Patron saint of leprosy and lepidoptera, please pray for me. Your prayers are perfumed prettiness in the heavenly atelier of our most brilliant Lord and Savor. Who made the colors that coat our lives? Who inscribed code into our flesh and blood? None but Him, His hands soaked in liquid rainbows. My skin is getting old. My face is going viral. My face is a virus, a label I wear to hide my soul shivering in her thin blue shift, nipples cutting against the cold like diamonds. Faces are a contoured means to a flattened end in the catalog of human memory.
Woolen Fortress of January
In the woolen fortress of January, gunmetal skies and home chilled on the rocks, bathed by the sea. I was born to granite and snow. The birch trees lining the lanes of my memories have a thousand eyes peering out of them. All of them look into me, red eyed windows to the abyss staring at my soul and counting the wrinkles. January is an old, brittle friend whose joints croak in chorus with mine along the craggy coast. Though January leaves me every year, I can never seem to disentangle myself from his cold, lingering fingers.
Prayer of Tearing
Splitting wood, splitting atoms, splitting hairs. The world is falling apart from the bumbling, malevolent force of stupidity. I drank my dreams and burned my ambitions like a sweet incense. Mother Mary, help me to be more like you. Soon my sins will hollow me from the inside, and my name will be torn asunder.
Holographic Sea
My voice is like butter – high in fat, churned like a holographic sea, the fish glitching out in technicolor. The red ribbon that wraps around my waist was given to me for this journey. Howling, my ego holding her elbow after smacking it on reality. Reality has fish eyes. I will sail across an ocean for my love and give him sugar and sea.
Smellevision
I sniff my smellevision 4 days in the future, and God embroiders my backbone for me. The future is all geometry and piss poor planning. My cotton hands are soaked with sunsweat. The leaves of grass drip with it. I know I have to survive tetris as a sphere and it won’t be easy. Two demons play jenga in my front yard, and no matter how they play, I lose.
Failure to Grow
Clandestine stars twinkle guiltily. Here even light feels accused. In my old house, a ghost reading Kant. God is in my garden lamenting the lack of roses. Spiteful space radiates cold. I carry a 50 pound sack of flowers everywhere I go as punishment for failure to grow. A ballerina dances to the sweet music of the moon that only she can hear. Black velvet night cradles our secrets to sleep.
The Chasm
What lies between the roiling world and the cool white light of heaven but the chasm in my gray heart? Sunshine knocked on my door once. I bit him. I trudge across a wounded woods twice daily hauling water for the perturbed ghosts that bathe in my yard. Nothing is ever enough. Somewhere is a heart shaped key with my name emblazoned in gold, and an idiot is shoving it into the wrong lock until it breaks. Heaven is like a squirrel feeding me nuts on the porch. It’s amazing but I’m probably dreaming. My soul struggles for resuscitation, and my man puts his lips on my broken person and breathes.
Modernism and Post Modernism
I make love to Modernism in the back of a black cat museum. Then I dump him and deflower post modernism, which is a whore in rayon. After that the clouds follow me back and forth from home to the store. My clonopin can breathe on its own and has 20/20 vision I can only envy. I am sick to death of navel gazing and semi autonomous whispers. What comes after contemporary art? Is it fudge or shit? We put visionaries eyes out and toast to the promising future of the ambitious dark.
The Claire’s to Victoria’s Secret Pipeline
Tart tulle. A world of black and pink. Girlhood is a vivid hot pink stain in the local psyche of ravens. A lipsticked maven sells beauty to the hungry future ghosts of beauty. They sell you your youth while you’re young and have it anyway. They sell you beauty when you’re gorgeous already. The stars shine like the bright eyes of my younger self before I shook off extraneous need for approval. The Claire’s to Victoria’s Secret Pipeline is the first real graduation a woman has (after she gets her life giving flow). The travel from the land of glitter to the land of fishnets is brutally short. The ghost of a blighted field is scintillating and sinister in the lacy snow. After graduation, I lived according to the laws and regulations of my new hyper sex bunny land, but I loathed it because I felt like a rock where I used to be a diamond. At the core of the softness of woman is always the sparkling of gems. So I came to the valley between my mountainous breasts, and my heart erupted into a quiet, silk thing. No longer a fetish of myself but a real woman of flesh and gentleness. Snow fills my bones, my memories. Soft, pristine, clean.
Deep, Unrelenting Fear
Dayglow fangs of daylight rake my face. This is a burgundy place of waiting. Of why. Of the soon to happen. My punishment for helping Sisyphus is to continually scrub my name off my skin with a wire wedge of anger. Rage is a black ocean inviting gray wars and porcelain ghosts. A rogue wave somewhere drags my doppelganger under, and I freeze under the weight of an invisible, dark shore. Sisyphus has his rock, I the deep, unrelenting fear of the sea.
Miniature Moon 