Daughterhood

The pure cleanliness of innocence,

Or the unclean marketplace desires?

To be friendly

or experienced?

 

Our sons come with the scope of power,

With the confidence of a multitude

fed on the milk of love

and grown in crocheted glimmer.

They will learn from a trick candle

How to live.

 

Our daughters?

They come with blood,

to give birth to thorns.

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Among the piqued daffodils
my body of silk.
Nothing has touched me
but a phantom with a ribbon.

The friction of lace on my
lowest, basest secret.
The clouds are pearlesque,
my skin a pearl casing I wear
because elegance is getting
cheap as talk.

Born from my animal mind,
her breath cascades
over my breasts.
Her hands peel the lace sweetly,
sweaty.

Execution

I remember your letter of gun metal,

How I read it between my ribs

Before I could stand to see it.

 

I was executed for the fifth time that day,

Convulsing in a pool of my own heart music,

Staccato on the antiseptic floor.

 

Control is between your thumbs.

 

Make your skin detectable.

Thank you.

 

One day it will be as a mirror.

 

If you are writing again,

use the electrical font.

Naked in my Heart

Foul perfume of fear,

my face as lowly wine,

harvest yesterday.

 

He removes me,

a good counselor.

I know he is clean,

correct,

painful.

 

His name means success,

In an absent language.

 

In his cell phone is my stultified image,

another woman

in a lightning world

with no sign

of beauty.

 

My face is a window.

You see me

standing naked in my heart.

Air

In the smudged silos,
a slipshod grain hungry and unfilling.

The fields here do not even
feed their own.

On the crotchety mountain,
emigres weave stories of
the old cruelty of the thin, dry air,
new cruelty of elevated antiseptic oxygen.

Between a one and a two,
a child is born with four feet.

The cry of a lone lantern in
the nefarious night.