Spitting Popsicle thick from our wooly teeth, soaked green, into the neighbor’s birdbath

When we were little and rotten, you found a foothold in the jasmine bush in the neighbor's front yard and grabbed that blue jay's nest with your bare hand. A beak to your cheek was all you needed; you weren't rotten to the core yet. Our mother knew your hands needed hers; didn't disown you for associating with the birds. But mothers have reasons for what they do. The vomit crust on the side of your milk cap will never have someone to drink it; sometimes rotten doesn't need layers to be sure.



all these proceeding poems are final copies from advanced workshop in spring 2010 :)

the nature of the selfish

I keep asking these questions,
wanting to hear another person
understand what I know already,
wanting another person to know
of those things that aren't a calamity,

like you did. Things that others
can't get past their coward teeth,
for the clout of beauty is as thick
as a gypsy's hungry lies, as thick
as an ostrich's egg. Questions just

to see if I could say "I'm haunted,"
or how when I sit in the the middle
of my bedroom, the new silk horse
above my bed looks small and quiet,
and it looks like a tabby cat, i'd say,
with a bed up on a plum tree, watching
the blue jay's sniggering in the jasmine.

Can I just say it? That I know about things
like fructose, fruit trees? And their voices
when they sing on grey days? And that
I feel like ghosts know where I am
when I sleep, the only time I don't? Or,
maybe that today I feel like a southern
anthem, emitting the pluck of a banjo,
so high-pitched and out of place,
watching my feet fade in a creek.

Is it okay? Like you were okay?
Even though I never said I'm sorry
for yanking every clementine
from your bag of questions, pulling
apart the rinds while you kept slowly
handing me your questions. The fruits
of your labor shyly trying to birth someone
from the girl licking nectar from her wrists.

Spreading goose bumps with a butter knife

My lower half is a pear cousin, my breast bone wide,
with an aggravated facade, the progesterone slipping on
the wallpaper of my uterus, trying to understand my pattern
language, while I get the first tender stroke of tired on my eyelids.
Estrogen says,

"weak," in my month of troubled similes, my veins jostle with
it's weight; it brings everything to the brim, like a pool after
eight days of afternoons in Florida, full of more than the usual
victims of drains: pollen spores, my hair, soft brown spiders.
The chlorine muted, instead of pasteurizing my skin tone.
Anything but floral wallpaper,

anything but a circadian rhythm, anything but something
I know how to fix, this hormone induced melody; more like
a tightrope without two sides of the story, a tether that listens
to the water's direction: "shake an oval out of you." Shake
the nervous that asks,

"who will sit with me at night?" Estrogen spreading goose bumps
with a butter knife, biting the quick of my nails, biting like an ant
always finds its way between the pinky toe and the other.
This garden salad of nerves makes my bones empty a little bit
when calcium forgets how to be strong, falling victim to drains,
or finding my other elbow: a new rind to claw.

Erosion keeps on trying

I'm always stuffy when a tabby cat
licks my eye, and every last August,
every last Tuesday sits in my stomach

in my old yellow room, where I know
the ceiling from so many sets of eyes,
a ceiling that has no answers.

The color underneath my walls is blue.
It sits above a lemon I was born out of,
and hides underneath the yellow

that has found its way back. And my bath
is the only bath my ankles know
how to bend into; I’m terrified of lime grime

in every other, the kind that bites
the edges and scrapes white noise
underneath a wary fingernail

until my lunch tastes green. But while I know
yellow rooms and ceilings and baths
and a way to place a floral wallpaper

over my cornea and see things in small pattern,
i'm fucking terrified i'll forget to keep
yellow rooms and ceilings and baths

out of the haystack when the needle
forgets to bite the hay; memories
that don't jostle won't come back,
wallpaper will cover all those yellows,

and how will I wonder about
how my bones know I'm home,
and know how to melt into these old beds?

How will I wonder about asking the night
questions anymore about if feet
can get used to dirt; and why are we getting

un-used to it? Why can't I remember
what time it is in Spain
and if the persimmon tree will be blooming?

Why aren't my blood vessels
sculpted out of steel?
Then, I realize the whistle of my worth

is poking my ear drum like that iridescent pencil
in the second grade right now,
while I sit here with my low blood pressure

and histamines, worrying about how
I’ll forget what it’s worth
knowing how to keep.

To the young man who loved my tendencies for fructose

There is orange juice cracked into the dimple of your couch. I’m sure it’s still there; it’s been there since we were seventeen, when we slept all summer like Siamese moths, wings stitched tight with sweat beads, and Lucy meowed to get out of your room every morning. Sometime in deep July she knocked that box of orange juice onto the palm of your head. I woke up in the usual salt; you, with your head stuck to it’s hair, in sweet. Pulpy morning and bulbous, heavy night wove the summer into the thickest braid, and we stuck to each other like orange juice to your forehead. You always had that plum in your pocket, until the plaid couldn't waltz anymore, couldn't reach the small of a stitched back and you were always suddenly fifty-five cents short of another plum. Your mother bought you new jeans in August. The tumors on the sides of your hips were back and god, I remember your mother’s voice even, like cellophane crumbling over a telephone line. (They're going extinct, you know? ) She always was smoking Fine Wines and Spirits out of their stock of blacks, always yapping like a nervous foot tapping tile on her lemon speckled telephone. Polka dotted armchair even, polka dancing around it, the blinds cutting her into light strips, like when you cut the edges of a paper into an Indian fringe. You could always hear the space around her breathing with her, the graphite of the hallway's height chart fading in hums. But she knew your inches like she knew your home. And once you told me, “home is a place in your head, Jackie,” and it made sense like home makes sense, but like ovals never did; makes sense like the need to swallow the fruit fly before breaking open the orange rind.

On Leaving the Place I'll Never Leave

If you put a ruler to your nose, the house is just an inch on the hill, with a fridge with two birthday cakes inside it, with my name in script on them, and it's home. A place where I used to bite the gourd without a rind so thin to peel; we just needed time to ripen. A place where I get bleeding, craving, on your knees kind of days and white grime like geography on my tongue when the pollen excavates every hive, and feeds me sweet histamines. But, you know butter knives spread jam and pulp the same way across wheat; we all left that little pulpy place.

A mess is usually simple

It's eight.
The window says the tomato bed
is easing awake, the cat claw,
bird eye, empty hammock,
woolen lawn.

I'm just a curl of skin, unraveling
in the bath, steaming
like brocolli. I get out,

but still a mess, like
rice, garbanzo, coffee beans
in one zip lock bag; waiting
for fingertips,
for piles.

It's nine.
So much apathy on the tongue;
what to do when it's all
brown? Browns just don't
jostle. Need garlic, curry,
chili powder to make a creole future.
Need waves of heat
on my tonsils, my words.

But I've got Soggy Eggos,
wrinkled linens. I've got sun,
sun like a child tugging
on my calves, warming
empty hair follicles,
sprouting buds.

Waking up with the yellow blinds

My circadian rhythm forgets me like light never would;
I wake up so heavy, like a thick afternoon, like the ghosts
who sing and heave in Loch Raven, only weighing as much
as they let you see. Am I waking up death? Is death just
another rhythm? Like the thick blood of sleep’s, as bulbous
as a hive, swarming and folding into itself to only find bees,
scouring you clean and leaving your bones on the edge of the sink.

'Calamity' is too much of a beautiful word to be something horrible

Tonight I am the tiniest bird
with a beer belly:
full of shit and Woodchuck cider.

She's telling me, it's the end of the night,
honey, you have to go home.
I'm just ripening, ready to tell him:

I won't fall into your secondhand,
lemon yellow love. I'll need brighter.
I won't fall into the I-10 meteor crater,

alone with the dead deer bones
and missing dogs howling
for nocturnal mothers.

But how do I open my eyes
when they both see in different ways?
How do I open my eyes,

when one sees the banana
and the other sees the fruit fly?
And then, how do I rid of him,

naturally? Can you itch and chew and yawn
away a person? How do I rid of a rind
so thick, when lemons and mineral spirits

wash murky away with grey?
And where does the grey begin to sleep
and the deep canary fly?

Apologies for the Well Wishing Volcano

Who are you in that rickety body?
A racket of lungs, a weathered leg full of caged veins.
In the caramel adirondack chair,
you're shaped like every cat in August, melting and
lying captives to the porch, with thin hairs spraying out
from their necks, like on your chin, like wings too thin.
Chicken bone of an arm dangling,
you're waiting for me with seismic sighs.

You've got reverb louder than a yeti,
all those sighs quaking in my chest like backseat bass,
so I come home and you tell me you forgot again,
those things you told yourself to remember.
But how would I know the antidote for erosion?
For fault lines? You always just used the plastic comb
to exorcise the demons snarling in my wet hair.

I know they're out there, your memories,
in the warm bellies of taxi cabs,
lying in the greasy palms of acorn squash,
hungry for your teeth. They're there waiting for you,
I say, because words are all I know how to use
to untangle your head. Still, I know you live on a hill
full of time capsules; you walk and feel them kneading further
into the ground by all the weight of shoes and towers
and automobiles and tides, until they turn to lava.

But the volcano's promises are ivory black.
Your memories are full of the soot
the earth bends into itself to find.
So I'll just sit with my words
and find another knot to ease apart.