Seasons of castles, cathedrasl, fortresses
go by.
Pride with his transparent wings buzzes outside the window.
What if Cinderella was as awful as her step-sisters?
The mortar between the bricks says,
Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Beneath the cathedral floor princely hands wring desperately
to extricate themselves from a promise.
Inside the house there are ghosts gnashing their teeth,
whispering into the baby monitor.
At the other end of the house I freeze
hear the voices amid crackles of static,
stop folding towels.
She is the final holdout,
but the bread has crossed over to our side.
My friendships are all pastel.
Neat
Trim.
Tidy.
If I do not hold them close by their mint fingers,
children in a meadow of death,
they will fly away.
Frazzled fire
licks me frenetically.
My mind is the Monday after a holiday weekend
that meandered into a new month,
and the paperwork in me chafes and squeaks.
Behind my eyes I am filing.
I have begun 178 projects.
177 are exactly what I have been needing, what I have been waiting for.
1 is even better.
My eyes,
my hands,
my judgment ache,
and all I can hear is agitated paper.
Scrape scrape scrape.
My watermother holds my heat for me
ambles through my mind reminding me
Hair won’t comb itself.
Yellow cables radiate sunshine and trigonometry.
I think about all the weeds in the sidewalk cracks
of the neighborhood where I grew up.
One woman planted roses,
A confused cloud asked no one in particular,
What does it mean to rain?
Watermother is tender.
She helps me take off my aluminum slippers,
my slummy makeup,
her mind an ever-growing equation like a cancer.
Her name is Tracy and she looks at men all day
on screens and streets and books.
She is made of desires women are not supposed to have,
her sisters rendered blind by modesty.
Her dearest friend looks only at the swirl of turquoise
feelings that envelope her man
and never the back or the shoulders that Tracy hungers for
at every party,
unwrapping him from his suit while her friend prays over the meal.
And what no one knows except the pantry of his brain,
is he longs to be kissed by her lashes,
loves to be seen as a thrill,
as a man sees a woman
and a woman is forbidden to see a man.
Branches etch messages in the window panes.
I stare out at the asylums chewing on the victims.
A man has a web server where his heart should be.
A woman saunters past, laminated, glossy, unremarkable and perfect.
and he does not glance up.
His hands are writing a wiki of the world.
His eyes already own hordes of long, tan legs,
trunks of breasts that stand as zeniths of desire.
He has entire folders of ass.
The woman struts smiling.
There will be another man she can pass,
being made only to turn necks and catch eyes.
There has to be.
She cannot plan for another possibility.
I am snow. Not real snow. I am too thick and fat and warm for that. But I am equally fickle, white, storm tossed, blinding. There are many just like me swirling in this orb. And who I love is this boy. He is so little, his smile almost too wide for the edges of the plane on which we live. He is a good boy, quiet and sad. I know that if I am not his mother I was meant to be. Still, his life is thin, will tear at a touch, and he will slip out of existence like a mirage of water. I will be left tumbling over strange faces who may have that sweet jaw line or wiry hair, but are not my son.
DNA
At sea level a serpent. Tells time by the rhythm of the scorching land
God. Can see how to strike while it’s hot
Memoir of a Rhinestone
The light boils and boils within me.
I grin without skin
and color gushes out.
I was born in the dark and dirt.
Everyone around me was just like me.
Everyone around me knew they were special.
And some of us held onto that belief,
and I in my green translucency was not the least of them,
until buried in a wood of polished trees I saw
a green so pure,
so somber with the weight of effort and intention-
formed like a tooth of God,
and I felt my plastic disintegrate .
Miniature Moon 