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.”

Arboreal Visions

Maps of memory abound with trees. My first breath hangs in a specimen case at a museum. Why all the ravens when even literature, a heavy handed, glimmering thing, runs ragged over a brutal salt mine of a dying culture? On my map, L marks the spot. “L is for loser” the other girl said, looking at my diamond crusted initial necklace. So I cut open my rage and rained on her lagging, unfashionable parade. The first tree you’ll see is the one I used to swing from growing up as a dust bunny in Connecticut. The second is all rich autumn colors in January. Out of the third tree, a cross rises. It cuts open God’s ashen rage and mercy leaks out.

Memory Number 42

Construction paper everywhere. I feel the colors with my fingertips. A rainbow of raw, unfettered childishness and possibility. The garden of papers that was a rainy day recess in Connecticut necessity. I had castles in mind. Later on I would mug Baudelaire and I found the mechanism of “beauty is truth, truth beauty,” ticking away like a watch in his left pocket. On this day, though, raindrops trample over me. My glaring deficiency of virtue and economy are on a television for everyone to marvel at whether they want to or not. Some day in the not too distant past I will get up and turn it off. Fear is an organist playing “Bitch” by Meredith Brooks, over and over again in the corner.

Amniotic Safety

Ebullient daylight argues with darkness at the periphery of my hungry eyes’ territory. All this bickering and no one brought me lemonade or pet penguins. Every time I feel a sour, sticky dream sliding through the folds of my classic brain, I take some pill that probably causes cancer and the manufacturer is just lying about it. In the clouds, a place wet with dreams and warm with an amniotic sort of safety that surpasses all knowledge.

Beige Women

Craving comfort, beige women line their cream homes with white roses. The thorns, being cut off by blunt scissors, bleed their chlorophyll dreams out in the trash can. Some perfect woman will dump them out in compost, saving the world wearing a cable knit chromosome and the greenest eyes. In cold mirrors, I stare back at myself. See the thorns coming from my finger tips, my hands clasped around my own throat?

This is What I Couldn’t Explain to the Aliens

Beneath a gun metal sky of trauma, which grows like a vine throughout all Creation, I play chicken with Death parked in my bathroom cabinet. Will I turn away, or will I succumb? The answer lies in the valleys of existence. This is what I could not explain to the aliens. We must die to ourselves without dying in ourselves, and our growth causes us to constantly shed crude, crunchy casings of our old selves.

Ghosts Clamor

I wedge sentences into paragraphs like door stops. What do I really want to say? I mean to say that frostbite is the only answer to a love that wanders far afield, and that terror is a terrific thing to keep in your backpocket. The cold settles onto the land like a squatter in a fever dream. Ghosts clamor at the edges, longing to steal the living for their games.

Mary and I

In the blue light of her motherly vision, I glow dim as an ember. And yet she blows her gentle breath on me until I spark. Suffering weighs a ton and smells of gangrene. From the innards of stars I come, foisted out onto a world prepared to devour me. Because of her my flame will grow whiter, hotter, and guide the contemporary pilgrims home.