The clouds drag over

the prairie to work

in the horse fields.

Rain—an instant sister.

Outside the barn,

the Mandarin language

in a raincoat.

Always the words

wonder where they

will fall when they

drip off the tongue.

My sister floods the plains

as a gift to our ancestors

who wove bicycles on looms.

Instant sister never arising

from good faith,

but falling from certainty,

a meteorological right

I’ll fight for.

In the wind,

Mandarin chatters.

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.

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.

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.