I lock my secrets in the subversive sea. A ghost ship prowls the Bermuda Triangle. A sonnet patrols the circular rims of my sanctioned eyes. Failing to roam the land like a bad idea, I knit myself to the ragged edge of the sea, as it furls and unfurls its turquoise banner against the hostile land. One thing is true. No woman can calculate the cunning of the sea. Dream of it and you drown. Drink of it and you dessicate. My secrets, tucked in their crimson wrapper, will mutate and spawn new life forms. Life that will hurl its body onto the gaping shores of misanthropic continents determined to conquer.
Shameless
The sun retreats to her chalet to party with other hotties. Night slides over me like a tongue, shameless. What shall I name the hurricane born from my meekest breath? Fertile galaxies swirl, swivel, and sway in slinky black gowns sewn with stars like diamonds and pearly planets as buttons down the back. This night does not belong to me, but I will adore it. I shower beneath the silky onyx sky, and warm champagne floats out of the faucet.
Personalized Ghost
Desire hangs inappropriate pictures of pencils on my aging walls, and evidence of knives on my porcelain wrist. I wear pink like a lanyard of honor to show there’s felt underneath my smooth, silken skin. Along the road to perdition, I dropped my glasses. Deftly, Deference picked them up and put them on. She said she could smell numbers. Spicy scent of 2, linger over us like the shrouded lingerie I wear that gets as close to my flesh as it can without ever touching me. I follow him from room to room, not the haunting he thought he was getting, but a personalized ghost nonetheless
Life in an Old VHS
I live in an old film. My sight tears and glitches sometimes, the curves of my form wound in a vhs tape. If you play me back in a time machine, you’ll see rain flying up from the ground – sapphires taking petrichor and tiny fossils of light with them. The producer of this film is smoking by the turnpike. The director melts water and keeps an old ledger book lined with my hair of every time I don’t show up to live.
Glittering Desert of Diamonds Ruled By The Worst of Us
Seas of silty green glitter carry life like a gloat to the unexamined shores of the Present – a glittering desert of diamonds ruled by the worst of us wearing designer bags. The new life will sprout transparent like ghosts, but immovable like a disapproving father. It will reflect life, envy, wealth, inexperience. New money aesthetic laid like a costume over a third world spiritual plane of poverty. We can all dance the Charleston and drink our grandmother’s wine, but our prayers bounce among our children like deflated balloons and the rent has come due on our bodies and we have nothing but glitter and smoke.
Semi Precious Revolvers
The rainbow of my shape shifts between sunshines and valleys in this cosmic horror of suburbia. Turquoise and emerald chains tether me to reality. I am a landscape of soft legacy, of marble layered in fleece layered in velvet layered in silk. Leaves fall all autumn and the royal blue of my cold nails. Music here tilts radically left and downward at 30 degrees. Least believable turtles I’d ever seen, I answered when the radicals asked for my vote with their shining semi precious revolvers. Sound initiated me into the rolling sea of the dead crashing on the mauve shores of regret.
Pureed Future Tense
Ceramic cerulean blood scrapes through the veins of the aging skin of my face. My expression could strip the veneer off the 21st century. My breath is vaporized blood glistening like rubies. The violins playing in the cemetery smell like rotten verbs and pureed future tense. I pretend I am not a tangerine. No one believes me. In the violet, violent hallways of death, my silhouette bearing another like a casket.
In The Tide Pools
In the glistening tide pools, an octopus polls his neighbors about the upcoming tide. “For or against?” he asks. The tide comes regardless and the octopus pulsates purple with anonymity. In the glossy horror of the sea, ghosts bathe in hot vents with life forms the living will never sea. The tide does not care for the fish.
Ekphrastik Poem – Identity’s 1st Painting
Sooty clouds leak a fine dust that turns into sliding beds of black silt along the murmuring rivers of my mind. Rowing in one river is my husband, setting sail along the shores of my body, stopping in the inlets and the dive bars that are my eyes. In the next river, a poem sunbathes with a rubber ducky, drinking cough syrup. I always have loved the flavor of cough syrup and the slick scent of dry erase markers. On another riverbank, little Lisa penning novels in gingham dresses. The novels are in gingham. Lisa is in a shroud of loss. My memories ride rough shod over the rough volcanic landscape of my consciousness, periodically plummeting to their deaths in unseen lava tubes.
Sewing Buttons on Sunshine
I’ve got to sew buttons onto the sunshine. It’s a lot like trying to define myself in the language of flowers. The roses are red from pilfering the blood from my veins. A red umbrella taps into my wrist and the rain is as rubies glittering in the uncooperative sunlight. Feel the burn. Not communism. Asphalt. All of my childhood days not running barefoot have caught up to me, and I must pay for this particular batch of sin all at once. Lay off the iron. Bring on the buttons.
Miniature Moon 