Take my life and let it be a strand of pearls around the neck of the strongest shark in this reef of rainbows and diamonds. My spirit leaks a little. He asks if I’m crying. I am not. My name, however, is weeping with shame. Take my life and let it be yours. When he throws my love letters in the air, they explode in pink and blue like fireworks. By the reef’s edge, predators hunting hauntingly.
Alkaline Angels
Alkaline angels freshen the twilight with blue, twitching light. There is an impatience in me blooming like a black dahlia and laced with oleander. The light here is alive and learns everyone’s name but mine. My shadow runs ahead of me. I limp and stumble trying to keep pace with that dirge-singing child of obfuscation. Everything here is primed to bloom, but in my spine, the root of an oval organism miming its way into my esoteric being.
The Small Packet of Miraculous Insight
Could you hand me the small packet of miraculous insight laying down by the invertebrate river, meandering as it does through the mind, curving and cutting the manly wild of flower soaked land? My father buried an axe here. My mother, a key. In the cool dawn of my effervescent identity, a strange blue wailing I only recognize later as my name. Hungry, the moon descends to feast on the horrified dark. The sun illuminates you and me now, honest as soap stripping away filth. Hand me the packet. I am going to see the color of angels.
A Meadow of Math
I wake up in a meadow of math. Multiplication is everywhere and the bees dance in their polyphonic language. Here lies truth – sunbathing drunk in a dagguerotype a hundred and 30 years old. The ghosts of mistakes past plunder the pansies at the edge of the valley. Mountains are but vaults of information buried with the dead.
Hot Pink Ghosts
Pearlescent peeves poke me incessantly, chanting my name in a lint accent. The hot pink ghosts of my flamboyant girlhood eat Lucky Charms on the veranda of eternal summer, and all I can do is count mosquitoes. Gratitude is plush and warm and siddles up to me. My own body, trilingual in curve, pain, and generosity, presses in closer. I must come to understand the onyx vortex inside me to decipher the great cobalt void around me.
Snarls Through Snaggled Teeth
In the crinkling dawn, death yawns. Another day, another disembodied body. I tell him to get off my back porch, and I chase him with my own scythe painted dayglo orange. He’s been drinking and smoking joints on my patio all night. Angels sew the fields with tempestuous flowers, hauling bright colors and soft textures with them like a holy burden. I hear one mutter, “I will dance on his grave.” But death puts his joint out on my face and snarls through snaggled teeth, “I’ll be back.”
In the Wilderness of my Ambitions
In the gold, twilight wilderness of my ambitions, aspen trees grow. Birch trees grow. Black eyes beaming out of flaking white casing, leaves as yellow as orgasms. The hills are humongous and roll up and down with my psyche. By the burlesque pond, my skin shining in the sun from beneath my judgmental shroud. The shore is fundamentally erotic. An electrical storm in my kitchen cooks lasagna and lights my breath up with pink flame. In my eyes, the reflection of an overtaxed, underrepresented ghost. I will climb trees and wait for my inner child to float back to me.
On Aquidneck Island
In the verdant, sylph like morning, my younger self dreams. On Aquidneck Island, a sea monster eating Ma’s Doughnuts. Just the doughnuts. Ma smokes soft, salty dreams in the back while she bakes in love in every bite. My hunger is a form of weeping. The hole in me changes shape, being made of wind and sea. Wine dark, my thoughts creep over the hill and into the soft, lush grass of the sleepy old battlefield. My older self is a shadow among the birch trees, watching little me tenderly as she builds her boat. She will set sail under the negligent moon.
Broken Teeth and U Shaped Smiles
On the underside of a horror story, my ghosts crawl along the walls to the dayglo exit. Reality is a bitter elixir that suits their broken teeth and U shaped smiles. Math drinks absinthe in the corner, telling stories of the world’s end. The universe will end not in a bang, but in a whisper. One soft plea for togetherness after the stars have pulled themselves into dank regions of brutal isolation. My ghosts are ride or die. I will ride with them or they’ll stitch my name in nightfall and feed me to the remnants of demonic empires.
Blue Stars and Vanilla Numbers
Stars in shades of navy, denim, cobalt, and pool circle my broken halo. My halo is made of an olive branch. In the almond flavored yellow light of disposable memories, my mother bakes pies for canaries. The coal mine in my heart has been unsealed, and the cutest bats fly out in an onyx symphony of mammalian, primal joy. The canaries sing alleluia in shifts. My halo sprouts thorns that grow into me, piercing my mulberry shaded thoughts with a steady stream of diagnosis for the recalcitrant weather. Soon my maker will sew me into the space time continuum with its vanilla integers in prim rows like headstones.
Miniature Moon 