The Performance

Held together with ribbon and twine,
Our childhood selves in pink gingham
Rehearsing for a musical about my 12th
Chromosome,
Who watches in the audience, less than
Delighted with my performance.
I held your hand crossing
Boulevards of performance and
Cheap accusations of raw penance.
You were half my size,
Smelled of croissants I
Never ate in Paris.

Chromosomes are a particular bunch,
Critical and essential.
My voice sounds like a plastic bag
Caught in a fan,
And my genes hiss from the
Dark dense visions
Of my warped mind.

We will grow up,
Smell distinctly of possibility,
And then flourish in fields of tulips,

Ripped apart like two galaxies

Dancing beside a black hole.

Being

Being –
Celestial noun,
Rough neck verb.

My name crawls up the walls
With the lizards,
Dripping sweat off the S in Lisa,
In this tropical suburbia of hungry humidity.

To have. To hold.
To be bold.

Pleasure sunbathes at
the periphery of
Armageddon,
Glowing in the radiant light
Of mass death.

The work of my hands will burn.
The work of my tongue
Will breed like bunnies
In the salted bogs of blood and memory.

What is it to be a being?
Is this skin case enclosing
All of me,
Or are my more sacred components
Blowing in the billowing breeze,
Bereft of body?

Soul,
In your cantankerous wisdom,
Fill me like a breath,
so I remember
Myself.

Haunted House

Degenerate locks allow me passage into a haunted house of my own making. The ghosts here were all embroidered by me. The slamming doors are a trap beat rising from the fiercest fire in hell. Folds of memory, folders of poems. What is left of a lace life unraveling. I cannot leave. The pain will devour me like a woodchipper, from the toes up.

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White, watery worlds of cleaned thoughts roll away from me in this universe made of my flesh and bone. The fear in my prayer. The tearing in your chest as the last leaf falls on a planet I cannot remember. Stifled bruises show up at the most conspicuous moments. I am my own gravity, drawing my love and my baby toward me eternally like a bowling ball in a water bed. All else rolls away until I’m left with a thin, shiny film of memory eternally falling into itself.

The End

Falling

My hair

        My jeweled name.

                           My breath leaves me in a hurry.
To life I’m more of a situationship.


Leaves leaving lavishly,
Their crispy crunch
Preserving the forest floor.


In the distance,
Monsters with lanterns seeking fugitive wrongdoers.

Silhouettes of maples shimmer
Breeze divine – breath of God.


          Will you enter through the vine choked garden gate,
      Or through the scar in the fence on Cemetery Lane?


I fall through maps of treasure.
Silk sky caresses me the whole way down.



Space envelopes me,
Soft and lax.

When I land
There will be fireworks of gold and blue.



Crusty Tuesdays

Crusty Tuesdays stick flyers about a month for sale in my old, chipped mailbox. I need a deal. Math has been chomping in my periphery. I threaten him with my angry blood. Rage washes over the periwinkle, petrified plane. Take my hands. Sew them to the monster you keep chained in your office behind the ad soaked computer monitor that logs your wasted time. I feel I am not real, which makes me true and evanescent. I’d like to buy a month. September, perhaps, savory and amber. Or July, polished until it gleams. But my funds cannot be found. Money hears my name and prances off to another pretend person.

Sparking Joy

Clotted stars jam space up, sweet and sticky as it is. The blackness of the universe is a front for the rainbows running rampant beneath our neat reality. I threw out Jupiter because he didn’t “spark joy.” My husband charging a car battery, sparks sparkling around his hands like sycophants. His hands build my name, a ship that gnaws at the unending sea, our home of seashells and topaz. At the end of time he pushes my wheelchair through fields of angry poppies, the stars above us bickering about who gets to immolate the screaming earth.

Scarcity

Hardy tulips in their frivolous, life saving splendor punch holes in the frigid Earth. Life begins with a shriek and ends in a whimper. Scarcity is the justification we use to beat one another to a pulp, and then strain out the personalities and clumps of hair for a juice that will go down smoothly. I’ve always liked my juice pulp free, as though to avoid looking at the once living cells that produced it. In the Garden, a deer delights in the warm friendship of a field mouse. Oranges grow at the periphery. And in this world, people are harvesting one another’s energy like a crop. The tulips sing their purple and yellow song into the purple and yellow birth of Spring.

Seasons

The grifting dawn begs for someone to appreciate her slovenly humidity, but none of us have gils and we are tired of swimming through air so thick that you can hear the water say to it, “Damn, you’re fine!” Summer calls me from a landline and asks me to pick up a movie at Blockbuster, and tell her how the children are enjoying their candy cigarettes. The children bob up and down like balloons, high on the thrill of looking adult. Fall is more subdued. He will write to me with a quill pen and say he isn’t coming, Summer has Heaven’s big brass door locked. Then he comes quietly, all at once. The water rains down on rotting leaves and we celebrate our breath, the rattle of our arthritic bones just beginning to clang as Winter caresses the door handle with her bony white hand.

The Gardener

Space opening up like a rose, me blooming by lightning light. The sinister thing is hunting me in the mountains of Virginia. A sagging porch gives way, and I fall into a dank basement. “I was here” is written on the walls in ginormous neon green spray paint, but the quote is unsigned. Time shimmies in her shift. I have this discombobulated life to live, and my thorns grow inward. In the woods, a predator we the rose faced call, “The Gardener.”