I am from bruised thigh, junk drawer, box of borax on the top shelf. I am from vowel hard to pronounce, disordered creek bottom, bloody heel. I am from set of three. I am from formula, jar of baby teeth, sharp-bearded fish. I am from February, from Saturday, from many specifications of the abstractions time and space. I am from hand of my mother, bone of my mother’s ear, mother of my mother’s mother. From a tome of like characters. From filth, from undesirable car parts, from trundled spoilage.
Archives for March 2016
The Turnip
March 8, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Once more you force
its fisted mass. Blanched white
with a feather of pink—
the bloodless promise?
Has the chemistry of want
exploded the dreamy cluck
of that heart in your chest?
Under the sky, the grave
of dawn’s planted again—
its beginning wed
to the same milky stone.
Coelacanth
March 6, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Before the lizard gods, I was shaped from blue clay, my eight fins pinched, scales combed, gills lifted like crescents. I trembled my fins, tested my mouth on coral and young clownfish, dove deep. Above, lands shifted and crashed, drawing lava from my ocean floor. The reptiles rose and fell. Things began to take to the … is it air? New primates grew greedy. I dove deeper, leaving the shallows to those who dared go out in tree shells.
The Seven Deadly Factors
March 4, 2016 by 1 Comment
dedicated.
.
1 They don’t hate you. They’re hungry
2 Is it like sleeping?
3 The jig of the rain on the rooftop that you are missing.
4 the sling you cut
5 Tomorrow no longer exists.
6 The people who have to extract your crushed body from the roof of the car.
7 the technicolor of what you no longer can see.
Prudence
March 2, 2016 by 2 Comments
the beginning and the greatest good is prudence
—Epicurius
Its 94 at noon on a heated desert morning after two weeks of boutique and backroom antics with their scaly echo of that first gill-to-lung-sac thing crawled up from a polluted creek, antics that could only result in unreasonable headaches, love’s alarm disarmed, and end where no amount of languor can mask the bad girl whine from the pineal gland that knows-it-all when the subject’s betrayal and no amount of wishing can take back the clack of chips from the business isopods turning out their Travelsmith pockets at security. This story is my traveler’s tell-all, starts in idiot default. Dopamine disease, not failure, causes risky behavior. What’s the difference you ask, between my life and the lives of others who also smell of a place where the mermaid gave up her tail on her journey from fish to goddess—only a lifetime learning to hesitate, a modest Epicurean eye, the necessary mediation that tempers a wild urge, the hand that gives off a slight organic hint of fountain, leaves behind a wide-awake woman with her slide & scale & glisten.
