My story is the decor
in a vault robbed of my
birth certificate.
Painted chapters—
good information about the
berries who influenced me
and the flowers I changed.
Chapter by chapter,
my flag unfurls,
a rainbow stiff in the breeze
on a line that could snap
and cut the sweet planet in half.
The juice will drip into
the hungry mouth
of directionless space.
The epilogue is encased
in purple plastic,
a report with glittering graphs,
sobering statistics.
The forest clutches
stolen fire
while lightning loses her identity.
We hold onto bad things
and are leveled like
post-tsunami water.
In the forest,
trees in pain –
the communication between
leaf and air severed.
When the grasses and branches
have burned,
the forest repents.
And then the falling
of fallen water.
Oval ounces of flutterby breeziness
string across the
marinating grass like
crystal balls.
what a brew he makes
from fog and my secrets!
I have been seen through to.
Beneath the weight of the future
blades snap.
I sift through softness,
through the pliable belly of the moon,
to find my star,
glowing like an electric song.
How many lamps are
hidden in this orbiting bed,
a million and one possibilities
in white.
Flowers coagulate in the
living room you can’t see
because I have strung ten thousand
chandeliers from the foil ceiling.
The season is polished,
a wave of salt rolls over
the soil at the other end of the street
but here is nothing but
the tang of chlorophyll and breath.
Enclosed in my equatorial dress,
I am as a letter to the star,
whose power I painted
electrical in a posh home,
mixed media mural on my ceiling,
cheap imitation regality.
The ground shakes.
The scent of salt
blossoms from the door.
Tears in my pale eyes,
petals shriveling.
And still my lights do not
go out.
I am tucked in beneath my lid,
the jar lined with velvet.
Blackest black-purple
my voice returns to me
dragging shackles.
What vertebrate ghost did this?
A legacy of ice floes through
my life
High tea in hell.
They look so refined.
I close the broken window.
The wind turns back.
After the fire
ash sifts through the air
looking for something left
to land on
finds only my hollow hands.
My voice climbs over my tongue as
a weary and alien being.
My artistically rendered
silence leaks from my nailbeds.
The sky is black,
black purple,
and I am invaded.
In some paisley antithesis
to paradise
a swan defaults on her loan.
When water is rented
and love is leased,
how can we have enough
spoons to gnaw our way through
magnified day?
In the kitchen,
patience burns tea
while virtue gets drunk on
the last of my Italian wine.
The swan will not leave the bank.
Her babies are buried there.
Below an investing, rippled surface,
a fish surveys the
inescapable purveyors of loss.
The velveteen girl,
skirt of swirling fire.
While disease lumbers
through the memorial town,
and a lasting sleep
settles like dust –
She waits for a new
beginning,
one lonelier and brighter,
toast of the town
with the crusts blazed off.
Supermarket cool,
I saunter down the avenue,
acknowledging height with a nod.
Perched on a chain link fence,
bleeding,
some idea about birds.
I wept once,
and the bluejays turned a
mysterious shade of wisteria.
Spectral women love the glitz
more than me,
which is to say they don’t love
me at all,
which is to say I love glitz.
In my own plastic Paris,
The shops sell angelic wings
sewn with glistening webbing.
Yesterday’s neighbor
smiles benevolently on me,
her eyesight restored,
her loneliness a cloud on
her daughter’s rooftop in
the city of breath.
I am a trespasser here,
A bird in the stratosphere.
Miniature Moon 