Tag: creative writing

Number Jungle

Number Jungle

 

5 has keys. 5 jangles.

Closes cabinets with hips.

 

9 slithers up the glass windows,

copulates on the roof.

 

2 lives

in the succulent old birch tree,

sipping insipid syrup leaking as though from a sieve.

Trees hear each other cry.

 

 

Fighting with a chipmunk for nuts is 4.

4 with big teeth and base instinct

who made the terrain with his little claw year by year.

 

 

3 is a sucker for Romance languages,

estuaries that burn the thirsty livid.

 

 

See the gators muscle through the delta

unaware he watches hungry.

 

7 churns in the puddles

bites mosquitoes til they welt

 

8 carves slices of watermelon beyond the fence

 

spitting seeds

into

a

hole

in

the

ground,

listening to them nest and

fight,

content without toys

 

1 sings high in the breeze,

perched on a cell tower.

Unattainable music,

sweet sweat dripping from him

a rain of sugar.

 

 

Form is Function

She steals steam after the summer rain,

rolling it off the asphalt as a carpet

she will lay in her den.

 

She was named by the tesseract

snarling in the backyard.

Instead of her period each month,

she turns blue

and Inspiration knows she is fertile.

 

You are so cuttingly engineered,

designed with impure

perpetual function in mind.

 

What does it mean that your gears shudder

torturously

at the turbid passion chewing a gash across her left hip?

An Absence

An Absence

 

Names filled with letters and liquor.

A twist tie twists and I hear Zest taking the

garbage out.

I want a county style day,

where those roads I love

take me from people I don’t.

The places are eager for touch.

My thigh draws his hand closer

our skin fusing under the heat of the windshield.

 

After the detergent is bought,

and the bookstore has pinned us against the wall

and takes our money, we go down the roads again

to laze and lounge

in the house of pasta we built.

 

But now the roads are curled away from me.

His hand has greater work than joy for now,

in places that growl low in the night.

Color

Color is called back

only on loan from light

this whole time.

How will I know my house

without its yellow coat,

my friend without her green soul?

 

The houses and souls are still there,

Sure. Just the pigment is gone.

But now we must converse

with ourselves, ask our feet

Who are you and what do you want?

Because what we are left with is conversation,

Though most have trashed their memory of speech.

 

Going With Ghosts

Ghoulish women crowd dark corners.

Light glistens on my breath.

There is an evil menagerie beyond the gate.

I am dancing motionless.

There are many cathedrals waiting

to be unearthed in my garden.

 

I want to remember exhaustion

Sex,

Monday mornings,

Gratitude.

I hate Complacency

and the way he makes everything pale

and organized.

 

I’m packed and ready

to follow the ghosts and learn

what they know,

but I dread the low opacity

the cold

being unchallenged

and unchanging

Designing My Own Destruction From Glitter

The road curls into

a ring I wear on my finger.

The humid spring air squeezes through

my open window,

fat

sweet

and loved.

 

Somewhere out there I am a baby

Writing great epistolaries in brooding vomit.

 

In the center of a field,

I’m ignorant,

sophisticated,

too generous,

my senses plundered

by clouds of venom

 

I can’t go back to the day I left

My universe of birth

and I don’t want to.

I rinsed the dust of it from my hair.

I glow pure yellow into the waking calendar,

designing my own destruction from

glitter.