapes, pears 
(an emptiness inside her so vast you can hear the penny
of longing clink inside her)   she knows
without desire she is dead as a doll

but that's what she is--

doll/angel
at the top of a tree in a room
somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere
she bites her lip till she can taste red
in her mouth   you'd never know
by looking at her with those feathered
wings    gowned at the tree's top
that descendos into her needles
and all no one
ever gave her a name she's spent
her life looking out
through the plastic of an attic box
the occasional scamper
of a mouse    the sound of voices
below laughter below   so bright
she wants to become it   wants to move
as it does:    fill a room
with the sound of the beating of a body
that will never be her own  

Friday, June 12, 2015

The bones will not remember


The picket fence means to contain     not so different from her
body wrapped around her spirit     will one day be containerless--
cube removed from tray:  melted:  evaporated into air    no more visibile
than a thought streaking across a face     on occasion when she visits those earthlings she loves

              (what was her obsession with dying those years, they'll ask,) when she carried pain
              eleven times her weight    wading

towards her lover who would hold her in the night    make her eat
her lover would take weight away     once she spoke it into the swirl of her lover's waiting
ear     how then she would fear death-- feelings turned on their head now with so much to lose

               stiff as a board, light as a feather you could lift

her with a finger she's afraid she'll blow away too soon
once they burn her body to ash she'll settle into the crevices
of tree bark     hard to conceive 
her spirit won't miss
the body won't remember

all the aches    the feeling
she always felt of having stuck her finger into a socket--
everything frazzled     nerves frayed on a sound    neon
everything neon    grass neon    sky ablaze and hot eyes
in the light that makes her squint    she jumps
at the touch of her lover's finger     the smell of the breeze
splashes her nostril with citrus power    the body won't remember
the body that haunted as well as loved her    the body
through which she experienced pain and passion made her
bend    the body on its toes    which did it's job so well

Wednesday, June 3, 2015

I suck lemons,

my tongue remembers the familiar, the girlhood it burned over onions eaten like apples,
brought empty tears as I binded my barbie's hands, feet with toilette paper so she couldn't move I called her Sexy, did a dance for my mother's camera but her eyes didn't blink like my own at times didn't blink. I sucked on a quarter got stuck in my throat no one saved me my throat learned early to save itself by gagging. Peeling back the bark from a birch tree to leave raw skin beneath I imagined the tree feeling as I did picking the edge of each scab till it bled-fell to the pavement and wind to the smell of juniper, always takes me back to that little white house with the picket fence and inside it the attic of my room swallowing me in its pale pink, my magic rock collection arranged according to color: the blues, then the yellows. And the giant bear I played boyfriend with though it hadn't all the parts, had soft, stuffed hips I mimicked the act and later peed in a bucket for release, to be more bear-like: more free with less bones I left the forgotten bucket beneath the bed. Like a memory it filled the house full in a week with an unattended stinch, so foul even denial couldn't keep my mother away. Girls will be bears she never said and that night I renamed the constellation Bart Simpson on a motorcyle from the star-pieces of Orion's belt. No one could see it but me, out on the roof, bird's-eye-viewing the street lights, each house I imagined, lonely as my own.

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

the fear which sits in my body's center

they say you can sense danger
through the follicles of your
hair I've always known
something holy about hair
as a girl my boy-cut
made me weep I wanted hair
down my back its feeling
of safety coming down
over my shoulders
like a warm yolk that stays
but as I drive I keep my distance
from the trucks with their cargos
of spikes and poles all the dead
road animals soak in leave imprint
on my mind I see another sign
that says blind drive my hair
just above my shoulders I am so tired
of fear fear fear of knocking
three times of curves taken
too slowly I am not making love
to the hip of a road here
I keep thinking this could be my last
I'll never wear the dress will hang
in the closet as a crushing
of how I once lived of how I hoped
for the aisle leading to her forever
but in my mind I am pole impaled
in a mangle of car metal
I am fighting
for my life the way
I always am
in the reoccuring dream
the snake bite that brings
me to my knees in prayer
when God already knows
she has to know how much for the first time
in my life I want 
to live

Monday, June 1, 2015

something to cry about

I am no good
at handwriting but I can spell w-e-l-l
inside a girl was hard for herself
all flooded like the rest of them
she can hot help her drowning though she tries
to heal via the trees work a little but she needs
she needs she's lost
her grace she goes to healer
has a drum    magic stones and sits
with both feet on ground    teaches
girl how to tap on her face till
all the swallowed feelings come
out of her eyes    nose she even pees
them out    all the yellows she falls
to cushions folds up limb to limb
the weight of it releasing as rain
she comes back to this room healer
for years to heal old places to become
more round in stitches that will heal
her heart's hot sorrow

Monday, April 27, 2015

Audio Recording of Feeder Emptied

Audio Recording of as spring came

as spring came

the azaleas spoke but only god could hear them

you ached for a lasting warmth to lay in
you understood

lots of things: 

how to unearth a fossil in a hotbed: that time of the cow's rib, the saber tooth, 
the mandible: one bone every two to ten minutes: the luck

the sorrowful bees, the honey that oozed like molasses (from the troubled hive
where we met-- veiled-- your velvet voice a balm)

the sacredness of vowel sounds, drawn out from the mouth to god in hymns of
   why?

& yet the azaleas so early to bloom, spoke and didn't compare
themselves to the dandelions    to the roses     to anything & you understood, again

how like girls they are    blooming    tall &bright, even in Spring's early, harsh cold





Feeder emptied

          by the smartest of birds-- crows bully away with flapping
purple wings all the bright ones--- the blue, the red, all the winged who all ache
for seed-- a collective of need.

          When a sparrow flew in through the window the promiscuous woman with crowblack hair said A sparrow is a bad omen...be careful, and cued, my life split into shards of obsidian. Even now, I remember, remember the echoe of her omen. Had I not palmed away the cold

          feathers: body of sparrow and buried her in earth, would my life have been 
different—path paved in feathers and blood-veined leaves fallen in their own due time. But now I spin
circles over stranger's graves with glitter in my hair sparkling

         down to black grass I rip a patch clean,  till my fingers bleed, I'm so hungry I pull from the earth 
a rib-- lick dirt and gnaw. 

Oh mirror, why have I not cracked and crunched you to silvery dust with my bare feet and buried all the obsidian reflectors-- for my outwards have come to mean

         more than the black horse drinking the stream, more than the willow-swept night, more than shadows on the moon, more than the ash of my beloved.

A mouth full of nest to heal me, I want the built-up wildness of fledgling out-grown its nest, want found songs between my lover's long legs: to speak there in tongues. Most days I accept I have no beauty to sing-- no song, just this great canyon of need.   

Friday, April 24, 2015

Audio Recording of Thought Stream

Thought stream

My dog has something caught in her teeth     she is smacking her lips she is
looking at me like she wants to speak something    perhaps it is help me
get this thing out of my teeth, please    though it was delicious    now she is licking
my computer    her mouth must be very strong    it is how she loves the world
she licks and smells it     personally, my olfactory sense is quite 
acute     when my partner gets home, I smell her    I am spending too much time 
with dogs     (is that even possible)      we lay in the light stain    all day   
a hammocked existence     dreamy warm like that place Ive imagined 
in therapy where the angel holds me      but today I am not thinking about that 
today I am thinking about time      how slow
it used to be      how it didnt concern me      doubleknotting my shoelace
on the playground      but how time now concerns me      I am 33      I am divisible
by 11 which means I've had 3 cycles of magic      that is a lot      time drips 
from the faucet       I hear it and ponder      whether I want a child      drip/drop perhaps
they aren't so different than dogs      they give and take but once it's inside you
it has to come out and that's not even the hardest part      you forget the pain 
they say but not till after it tears through you      I understand how much I would love it 
I have a craving      I want an old soul of a child     one with starshine in their eyes 
and dimples     but I shouldn't be so particular     10 fingers/10 toes       a face 
that'd be nice    I expect the child would change my body forever      it could go 
either way      i'd love my body more or I'd love it less      but the bleeding
each month I want something to show for the dues I've paid      I have worked
hard to heal/I am wise and time's faucet is dripping faster
and faster      I am like a dog      so little time/so much love to give

Thursday, April 23, 2015

Audio Recording of If I were a Fountain

If I were a fountain

I am in love with a dog-god A famous poet
once told me to never write poems about dogs or dead grandmothers

Did I mention he is famous and is a he I am a not-he but it would be nice
to be an oak tree-- an oak because of the o sound when people beneath

look up and say oh, look at that oak-- sounding painful,
but good-painful like when you are about to sneeze or cum Just listening

to the sound of their o's would cause me to tingle as I would be
a sensitive tree, enjoy pointing my branches at hummingbird-clouds

and dipper-stars, saying look, look But as I was saying, I am not a tree,
a not-he I am a vagina-me I could be better--

I should point at the sky more often I should
put only dimes in a mason jar should not sleep

with a bat beside my bed should vacuum
all the god-hair more often

       And if I were a rose I should open slowly
       If a box I should keep secrets
       If a mirror I should never be touched
       If a table I should not complain
       If a nude portrait I should never blink

And if I were a fountain I should not feel so sorry for all those humans
who live on hope, for all those beautiful wishes I could never grant

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

That first time I died

I remember the carpet on which apartment
scorpions hid in corners, cloaked
in shade. The first time I died all the baby-Buddha-ness
gone from my eyes, zapped away
in a flashback of fists immeshed with pain
of my teething—the icey ache in my gums dulled
by the sound of his voice overcome hers as light
hits shade and wakes it. I died that first time
he threw her to the ground, sparkles surrounded
her body, and ache purpled inside as I had no words
for one star shooting down another: I did not
make a wish when she fell/I scooped
up the spiders and let them loose outside.


Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Audio Recording of I have resorted to dust

I have resorted to dust


I've counted 74 boxes inside our house I have a thing for
counting and for boxes all I know is this boredom is painful-- these yawning

days of dogs asleep, these empty boxes full of Want. Mahogany, pine, oak
I wait for them to collect dust so I may blow on them and sneeze to be taken away temporarily.

I saw a photograph of a star and it reminded me of your oldest self, how
I'd put you in one of those boxes if I could, to open when I am in need of awe.

These hands want to make and be lost in some thing, buried deep in warm wet tissue or scratching nails over bark. But it is so green outside my window-- so green I think

shiny thoughts, I think lavender toe nails and new sandals but the air has a chill. And boxes know nothing of today's green's deception: they only know monk-sit and they don't remember being alive.

I will give them the benefit of the doubt: they'd probably spin in circles if they could.
Imagine all their corners wearing away and the sky gone dizzy.

Imagine a day as green on the inside as it is on the outside: imagine warmth: imagine this body

leaving the loneliness it was earth-born into and all those boxes at last filled with old letters.

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

I can barely take


I drive past calfs playing in the field every day: so, very-sorry-feel. Ache
the color of bruise swells in my throat, an aura of purple
behind my eyes, presses as though I should always wear black
& earlier I'm dangling my legs from a branch in an orchard on a planet I hum
a bright song that goes sour in my mouth: no candy to fix
this feeling I can not name & those cows get me
by heart every time I am so utterly more human than most-- ears tagged
yellow tags murder
yet still they lay calm on grasspatch beneath sky. It is the roundness
of their eyes letting in all the world. It is what cuts short
their promised-by-God days. A truck ride
and they scream bloody I have heard. If only it were different here, if only
we'd ask nothing of them & let them lay with the lonely girls when it's cold.  

Saturday, March 28, 2015

Burnt pudding

A horse in a womb somewhere
grows, suspended in pink light
and another, birthed, into a field
is spooked and gallops away
from a bag blowing across the earth

But I, I am pouring my sadness
into the pudding, stirring the creamy
white, stirring in my sadness
I want you to eat it I want
you to know what this
feels like

Last night's dreams I was driving a blue
convertible through I should have known
what was coming: today my sadness would burn
the pudding and we are having
to start from scratch again

This pudding for your birthday
will take all day-- that is what
sadness can do to time--
stretch it out in strands of ache
A woman can temporarily ruin, have to
start up all over again,
stir the second batch, pray over
milk wont burn this time, this time
she'll leave sadness
out of the pudding she will
brush her teeth and be able to speak
and the horse galloping will
come to a stop-- no longer afraid
of a bag, or of anything

Sunday, February 15, 2015

Dear Gatlinburg,

Your roads --the curves of women linked together, uncovered we discovered beautiful : hipped and bedrocked-- jurassic slabs of slate. Your cabin's music playing, and fire when we entered, entered where she said yes, I slipped old stones on her finger. Where bears still sleeping, where still illegal for us to marry, you should know you were apart of the story: story where two women become lovers again and again, in the woods, on a hill, in a state where this kind of love is dangerous, not unlike all love. Where we ate at the Old Mill, meat covered in stone ground corn and fried, we tasted you and left the morning before the snow and ice. We slept on the finest pillows,  swallowed from our tongues wine and juice and with dog as witness,  made a promise to each other. We drifted through dark chambers of blue, watched jellyfish through glass umbrella into red, and sharks glided over head. We drove through smoky mountains--their blue aura, their snowy tops and slippery rocks where the cold bit our necks for each photo-op. We were high, we were in clouds, in love and looking out at the curve of the world.

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Audio Recording of Where Poetry Begins, I Begin Again

Where Poetry Begins, I Begin Again

Stagnant puddle in a Humidity thick with fly-sweat. Godweb
of sun and heat-- stuck in thismoment forever. Here Poetry begins
with Father Fist and Mother Bruised, cacti needles in skin, carebear
nets and facecake. I knew I was shuddering in some place holy,
some place tattooed into my soul's soul, some place scraping
my mother off pavement with little hands/little water. Heat-stroked
thighs, metal eyes and cat gone hiding beneath the sofa: breathing
ball of endangered fur here Poetry begins in the only cool blue thing: pool,
aurelian surface lapping and slurping into the side-drains. I am rescuing
all the dead bugs, holding them in my palm and blowing onto their wings in belief
I can resurrect. Here Poetry begins so thick I cant separate air from water, sun
from sky, hot from black. My world at his knee cap, my world with a crick
in my, my world whirling around me from where it all began, where there
must have been some frosting amidst swollen lips and eyes my mother wore
the fashion. Some nights dreaming between the two of them I'd awake, listen
to their lungs exhale and fog the room as far as I could see. Some nights I'd lift
myself into the heat-cloud above them and wait for the rain to pour out of me.
But it rarely came and when it did, it came in hard, slanting sheets. Till I became
nothing. It all begins here, here this place needled into the pink behind-my-eyes.
I go back there. I go back. I go back.

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Audio Recording of My body, 2015

My body, 2015

Holy sac of bone and blood, beats like a hip-hop song in the attic: I am the lyric carried down through the vents, repeating itself over and over. Not what it used to be, having seen twice the scenes, expanded twice the times in breath and pain, I find it each morning with surprise--my body, holy as stone, softens with time: becomes more and more cave like. Let's make a place of my body: here is home for my lover to write on walls. I'm talking carving, I'm talking home for her to lay her heavy, heavy everything and dissolve: swaddled. Skin-- scarred no matter, color no matter keeps my insides in, holds me in shape of a woman ready to love the world and hate it too, equipped with eyes, tongue let's meet there lover and make her dance. Make her naked, make eyes rattle, bones bend. Let's fold and crinkle her in all the places and get her wet. My body is a place waiting for you to enter, Lover, turn on lights and music when you come, for it grows so quiet without you.

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Audio Recording of The Bulimia Years

The bulimia years

Sound of ring clinking sink. Of faucet running
till warm water. Sound of toilette lid opening. Of human
heaving. Splash-of-water sound. More heaving: more splash.

Sound of toilette paper unloosening from squeaky roll.
Nose-being-blown sound. Silence. Sound of hand hitting wall.
Toilette flush. Muffled sound

of lid closing. Water-refilling-tank.Toilette-flushing-again sound.
Silence: throat clearing. Door opening

on rusty hinge. Sound girl makes as she stares into a mirror.

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Audio Recording, reading my poem Carousel at Festival Market, 1989

Carousel at Festival Market, 1989

Always I chose the same one-- impaled like the others, by the gleaming
brass pole that fed through its mouth, up its sinuses, up and down it lifted

me in the direction of the roof which sat in the shape of a gold hershey's kiss
over my head. Covered in jewels I found its colors well and equally distributed--

painted like a sun setting over saddle and bridle on a summer day in Kentucky. Who doesnt
find beauty there, in a white horse whose eyes never waver. But glossy, I'd probe my

fingers over them, finger-nail the painted pupil and find also sadness in the shelacked glaze--lifeless as
its body lifted me in enslaved, slow motion grace. I rubbed my hands down

its hard mane in the only externalized evidence of what I imagined to be, but could not yet name,
our mutual brokenness.

Always I chose the same horse, would wait for its back
to become weightless.When the carousel would ring out like a school bell, I'd dash

to her before any other pink'ed girl-child would. With all might I'd fling a leg
high over its back to seat myself on its finger-smoothedness. I was lonely./I was loyal

to an inaminate thing. I was already personifying and attached
to this horse I never named. I didnt know I'd grow up to wonder which Id rather be:

a riding writer or a writing rider, that either way I'd like the sound of the comparison,
the mere assonance would be enough to light me up inside. But back then, it was different,

something sad in my chest was going in slow circles, rising into the air, suspended
as a girl inside a memory would always be.



Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Strange/Sad Earth Facts

Earth is the only planet not named after a God
The ocean is mermaidless despite all those dreams and paintings
Each day some of us stare at glowing blue globes for hours
Night returns
The stove burns with touch, leaves its note on the skin
A woman bleeds for days yet no one knows, she smiles, carries wood
Inuits have hundreds of words for snow*
A turtle lives inside itself always like we do
The sky will turn purple
Glass made from heated sand, drops, breaks back into pieces:

              how we all fall, too, into our truest selves when we break
              as we are bound to





*I only have one.

Audio Recording of My heart

My heart



The ink-stained sheet
The bathroom stall with Mike was here sharpied onto its back
The candle in the fireplace
The mermaid in the painting at the dump being rained on
The octopus in the Aegean stalking a snail
The plane window turning white as it flies through a cloud: the blue on the other side
The library book whose index card is filled with crossed out names
The ukelele with a broken string the homeless man plays
The strand of white lights around the window, the window
The imprint the lying girl leaves in the grass after staring at the stars
That home with a hole in the ceiling-- that bucket catching each drop
The abandoned rail road track the coyotes follow at night
The deck of cards missing a queen
The ceiling at Grand Central

Friday, January 16, 2015

Audio Recording of Remote Controlled Woman

The remote controlled woman

thinks she's a robot but she's not. Like any human
she has three inputs: vagina, mouth and anus.
Blood makes her human but he treats her like she's spinning
on gears, tucks her in the closet when not in use. When he gets
home from the office, he pushes mute so the only sound
besides clink of knife through steak are her lips smacking.
There must have been a time it hurt to be silenced-- a cat clawing inside her
but that was ions ago--that part of her cauterized for survival.

The remote controlled woman is programmed
to do anything hubby wants. In bed, he puts her on pause
so she wont remember anything, will hold the desired position.
Her body is like any humans-- it responds, secretes where
and when it should but her eyes on pause gloss over--
frozen-faced he sometimes misses having alive eyes
to look into as he cums. This makes him push into
her harder and faster. When it's over he hits play
and she takes a freesia-garden shower. He listens
to the sound of the water and thinks of his mother.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Audio Recording of my poem, On Icicles and Murder

On icicles and murder

I think of the perfect murder-- how, if broken, one glassy tip used to stab the enemy dead would soon melt into a pink puddle: no more weapon. Would my hand slide down the slippery shaft like some sex scene in “Frozen?” Would it stick like a tongue to a pole in “Christmas Story” as I jab into the heart? Who would I murder--a cop? An innocent black man selling lose cigarettes? Donald Trump and all he represents?

 It's come to this. Some of us are so poor we cant afford proper weapons-- search along highways for the tossed-outs: plastic bags for suffocation; doggy bag to crumple inside a tailpipe; shard of glass to slice the femoral; deer femur for a blow to head. The smart ones wait for winter to come, wait for the icicle—sleek, beautiful, ticking for expedient murder. We wait because we're human after all-- we cause meltdown-- our machine selves emit warm, pulsing heat and destroy.

 Though pulsing we don’t feel so alive. We float along and cant stop staring at the goddamn light. They're talking and all we hear are their lips opening and closing like a garage door. Is this how an icicle feels-- heartless self sucking a rock-nipple for its life-- birds, cars roar by when the sun's in full rise, bits drip away from a distant appendage, feeling nothing as we drop-by-ticking-drop age, glisten into nothing. Even the moon can not save us.

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Audio Recording of What I Know Via Snow

Audio Recording of Fight or Freeze

What I know via snow

What I know via snow


Overnight the driveway changed colors-- skin fallen from sky, covered
from tip to tip in white. Beneath the snow the driveway can't breathe
but if it could the white would rise, fall, rise, melt as all creatures
who warm-breathe cause change and loss.

The mundane loss-- strand, sock, moon : paper, cow, star.

But then Other loss-- the speaking kinds/blood-bodied kinds-- kinds
who leave and don't look back through the rearview.

                          (Melt.)

Driveway cracks, heart puddles where snow once-- now baths for the sparrow.
Sparrow and weed, snake glides without worry--

                                                              no vibration, no footprint, no tire track--

only a ghostly ache when they're gone: a silence more silent than snow.

Fight or freeze

Tree naked and cold as goats
hating winter in the open
field, but dumb, tree is soundless   She takes
it, takes the violent-breeze-swirling through her limbs

         Can't cry can't scream, no

Breeze-pleaser tree   Wind would have
to press its nonexistent ear to her bark
to hear heart thud hard in protest

              But Wind does no such listening

She-tree is frozen, froze
after the last yellow tear fell, plucked   Winter after god-forsaken
winter why doesn't she learn
not to show so much skin

                   And no photograph of wind

Tree is thick-skinned and silent as a woman
whose sky is blocked by a ceiling and stares