raw

There are no more ways to feed me.

I wrote you the most beautiful bowl of fruit;

but my words were twisted up in

the flames of your

blue-lip fire:

nodding its heads under

their bodies.

Cooking.

Don’t cry.

We are made up of the same piece of sky.

And I can’t leave, you can’t leave,

we’ve tried; and

we’ve tried to mix up our miseries

and we can’t even do that right.

I will look for you

in the crowd of my personalities.

Hold me, hold us, hold, don’t stop.

You are the vast ocean, but I’m every drop.

Swallowing your anger

is an empty pill that

makes me hungry.

volume

When did he stop roaring? And why. 

The way he opens up claws stream from his tongue and lift me onto a higher cloud. A fortress in the tone of
anthems and access. 

Give him back the way he holds up the universe with a rumble, throat tumble, vocal mumble, where did mine go?

If it gets too loud in this cafeteria we’ll hold up a sign and shackle closed your chords, and if you even let out a hiss of a whis

per, we’ll drag you outside the crowd to your own separate table. We’ll take your voice and your name and your squad and you’ll punch your own head repeatedly because we said “shame” and you didn’t 

know any better.

molt

I stop; look back.
Hand over my eyes to block the
manic light,
and I see
salt pillars.

They glower, vaguely
outlined with my own face.
I’ve peeled their chalky skins for years.

And I try
not to catch their eyes –
Midas, Medusa,
basilisk, Balor.

It’s a fix.
I’m ripped off and stacked up and left out here.
A new me moves forward,
and I’m frozen in the reflection.

What will she be

after the last peel;
just salt?

brute

I thought I might give it a name.

It was sweet and it played; it was tame.
The West told me, why not? Go ahead.
But the East shook her dazzling head,
and said:

If you give that thing a word,
you’ll teach it hate and fear, I’ve heard.
It tends to hoard and make a lord
of names in cages just like birds.
It’ll think its word is better
than all other ones, I swear.
It’ll label you and know
your label’s different. It’ll care.

I hate to even think – but
it could learn its right from wrong.
Do not name it, please, I beg you.

So, I taught to it a song.

privilege

Sitting, pretty, on the edge of our aphelion,
eating unseen forces like curds and whey.
In goes a galaxy, rolling underneath my tongue,
shrieking and dissolving fast; a tasty display.
Wash it down celestially with pure electron water.
Knife into dark energy, a savory filet.
Suck deep on a sour eclipse and giggle at the stir,
dip candied kings in quasar oil,
you want this one?
I’ll trade.

After we’re full,
we contemplate beginnings and the end;
I’ll fold today like a receipt,
don’t need that in my head.

fruit

Leather and wood in my house;
crunch a crying carrot
amidst the bones and souls
of the once-alive.
Watch my cat
eat a box-elder bug
with a broken leg
even though it crawled on my journal,
which was its way of asking
for help.
Don’t think about the
fingers who stitched together
your t-shirt,
sweltering in the healing sunlight,
forcing their glorious eyes to
quiet. Mercy.
Use death and
death and
death
to animate your ruthless
heart,
and levitate
your peaking breath.

hatch

Your life is an egg.
Push on the colors in your lenses,
just watch;
they’ll crack,
fall like walls.
Everything that’s ever happened to you is yolk,
fluid firming into feathers;
feel them bristle when you see
an especially interesting tree
and know that it’s more real
than you were ever meant to be.
Don’t be afraid.
One day we’ll leave our starless,
sharkless cocoons,
break through
our amniotic rooms
to join
a new parade.

eve

I swallowed a bad wind;
fingernails in my
chalkboard throat.
Made me pale
and impatient;
lined my tongue with soap.
I struggled,
spewing filthy air,
and everywhere
I looked
there were canopies
of fallen trees
and sages burning
books.

overgrown

Vines creep their way into my bed,
slither up the headboard like snakes,
like sharks curving over my head,
like scales on the wall, rainbow baked.

My home is a forest green tomb.
Silent minds whisper, “Go back to sleep.”
But I roll inside them like a womb,
dripping voices like veins in the deep.

I’m chill, pale pink, buttery soft;
all my hair has been spun on a loom,
and the whole of my life up ‘til now,
was nothing but a still afternoon.

Napping quietly beneath the trees,
jungle humming with howlers and swans.
You were never yourself, you were me;
in the aftermath of a good yawn.

meat

The truth is, I want to kill myself.

I’m tangled in constructs like twine, sticky with social spiderwebs, made to move like a macabre puppet. Why’re you a puppet? you say to me, and then you stick your hand up inside and mime the right response from my lips.

I think about you walking out the door, and how I’ll sit, split, in the bathtub for an hour or two, deciding what to do, reveling in the steam and the heat and the swell. And how you’ll come home to a corpse, and when I think about it, the blood is always still bright red, and I’m beautiful, like Snow White in a clear coffin under the trees and some cumulus. Alive without air.

I’ll become holy. Warred with, sainted, elasticized around memories and wishful thinking, the everlasting puppet you can make say anything, do anything. Cut my words up and paste them in a halo around your heart, in your order. Cut off my face and wear it to work, while my hands prop up your chin, my knees jiggle under the desk. Ache in a simple way for the me you’ve made up, who’s really you, which is why you care at all.

And after I’ve been cursed and blessed and mourned and hated and loved and broken and solved and cornered and pedestaled and anointed and warned and beheaded and born again, you’ll die too. All of you. And you’ll realize it was all for nothing, because I never was a daughter or a mother or a lover or a writer or a woman or a suicide.

I was only trapped, and then escaped.