ALL AROUND
Love and sex and nails and ticks . . .
All the same and free year round.
Come around back, baby. Jump
the fence. The butcher has plenty of scraps.
The torpor of my loneliness
is a red-blooded louse from a scrap
metal dog. Voices wane, sobs
of pain and my work stops.
I don't know freedom from labor.
Labor from blood. Blood from
a schoolgirl's wishes. Wishes
are horses and horses are broken.
I do know the grass beneath this fence
is day-glow artificial. Falling backwards,
I lift my arms and legs. It's a reel-to-reel,
child. I am suddenly exposed
to the cloudless sky. I am stained
knees to its tarnished brilliance.
Baby, there is no grass greener.
Baby, it's on the house.
[Previously published in Poetry Northwest, 2007, Issue Three]
THIGMOTROPISM
Sleepy
tumor of flowers, all comfort and slow
movement:say jewelweed, say sweet
pea, say tamarind
melting
at a touch to touch-me-not. They explode
into
bony air through the slightest slit. The day I lost
you,
my bones fell out of my body for love.
The
climbing tendril. Concluded cells.
The
Jesus hair of your immovable trellis.
A
tongue-lash jeremiad, a winged instrument
hacked
out of the darking of the morning.
The
tongue wriggles and carps; a somite,
an
earthworm. Pathologically independent,
you
split your legend around the body divided,
deboned;
a metameric failure colorblind
to
touch. Tropisms
of my throat close
from
the final grey heat of light. The stimulus
is
over. Not here. Not there.
[Previously
published in All
of Me, Booksmyth
Press 2008]
VIGIL
for
my parents, 1979
How
beautiful. How beautiful
girlhood's
faded face.
Bright
eyes shadowed shut
with
glimmering stitches.
O tiny
mole. Gleaming
hair
with sleeping brain
inside
dreaming. Tender
spots.
Shine.
I am
looking down
from
high, high
and I
can tell there is nothing
unspeakable,
tapped down, or normal anymore.
As you
stay beside me,
large
houses grow.
Angels
nap between the bedposts.
Children
chirp from doorways.
Someone
laughs.
No one
snickers.
Measuring
my breath,
jet
trails. You're the pilot kneeling
at the
side of my bed.
Your
homage is a beacon
in the
settle down darkness.
This
room is a trance. My body
a
traveling fair, a white church.
Who
dares to wake me?
[Previously published in Survivor's Review 2008, Issue Four]
