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

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.

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.

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