The trees aim for the birds.
A cotton song sticks in my throat,
Warming me.
What a village of busted knee caps we live in.
I have not walked anywhere for days.
Over the hillocks and bluffs the sight of men marches
Naturally,
With no bodies to slow anything down.
What is there to see but birds
Skimming skeins of skyline,
Evading the green fanged death in the trees?
Category: poetry
Female
A blue tunnel rimmed with rainbow spangled stars
Leads to a woman in a black field harvesting high heels.
She is old as winter,
Her hair violet,
Her eyes ultramarine stars flashing.
She is no one’s neighbor,
Born beneath a pile of cast stones.
Somewhere in the looming black wheat
Beneath the onyx ether
Girl children are born in red satin receiving blankets.
My Shadow’s Nation
An ocean flutters from a flagpole,
A 3×5 slate blue ocean with dolphins leaping in and out.
This is the emblem
Of the country of my shadow.
My shadow is a princess.
She warbles,
Her tax code a filing system
Of feathers.
Beneath her flag I am wet.
My vision bordered by swaths of salt.
Here in Kansas oceans are special occasions,
And many rally around her flag,
Though they cannot swim.
Ekphrastic of a Life
A nuclear image of a girl constructed from trees
Blows apart a novel, a life, clairvoyant cinematography.
She sips from a waterfall,
Collects scraps of rain in her hair.
She rebels against rebels from every state of matter that matters
(Doesn’t all matter matter? A speck of glitter can cleave an eye).
With her breath fleeing north and her pheromones slipping south,
Nothing will ever be hot again.
Untitled Remembrance
I open the bright white box with the moon inside,
Clutch the lactescent, pock marked goodness
That remind me of when I lived in a joy ride.
The moon,
Eyelash light and chalky,
Crumbles in my embrace.
An Old, Good Idea
In the kitchen at the homey table
My hands read Molière.
Does the rain ever rise up?
The Prairie
The air on this prairie chases water,
Scrambling and wrestling in the brush with
The most minimal nuclei of cloud.
From the top of the bluff,
Hard work stares me down
Black eyed and stoic.
What will this land yield to me,
With my watering mouth,
My parched skin?
Light Parameters
A glowering candle highlights the shelves
Of jars
Of lethe,
Lethe so pretty and complacent,
Stitched by the spiders in a French nunnery
Out of the whitest, bleakest threads.
What lies beyond the candle’s territorial prowess?
Pearls cast before swine,
A vine of wine,
The truth artful and clandestine.
Once Bitten
Fireworks of pain in my fecund teeth
Advantageous chalkboards fill with unmoored drawings
In kid script
Of dragons and lagoons and devils.
Open red. See the wet birds waddle out cheep cheep.
Alarming threads sew me a bag for my head
In this titillating twilight.
Once I was 21 and I buried myself by a birch tree.
Then instantly I was 23 and I was born,
Having gestated under a plaid lamp.
I can barely bite but oh how I am bitten!
Hurt a cataclysmic light in my eyes.
Midwest
Fuzzy snowmen smell like turpentine.
Why all this wistful wind,
this heavy quiet,
these creative snowmen dancing in slow motion
to no music?
Not inaudible music,
or even illegible sound,
but nothing at all-
Machines with no factory.
This snow covers a ghost city.
The children scattered and died.
Yes, I am freezing.
Would you like to dance?
Miniature Moon 