Foul perfume of fear,

my face as lowly wine,

harvest yesterday.

 

He removes me,

a good counselor.

I know he is clean,

correct,

painful.

 

His name means success,

In an absent language.

 

In his cell phone is my stultified image,

another woman

in a lightning world

with no sign

of beauty.

 

My face is a window.

You see me

standing naked in my heart.

Cut the phantom from my back.
I am unannounced and unfrequented.
A wavelength no one sees,
a dizzy, dazzling particle
known to science only as
“effusive missing.”
Schrödinger’s dancer dancing in
the dark.
Remove from me the red, digitized light
of sovereignty and certainty.

I’m free of rain.

I show my picture to the mirror.

I was not busy in my shiny days

and now I see

clouds of supplication ahead,

burning bronze.

 

My shape shifting selfishness

Folded into a skin box,

Origami.

 

My life was born for a while,

between sameness and joy.

 

Ten times I memorize myself,

candy candle

I have to light,

To guide kaleidoscope perception

Back home to me.

 

Interdependence is difficult and soft,

ad infinitum.

My good mental conferences expel

content behind two leaky blue bags.

My tongue is holy and broken.

Fields behind me

Shy away.

My bracelets are sharp for them.

A pointillist point pontificates
on how many men it takes to paint
a portrait of dramatic, carcinogenic war.

In my closet,
a gun,
in my mind,
strange acts of sex and survival.
Distinguishable by rudimentary colors,
indistinguishable by sedimentary feuds.

In my Freudian slip I attract fireflies,
corpulent river deltas,
expunged scales of seething grain.

Behind the house a man grows mice
to furnish pale places with plague.
He will slide home when the death
evaporates like hail in heat,
find himself in my wet caverns.

Taupe travel traipsing over
someone else’s days,
bypassing my breath.
In the heady blood of surgery,
The resurgence of hunger.

The twirls of terrain beyond
the tips of my last resort skin
eddy with earthy puns –
something about guarding a garden.

No woman goes beyond the
rough hewn fence,
the fossils beyond still snaggle
jawed and just.