Tag: poem

Burning Suburbia

Blue light is not chasing

my soul.

Shades of slate and gun metal pursue me

in a way the other women wrapped in their profiles and friends

would understand more than they want to believe.

 

Our spirits dream while we say,

How much? That’s too much.

I have to have her there by 3.

We need to get away. It is never just us.

 

In the suburbs I drive over hillock after hillock

again and again,

for bread and milk,

my fingers searching beneath my skirt for something so dirty it is clean,

so corrupt as to be pure.

World of Color

A world of color is rich,

is all I need in this fog as heavy as maternal malevolence.

What I need is a glass of hot pink,

an elixir of glowing purple,

a tincture of pool blue,

languid and electric.

My atrocious capsules of snow lay beside my ginger ale

on my bedside table

while a documentary on contemporary

art stabs me in shades of black and white,

Sound muted.

Clamor Clatter Calamity

Clamor clatter calamity

a huge purple spill

generous to an idea getting drunk in the corner.

I am an absence of air.

Paris writes me telling me not to come.

Many things have fallen

into the gaping O of love.

 

My sick senses stretch like a violin note over

a ghostly concert hall.

Halls are caverns.

I have a hall inside my city

And he waits there.

He has a bomb wrapped like a gift,

I the suction of quicksand.

Beauty and Lust

Beauty has frost bite and is just

going to live that way.

The stench is aggressive.

I have been living whichever way is out of sight

from Age and Lust.

Beauty and I go way back

to a year I only remember as a pile of sugar to play in.

Skin scrubs keep Age away.

 

The truth is Beauty and Lust have never met,

though some think they are a couple.

Lust’s eyes are inverted in her face,

her longings contorted and her hearth

cold.

She

She is stove-mouthed

and thinks hideously.

Between her teeth are scrolls

from cities asleep.

Death cartwheels on my lawn

mostly to impress her,

And because in his spare time he has a pinwheel fetish.

After dark she will write my eulogy and

I will thank her

and never know her name.

Marilyn Monroe as a Housewife

A congress of confetti has decreed

every wind must blow up.

The ground breathes.

I look like Marilyn Monroe as a housewife,

standing in my yard with my dress billowing around me.

My husband sees me with his eyes shut.

Hands open.

The hours I have given him clump between his fingers like cat litter

I will wash them with aloe.

I will dry them in silence.

Our daughter has been sequestered with the sequins

and she has sewn a shining dress.

See her straddle the breeze.

She learns from me.