Category: poetry

After a Fashionable Year of Industry

The next day I stay

Stay awake.

In another land a woman

Locks a book in her heart chest.

I recreate blue with my face,

Talented flesh,

And the thermometer crusts with ice

As the heat peels away from my skin.

 

Look,

I’ll tell you what to do.

Bury the sewing kit

And all the afghans.

Lay your knitting needles in a raft,

Set it ablaze in the neighborhood duck pond.

Let other women gawk with scorn.

 

These women are not your neighbors.

Stalagmite fangs,

Sweeping the breath away from you,

Leather handbags stuffed with original creature.

 

I will be wakeful, watchful,

Unable to create the heat I need

To close my eyes.

Will you rededicate your life to sleep?

Union

Seeing is cataclysmic.
Hearing has rendered me mute as a portrait.
Beauty’s pelerine flows behind
my shoulder,
and the gift of slender hands
unties the bow,
to get to the realness of me.

I once made a mop from my hair.
Now it has grown back,
glossy but hollow.

In my nutrient dense curves
(where does a curve belong?
everywhere wrapped like
legs around a lover)
she licks lightly.

Winsome Fire

The dance of silk over my hips
crossing the bridge in the
strenuous rain,
I strive for the dream damp
roof of my umbrella.
Slipping through a street
silver with desire,
in my slip, pink and traditional
as ballet or tongue,
I enjoy the voyeuristic windows
gawking at me,
vacant, mirroring.

I am slinking like a wisp of smoke
to a place I do not know,
an identity sculpted by a
winsome fire.