Beams of light burst into my core, bubbly and not too self aware. The electron amusement park is quaint and charming. The magnetic field of my metallic sight is baby pink and shifting constantly. My secrets are eating me one bite at a time. I am the bottom of the rainbow being devoured by neon glowing fungi. But in this radical light brimming up to the top of my head, I feel a hope larger than Pike’s Peak.
Tag: poem
Math I Can Smell
Roaring orange fantasies float like a triangle song (waltz) until they blend with the dawn. Crunchy consciences brace with brittleness for the coming judgment. “Today is the day the Lord has made. Rejoice and be glad in it.” My rejoicing shaves off growths of fear bubbling out of my tired skin. He has to do that over and over, the dermatologist keeping me held above the flames. My mistakes cling to me like bacteria, multiplying. Math I can smell.
Juicy Like a 1990s Waterbed
My body is a soft petting zoo. My husband cleans his feral wife with kisses day after day. Wandering across the house, sailing over waves of pain, I search for my glowing glory. My body is a plush country of purpose. My breasts conceal secrets. Under his hands I feel my blood pulse to a spicy rhythm. My body is juicy like a 1990s waterbed, squeezing, bouncing, and always a little wet and tacky. He loves me when I bloom like a rose in the hothouse of seismic love he built for me with his gentle hands.
Dreaming Language
Language dreams – verbs dashing over the landscape of human thought. Pungent petunias grow along the borders of my knowing. Math has always been an honest enemy, language a lying, lascivious friend. What does English see when she closes her lavender eyes? Beneath her lashes, nouns cavort like bacteria, so small and yet so vital to life as we know it. The great pronoun stalks among the verbage, the 9th letter of an alphabet intimate and exotic. But the greatest pronoun, the capital H pronoun, skips through space time looking for nouns who need prayer.
Invaded Empathy
The tide brings in a panorama of the future, a tableau of aliens celebrating our last tree. The forest in my mind is talkative. The chilling woods of my childhood beckons. Sometimes I walk away from my softened body, and float my personality like a pet balloon among the piercing stars. But on the shore of the land my great great great great great grandma tamed, an image of a metallic future of sleeping earth and invaded empathy.
My Body
My body is a soft petting zoo. My husband cleans his feral wife with kisses day after day. Wandering across the house, sailing over waves of pain, I search for my glowing glory. My body is a plush country of purpose. My breasts conceal secrets. Under his hands I feel my blood pulse to a spicy rhythm. My body is juicy like a 1990s waterbed, squeezing, bouncing, and always a little wet and tacky. He loves me when I bloom like a rose in the hothouse of seismic love he built for me with his gentle hands.
Blue Balloon
The blue balloon chases the pigtailed girl down the lane. Oldest trope on the books but it happens. I myself have been hunted by glitter and butchered by confetti. In my eyes, coldness where light used to be. Distant mountains observe cooly, deciding who to collapse on and when. My name means party in a furry alien language of finery. But my hair, snaking behind me in the wind, is treasonous.
My Eyes Opened and I Wept
Miracles bloom like roses along the avenue of my gracious life. My blessings I can scarcely count as they bounce down the sidewalk in competition to see who can get the farthest from me. Is death the final form of ingratitude? Or a tiredness so deep it’s heated by the Earth’s furious core? My eyes opened and I wept. Dawn hovered over me, making threats not promises.
My Grandmother Was a Fish
My grandmother was a fish. Behind the iron bars of Memphis, she died slowly as my grandfather drained her blood to paint roses for his filthy lover. To me she was a wall made by the best mason, impossible to crack. Underneath, a heart poured out into a human sieve. The tragedy was she never said no. The bondage of the Southern Baptist woman, silent and sticky with secrets. She could have been in a condo in Florida with her little dog. Instead she swam in a tank in Memphis, her ocean of options breaking on someone else’s beach, and she dissipated into the vastness that is a God who sees every sacrifice.
Suicide Attempt
The old blue slide will be missed. Girlhood runs to the river and ends in the cold, fishful waters. My best friends are penguins smoking weed in Bermuda. My best friends are narwhals holding a beach party in Marseille. My best friends are a collection of yellow pills with “Take in Case of Unbearable Pain” written on the label, and I do. My girlhood was a tender thing at the fringes of polite society, feral and always wondering where home was. Now I follow prescriptions, pain, my dayglo God.
Miniature Moon 