On Aquidneck Island, a single red boat tied to the rocky region like life welded to death. Here my teeth are canoes. On this omnivorous island, waves hunt me on the frigid beaches. The sea breeze, always terse, demands me in my wholeness to dissolve into so much sand. In this way, glass is made. In that way, a mirror is made, in which you can see yourself crying while you think you’re smiling.

Auditioning for a role in my life, I sing the alphabet to the best of my ability. But B runs away first thing, skitters up the Judge’s chair and into her dress. After chasing B out, little F goes next, hiding in a crack between floorboards. I had a friend whose screen name was floorboard611. I always wondered if she was born in the DMV, to think of something that boring. Next, K shimmies down my shift as though I dribbled her, my mouth shining with chance as the lobby of hell opens to a greeting desk staffed by cockroaches and empty wine bottles. Will my audition make the stars sparkle or yawn? Sleepy, the Judge mutters, “Next.”

Drilling into the floor of the abyss, I find a rickety trap door with an old wood stairwell into the basement of iniquity. On the wall, lit by one sanctimonious candle, a cubist portrait of my once soft face. Years of hardened mistakes bake in the heat, unleavened by learning. Rote memorization is necessary before Mariana’s Trench-level analysis. Coldly, the cameras cut away to a scene of my birth on the craggy coast of a shore that will claim me.

Noble clouds rehearse raining over the desert of my pill baked mind. My mountainous psyche has been worn down into an everlasting plain by endless storms of malcontent synapses. My spinal cord is a belly dancer. The rain here stops when the books close. My identity is a red umbrella on the streets of Beijing. My identity is a daisy plucked from paradise by my lover with his textured hands. My identity is a bicycle wheel with playing cards stuck in the spokes. Soon the clouds will kill themselves above me, emptying their desperate passion for the old proverbs over my facetious face.

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 –
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.

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.

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.

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.