pavement split-
lipped, slopping my ruby hooves. Birthing children
piece by piece, I live by fortune
cookies, blizzards & scars.
Two for My Tumor
Incantation mumbling in the cutting
room, I watch hooks blossom
with corrugated beef—imagine the chunk
they towed from the sawed-bone bowl
of my skull. At night, I swallow
thousands of fists—gasp when lightning
splinters winter sky. Every splitting
rib cage whispers—Now, goddamn it.
Right fucking now. It’s time to pay for stealing
only a scar from the larder’s shearing light.
The morning saw squeals
through rock-hard chickens
as I scribble with the tip
of a blade. What is left—
savor child dog marrow—
The body’s secrets should be
anonymous as graffiti
in bathroom stalls, brilliant
as sun-chromed snow. Today,
I see like a drowned man, bait whirling
radiant as stars in a pierced sky,
sea-grass bowing to greet.
Scaffolding
It would take jackhammers
to find that other-self. Saw-shrieks,
elegies for taste—whiplash,
moan & scald. This body
is something Giacometti
sculpted: wax & molten steel,
the die-cast of night’s necessities.
Smaller, I beg you, smaller.
For fear my outline is neither
live nor dead, air dances electric
with broken ghosts. Cheeks
absent of color: lip after the bite.
Sticky in autumn’s poplar, the voyeur,
who may or may not be me, sketches
the leaf’s cursive fall. Grasshoppers sleep
in amber. This could be feeling: not good,
but at least not hurt. I need spells & voodoo
to stop time. Close my eyes—bring me
willing things, orphans waiting open-armed
for needles, gravel-floored cellars & spiders
the size of fists. Underwater, you cannot hear
my favorite song: a mouth whispering
half my name, all the sheets turned down.
Last Body
—after Mark Conway
Please me when I say take it
For a ride—make it a place others
Might understand. Let me explain—
A prairie puzzled apart by lightning
For example, the oak vamping de-limbed
In winter, or how each pair of tennis shoes is
Unwound from the power line. But none of this
Shines like a rain of thumbtacks. For a mouth
Open is no different than frostbite or a bucket of bolts
Slopping into the sun’s bath. It is a barking animal
But do not say dog. I will check for the baby
Beneath my dress. Now, we have highways
& nothing seems far enough away. The way
Of holy eyes—morning & knife-in-the-box
That act of misunderstanding, which is
Much more casual than a glass dusted in sunlight
& because we call it casual, or a glass in sunlight
It will not break or bleed. This is fundamental
& nothing came before. I adore you the blizzard
That going blank, that’s fine. A raccoon
Awake & thief-mouthed in the dumpster
The half-chewed chicken bone is a truth
That little victim is suffer everything & joy
DNA
You have to admit, pushing my wheelchair
was better than painting my dead lips.
Maybe, the surgeon said, caressing my head
like a hurricane. I wished I was a tan girl, hands
overflowing with perfect shells. You needn’t
ask, Mother, I forgive you. Stop nailing yourself to trees.
Pray my child never has to fall asleep cold,
waiting to be cut by strangers. Give them nothing
of mine, I’ll tell them before they shake
a heart to life in a test tube. Science:
make it red hair, brown eyes,
& by the way, Mother, the market
where we cried biting apples, Whole
Foods—they don’t let me in there anymore.
Goodbye Song
I’ve hummed it so many times I can’t feel
the right side of my face & now
I’d rather be gagged with guitar strings
& dragged behind a hot rod than sit
deadlog in a wheelchair. How many times
will you push a needle into my thigh
before something more brilliant
wakes? O, whistling skin of a pierced
& patched body. I stumble through life
like a kicked dog. How many have dropped
wishes in my skull? Dipped,
then pressed wet-tipped fingers
to their lips? When the body quakes
& pink bubbles crawl lips, push
the chest down—squeeze & plunge the knife
so the tongue is frozen & bit.
Swallowing the Scalpel
The hospital’s bell-throat moans
as my roommate dies. Remembering
where the goodbye letters were hidden,
the scarred clatter spoons in the hall.
Doctors gulp, click their teeth—
hum when skin accepts the cutting.
Tomorrow my head opens. If I am still
here, someone let me know what I am.
Paint a still life of my pillow. Use red. Be messy.
Remember the time you rode to the fields,
watched the calf work itself frothy in barbed wire.
Scribble that churning, the emptying of wails.
Remember how the dissected cat leaked
its chorus of sweet end? Shade in the hunger—
the not keeping anything down. Remember sheets
scabbed with stains. Pull out your hair, rub the fibers in.
Dip your fingers in the toilet and flick. Remember to scrape
a blade to best show what stuck during the night.
These pills are a lover sneering motherfucker.
Melted lungs, oil smoking from a lathe. Too many,
and moths waterfall from nostrils, nuzzle the body’s graffiti.
They are the last gasps of a premature baby.
Rattle them off my teeth, let’s pass them with our tongues.
I would have handcuffed myself to a bumper, jumped
from a bridge to feel my lungs. But I watched the seasons
from a wheelchair. Doctors fed me steroids, stretched
my legs. A nurse scrubbed me clean. Months passed
before they wrapped my fingers around a cane.
During winter’s first flurry I dropped everything—
spun half-drunk away from my mother, cane standing
as if held by the dark sky—and ran like a storm cloud
before falling into the slush. Overturned, my eye patch filled
with snow, lay like a mirror that would never show my face.
I shave my head because my eyes are monks swallowing
their tongues, and only hunching at a table
in a bookstore can make me whole. The Lorax,
Where the Wild Things Are, children point openmouthed
at scars. They buy with jars of dimes.
Read books where fat words lumber the page
like headlights illuminating a pharmaceutical fog.
I hum in my corner, hoping for more time—
for them to choke on the gasp of a body kicking
back to life—for a nurse to wicked their tiny muscles
raw. Smiles anesthesia
-dark, their eyes flash like razors
that let snowflakes slice, cold as surgical steel.
2
God, whom I’ve so often offended, has spared me this time; at the moment when I am writing these lines a quite exceptional storm has just been making the most terrible ravages.
—PAUL GAUGUIN
Love Is a Very Small Tsunami
When I spin fast enough, my socks
fling into the rough and burning world
like gasoline-dipped bees or the dirty tube
socks they are. Which really means I’m lonely
and have a garden of meticulous succulents.
My cactus lips slap fables of sleep
on trees. Pigeons play in my mouth.
The day is all sky and it’s not even
January or midnight. Little mouse,
come out come out. If you drink
from my hand the Lord will not lend
me a shovel. Oh furry gray sun,
life is all bloody sheets. Leaf-hearted,
I won’t eat eggs or peas, but slam tequila
shots until my eyes are cheeks and wet
as piss buckets. I eat with my hands.
No forks. No spoons. Knives only
for afternoons at the ballet where I stab
myself so I can streak, howl into the apple-
rotting sunlight. Sunlight where the gumball
is the only prayer I need. I race to the lake
where bodies drown in algae and the mind
flexes everything naked. Without coming up,
I swim to the lilacs where homeless snarl
orchestras from garbage cans and weep
grease-eyed when brushed by tan skin.
I use torque like a jellyfish.
I think shark fin and ladle.
When my toes kiss the shore,
it’s usually raining. I’m hungry and exhausted.
I crave bacon on my bagel and you
are always smiling when I wet-dog it
to the counter. On that day you watch me
chew, you’ll realize I’ve always lived upstairs,
apartment thumpy with music and flushing toilets.
Shuddering, you’ll swoon with the thought
of bacon and when the heart begins to sweat,
thread will pull from your jeans, drawn to my face
passing in the window, where sweetly,
it will rumble into the ideogram for disaster.
Plum
You shook, rolled clothes from hips like the sea,
circling arms in a friction I thought would burn
our home and before I could say a little bit of hail,
you were sitting buckass naked on the couch,
where your wetness stuck, cried, like a mouse
in a glue trap and you didn’t begin. Not yet.
Instead, beads of sweat ran your body
and we stared in complete silence at the fruit dish:
oranges, apples and plums like the google-eyed audience
of a solar eclipse removing welding glasses,
and even the baby’s wails could not pull us
from our meditation and then I saw your birthmark
sitting between your breasts and it is, in fact,
the seventh president. An earring had fallen
and you’d picked it up with your toes where it hung
from that delicate wing of flesh like it had pierced
and I could see the patch of hair you’d missed shaving
glow on your calf like a gold brick in an Iowa cornfield
and drowning in this ecstasy I remembered waking
to song, you sloshing in the tub, water flooding
the tile as you flailed against morning, groaning
lyrics I would swear were Dylan’s but just
as your keys caressed the door that afternoon, I heard
that song, and it turns out it is just some guy trying
to sound like Dylan and by the time the fake had finished,
you were half-undressed, trembling, hypnotizing me
with your bones, the sound of rain on the sofa.
Your lips moved, and I stopped you, put a finger
in the air like I had an idea that could save the world
or a secret I swore to tell but instead, unmoving, I sat
beautifully naked and absolute, smiling
away my incompetence, shaking your head
and biting a plum, juice streaking to your chin,
dripping like steam condensing on the shower mirror.
Fantastic Goes the Lost Cause
—for SY
A week & we crawl. We lisp.
Soaked in shine, the crooked
I am fine. In my head
turns progressions idle.
Steady wick the livid clouds.
We print names in blood
on white T-shirts. Scratch
steady to shine. Moonlight
confounds us nasty & the heart
murmurs. Baggies of ash, mothball
white. It used to be & it is. Steady
arm, go steady. The beginning begins
& someone cries—you shouldn’t know
how. Infinite desolation & shine.
Come steady, let’s drive all night.
We’ll sing the get by & broken
will press from our lips. Dawn
is always a fistfight, don’t be afraid.
Purity is butterfly-stomached & pallid.
Purity will never find a place so divine.
The Pleasure Notebook
1
Bend closer—taste the thumbprint mirror, lick a bit
of struck-match mercy
Shadow-laced & red, light helps splinter the cruelty met with
a flayed body
What named me, the moth pleads, banging jazz
from lightbulbs
Whose flash can raw a perfect face?
Meaning is the glistening cobweb
Smooth, a spider’s deceptive legs
I need breath thick with fire, syrup spilled from a swollen
heart
I need bites promising grace. Luminous, a tongue that prays
for wounds
2
Naked shapes devour winter light
They sizzle, salt the topography of despair
Stare & the body’s brittle math twists into uncertainty
Mime-lips mashing sleet-swept cheeks
I say nothing in defense of the hand
But praise drool’s fine silk stringing from a thigh
The furred wing wrenched off in honey
A static-voice hammers thick over the leafless tree’s growling
Sheets are sap-streaked like bark
Tonight—brass-knuckled love, weep & birthmarks break
from the self
3
I don’t care that you sleep on your stomach, groaning
fortune-cookie koans all night
The limb’s edged knots & I come just thinking of you
Emperor of gasps, paradise of sweaty face
Feed me the slow lesson of flowers, plum pits knocking
teeth & dark
My skin is everyone’s magic trick. How couldn’t it be?
What sad-luck damage would you trade for taste?
Melodies drill deep wells in the chest
4
As a child I worshipped chains worming through gravel. But
now
Is sugar from a heartwormed pit bull, benediction slaps
from tattooed gods
Kiss my reflection into brick walls, carve me golden & throaty
5
Streets are gorgeous with pissing dogs, red-petal tongues
& grandfather cartwheeling with muscled legs
He didn’t feel the heart’s disintegration
on the slick tile floor. A percussive