Hey you
in the aggravated suit: Did you ever steal
something? And I mean something. Something
i.
My lover & I need
to cross a bridge.
It is chained closed
for the night. My lover
climbs over leaves me
to hunt antelope
once a stiletto stitched a stab wound
on the underside of my heart
when it finally grew hair again, no one could see the scar
But he’s lying—
no longer will dawn
be a sparkling hush
At fifteen, my first boyfriend
forced an earthquake
into my foundation. Entertained
We exist down a road three miles from nowhere in particular, south of where we were born, north of one gulf, in the midst of others. So much blood in this dirt. So much green in the air: tornado season all year. Imagine a cedar tree taller than wind. Imagine a buffet of oaks:
Read MoreI decide to write more poems
about my father’s dick. I’ve seen it before
birth, the pupil of my mother’s eye a part of mine then.
We must have stared at it, erect with purpose, plunging
How many times have I been told
to bow like a man
with my hands straight at my sides
& held back as I bend?
Plastic Easter eggs strewn across a lawn barren
but blades of grass.
After surgery, her body weighted against
a wooden chair, eyes mid-blink, her face
curtained by a dark mass of hair, Frida lets
out curls of smoke from the left hand’s cigarette.
I arrange trinkets on a foldaway chair
a lock of your hair the handle of a teacup
the nub of a candle from the winter I ate
only mints and stones and mourned our dog
In dating and quantum mechanics,
a sure thing is no thing at all.
Examined, possibilities collapse: one brilliant
array of electron collision
I learned from Shayla’s older sister
that food sweetens on the tongue
when (yes those strawberries tasted
like a sugar spill of blood and seeds)
Wandering through the meadow searching for places where the dirt shows through— looking to where the trees touch the sky, thinking everything must be written in the grasses.
Read MoreAt an outdoor table set for a child’s tea party, a little blonde girl is using a saw to slice a ham inscribed with the words “Corpus Christi,” which is Latin for body of Christ.
Read MoreLimbs pinned or slack, body relaxed, under attack, stiff hard smack. Darkness. A little dizzy, language escaping, the word no, its siblings: not right now, I don’t know, wait, please, stop.
Read MoreLast night I wrote about a boy
on the side of the highway selling
Get out. Look at the moon,
your lucky red penny. One day the world
Who deserves the desert of their own intellect?
The detailed map of our deterioration