poems

1:11

2008-02-10T23:11:00.000-08:00

one liest, to
weave her meal
three says:

no body saw
and we won't
tell. cochineal

crushed shell
red, diest.

widow. riddle.
the luck
of one tangled
in her silks.

it does
take two.

the starved.

the food.

The Wanderer

2007-12-14T23:46:00.000-08:00

Mine was the page, Irena had her voice
and strings. Mildred her blades.
His mood tonight decided--verse. Something sultry,
rambling, convoluted.
A fractured sestina, a half bottle of warm wine
and my pen stained hands.
What blunder in orbit tumbled constellations
to curse his bastard birth.
Another one cut from her perch, hurtling. Pulling us in
he gathered a worship of moons, polished
mirrors, luminous after him.

When he finds his way to my door, he will
open it with thin fingers
all knuckle, twisting gently, straining
after the hinge sighing open.
I know it will be weed, attar flowering
damply in his oily clothes.
Lupine, my Anubis, his smile knocks me dead.
I will inhale the dark sour cast of his flushed skin.
And taste it. And forgive everything.

We were what crushed so pleasantly in a fist. We were
sodden, spoiled fruit. Bruise to push
a thumb through, ruptured
urgent, dripping sick sugar, puckering
a tongue. No snap of green, those
blonder and less to blame.
We always knew what we were doing.
And we forgave him everything.

_____________________________
First published in Farfelu, Issue 3

Caught

2007-06-10T06:36:00.000-07:00

Fatal commands an alp, or asp
or gasp after the door broke wide
to her broke wide, wider, wife.
A mess of greasy machinery
all elbows, all knees, all the sheets
wound to thick rope snaking
long-fingered, long-legged thieves.

Fatal was what I dreamt my kiss. Victim
supine on a sectional, steel-eyed. Arc
of his lower lip hardened under a red slit.
A red wax disc that dribbled out
the corners of his wet leer. Point blank
when I looked up, snake eyes
and the room bloomed black.

Fatal the original intrusion. The first.
Initial. A letter. The letter, a climax of zeroes.
His mesmer code. I was what the words got
done. Adagios. Prodigal. Nymphet demoniac.
My head of sleek onyx snakes.
He was written. Bidden. Bit.
I told: the antidote? Commit to poison.

Kiss

2007-06-09T07:21:00.000-07:00

I saw us kissing
with my arms crossed
behind my back
with your arms crossed
behind your back
with my ankles crossed
with your ankles crossed
laced in wide ribbon
lacing our arms behind us
lacing our ankles in x's
plaited, knotted
so we might not
hold

each other even
as we kissed and knocked
collarbones. cuffed
clavicles. folded and furrowed
scapula. vexed our breast
bones--flat palms, or planes--
these two plates, countries
continents. the tectonic
grind, rub, break
wet spindrift

against the other.
it was painful, this skeletal
embrace. it malleted soft
violets all over our
ribboning, but we kept
kissing in this way
lame, bound, loud
bony wooden snakes
pinched
and hinged at each

bend, and swerve
the slip and clatter
of gears, a sick
ecstatic squirm
and

kissing
kissing
lace-bound
braided
ribboned cripples
and we
would not
stop
kissing.

Blue Moon

2007-03-24T23:34:00.000-07:00

A kiss by any other, or if I crossed my sevens
like sometimes when I tell you I won't ever, never
meaning to do it again. But I do.

When the tread slid, or the door ajar cracked
the tea cup's lip wider, I cut my tongue
beneath the roof that drums a clay heavy rain
on crimped tin. A vein lit up our sky.

Your gray stare, gone slate. Sharp jaw
slipping its reef—that neck and the violet
my mouth bloomed

on your pulse. Sick flutter of the dog's
seventh and last year, crossing
soft, a cold rattle. The grave kiss.

O sack of bones, you.
O how I wear—so thin—
over your vanishing.

Tenths

2007-03-06T08:05:00.000-08:00

The gravel told he's home and I grew slack
undid the shiver, quickly set a match
to what he wrote, and scrubbed my skin hard, clean.
Wiped all evidence. Smoothed the sheets. Blank page.

I left a note in his pocket. He has
not seen it yet. Else he would have called me
upset. It said: Sorry I knifed the frets
on its neck, and cut your song to splinters.
But baby, it just wasn't any good.
No matter. String along another tune.
She'll likely listen better than I do.

The one who couldn't play dealt it better.
Text up close, or closed text, he read me good.
I took it like the sweetest narcissist
all pale sinew, doll pout and performance.
His favorite flavour, red. He knew best
to trick symmetry from a crooked moan.
He enjambed my soft slants. Yes, we rhymed well.
But every level stanza pants its last.
We knew the natural breath stop. And stopped.

One I dreamt, in the incomplete eclipse.
Unmet, only near sleep—this figment came
an apparation, in a wife beater
and stetson, pounding Jack's old typewriter.
I leaned over his page. Read him out loud.

You are the loose tooth I cannot pull out.
And I like this fever better than most.
If we should happen, let us be beneath
dripping peaches, and a violet sky.

__________________________
First published in Wicked Alice

Ratchet

2007-02-24T21:23:00.000-08:00

Its teeth lock
on a wrist, the neat click
of pawl against rack

your sticky
slow grin
tightening in
increments.

A thrill slicks your skin.
You are expert though
giddy over the trick.

Something of the pulley
and the pinwheel
in this clasp, a small gear
falling to—or in—

grooved, a mitre tract
suited for the notch.

O, my conjurer!
Mock-baffled, you gasp:
"Dear, what stunning
silver you wear!"

your grin wider
blue-lit teeth
dazzling as knives.

Reading Script

2007-02-24T21:17:00.000-08:00

Asp coil risen, eats a helix.
Spiral aria hewn by the tongue's
split reed.

A queer threnody whorls
in the wet bore of my throat.

Riven ox scapula
from reddest meat. I am
first lamb born
to surrender
vellum.

Ink raised. Invoked, the name
spelled backwards.

There, blotted. Tattooed
counterfeit by your hard hand

that presses the nib's tip
through, to thatch and purl
verse—welts—I run the heel
of my palm

across. Thralled, I parse
your glyph. Your obelisk
perplexes.

You: pitched tine to my forked
tune. Between me: You.
A cleft note, and what's spoke.

__________________________
First published in No Tell Motel

Man's Defense

2006-07-09T02:28:00.000-07:00

Ah, we are only milk starved! We share crow blood.
Not confession, but a contract. Blackguard charm
drunk fuck and cold feet (do it again, do it again).
Dark marrow slushy with conspiracy.

Hunter gatherer. Deer corn and cold beer.
Leaves. Rocks. The chaffed bark, an affection.
Crooked scope. Girl venison, sweet meat.
The attack, the attack, and its retreat.

We are remembering to hold hands.
To open doors and make our face a warm bowl.
Girl laps happily. Fur tongue and plump lip, laps.

We will shelter and prey. Beg and rape. Oblige her
who wants a ravening sheep or a wolf that bleats.
Look how wet these eyes, how shivery his chin.
How defeated, and desiring and full of sulk.

Ah, we are only hard earth! We grind lodestone.
We know the work in a young girl’s paunch.
Call ours a hunch. Mule luck or a taste for home.
The pie wafts from a window perch. Rag drapes

and tin doors. We build the house on a high hill.
Bring the woman pellet, adorn pistil plucked
from a steep heath. She will tread there with her
bare feet. A star tail is her wild hair.

She will cross the cairn we put out for her.

_______________________________
First published in Farfelu, Issue 3

Transubstantiation

2006-05-09T22:18:00.000-07:00

Knowing you is fearing the shuddering glut and shirk of the wormy crowd
the large mouths of crowd, the dumb rut lemming panic of freeways.
It is my body shrinking into your body, it is my breaths like wasps, stinging in the throat.
Crushed inside their ceaseless closing in, that stupefied clustering that drowns you, drowns me.
Knowing you as I had not before, I had not understood before, not before you--the quiet.
The earth spoken, the clay dirt, the wise knotted oak, their Gaelic leaves, a worship of stillness. Scruff white beard of buffalo grass, the pink bursting out of prickly pears,
the heath of blues and oranges every April, a clean wet smell telling of rain.
How rain here is not the spindly sleet drizzling cold syringes of Vancouver, of Kent, of Seattle.
It is fat and happy and drenches with the joy of letting go. It is holy, your San Saba, your one-gas station Cherokee is holy, these cricket thronged evenings are holy, I know, I know and
knowing you is understanding scent to be the more intimate name, the salt and musk and sweetly orchid inside your neck, in the soft crooks of you, inside you, inside I know a hard ache of softness, I know your murmurings, your tongue's lucid purls, your inimitable noises.
Knowing you I am spooled, I hold no wooden center, you are how I have come wound.
I am a thread loosed and the gathered sand dissolving into spray, into the mad grit whispers
of senseless men, of rioting lovers, of those who corrupt each season and make every month
a letting go, the tender brute that lets it all go, I will go, after you, I will go.
Knowing you is taking you in, as I have never received, as I have received, you are the bread
broken, the host erupting vein and tissue, how the devoted receive his body and the miracle occurs then, knowing you the tongue of flame descends.

_____________________________
First published in The Rio Review