I. at thirteen for a whole dark seasonI was lethal with my pellet gun murderingsmall things that wandered into yard stalkingthe thin woods between our house & the highway—I picked off any bird squirrel rabbit snakeI could track if I had two surprised seconds to explain the meaning of my hands my instinctswould have been…
Yesterday, jackrabbit belly was not a color. Today I hold a paint strip to the wall, and it’s true: this is the exact shade of a rabbit’s soft fur, of the sepia robe of St. Francis, whose followers swirled like birds, or were birds, St. Francis being one willing to trade like for like. An…
Two women are walkingon the ocean floor I’m the one in front, holding an oxygen maskthen passing it back to my mother We take turns She breathesI breathe She breathes I breathe We can’t talk we just keep walkingand breathing and sometime towards morning I notice she’s gone A bitof seaweed stirs in the shadows…
Throw scissors at it. Fill it with straw and set it on fire, or set it off for the colonies with only some books and dinner- plates and a stuffed bear named Friend Bear for me to lose in New Jersey. Did I say me? Things have been getting less and less hypothetical since I unhitched myself from your bedpost. Everyone I love is too modern to be caught grieving….
every day someone finds what they needin someone else you tear into a bodyand come out with a fistful of the exactfeathers you were looking for wonderingwhy anyone would want to swallowso many perfect feathers everyonelooks uglier naked or at leastI do my pillar of fuzz my damplettuce I hoarded an entire decadeof bliss of brilliant dime-sized rapturesand…
Pull hair from your head: He loves me.Pull nails from your fingers, from your feet, like pulling teeth.Pull teeth. He always could make you scream. Your navel, neck: once whiskey-licked, now ghost-towned.Cast them off. He loves me not.Drag your legs around & beg: Remember me. But this dissembling is your own invention. You always wanted to be character: orphan girl, femme fatale. Heroine, riding bare back & white-hatted. Re- member…
I am afraid & so I run. If I wave a white flag, he’ll kill me,If I fight, I’ll die,I run Falling inside every stride.Where is the hero? WhereIs my swift horse? Achilles is a tiger, a tank, a raging fire,Every fear I ever hadIn one. I run. The gods help, especially ApolloGod of poetry…
Sometime late late last night, after polishing offTwo bottles of Millésime 2004 to mark our 25 wedding anniversaryAnd consequently finding ourselves dazed in bedFace to face eyelids drooping with both reading lamps blazing,Almost but not quite unconscious yet,I wanted to exclaim as I once didSomething seriously corny, like You are my queen! or at leastFlatteringly…
Four a.m., nothing moving, no hurry,dawn still has time to be choosyselecting its pinks. But now a breezebrushes across me—the way my skinis cooled off by the evaporationof sweat, this artistry, this systemsombers me: when I am blown fromthe body of life will it be refreshed?I dread the color of the answer Yes.
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