Small as a pond,
You are bordered by mossy velvet.
You act like me.
Rivers do not
associate with women.
First I was a fish.
Then I was provided with womanhood.
The oars on the canoe
Love one another in Morse code.
I’ll walk under the hollow water.
My understanding of
beauty and all that you can do
flourishes like kelp,
always below the surface.
The soft lassitude
of a day parked by the fire,
like a car primed for a
make out session between
secret sex singers.
A leg soft and gently
dimpled,
an arm resting on the
pillow.
Outside,
a sea of hats I wear
to greet the constraints
of time and truth.
Fingers graze my nipples,
a hand cups my belly.
I have harvested the
secrets planted in my
garden long ago,
and they sit in a vase
drinking heavily from
their water.
She is my mirror,
but softer and more
at home with placid
calm.
The glass fell away from us,
and now we interlace in
front of a fire cooler than us.
I painted a negative picture
of a sun staring at my youth
like Big Brother.
1984 came and went.
My face is in the cage with
the rats,
but Julia holds the key.
My hands go on painting
without color
the surveillance of a rose,
chattering teeth,
an unworn sash.
Men, minerals
fill my dialects.
Wearing orange,
drugs worldwide
sing their song.
Something about lemonade.
Young women of wisteria,
Iron,
Zinc.
Xylem and phloem on two sides
Of the same love
thrown off
in autumn.
My body has lost something.
Bones are in my tongue of power
over the earth.
My tinfoil moon is so cheap
and glitters prolifically,
unlike the gold sun jailed
in the center of the solar system,
mined to death for its light,
wasted resource above the
bickering buildings with their
fluorescent innards.
Perhaps my dearest half will tear just the
littlest piece of my moon
to fashion me a fashionable ring.
No one loves the crinkled moon as I do,
The glitz and glam of being second best.
The blooms along the
pearlescent highway have something to say.
Something hard, heavy, fragile as
a newborn Monday.
Pastel clowns zoom past me in minivans,
with children in the back,
their desperate faces pressed to the glass
like cling wrap.
There was a rehearsal for the
unification of everything,
but I could not find my third
piece among my things,
which found me tangy
and burnt like pie.
Bees drink the oily nectar,
imagine heaven swelling up
from the soil in a
prefabricated hive,
and something sweeter than honey.
The clowns roll past with
children ensconced in their nightmares.
Nothing is unified, but more
and more steel is soldered
together by errant bakers.
The flowers breathe,
begin to speak their piece.
When the man who makes moths
asked me what I thought of independence,
I told him it had already been cleared away,
a spill on aisle 90 of the syphilitic
warehouse on I-25.
There is a question in my purse
and an answer hiding in the
milk I won’t drink.
I bound my breasts and thanked
God for tension and pressure.
For his newest moths,
he asks me to raise orange lights
from the depths of my instincts.
But I have poured my instincts
like wishing wet water
into the mouth of a butterfly,
who even in the dark seeks
flowers on someone else’s estate.
The melodramatic mansion
lurches oceanward over the cliff.
Lavish dead
pull the ropes.
The seashore’s children watch
with hope,
eager to be freed of those
patterned windows,
the eyes tuned to the frequency
of geometry.
In the elevator shaft,
a wind separated from the herd.
Prey waiting for pressure.
In the dumbwaiter,
relics of service.
The slippers in the catastrophic
laundry chute
are warmer than they’ve
ever been.
By the old hearth,
music divorced from the
phonograph.
Little screams flutter by
like so much cash at Christmas.
On the cold, creaking merry-go-round,
murder by centripetal force planned.
The walnut trees tsk.
Beneath the candy canes
doing flex time for the traffic lights,
melting slush with
the impression of honesty
imprinted by every boot over the crosswalk.
Candles have been exonerated
for their role in framing the dark.
Suspiciously, the corners glance
sideways at the humiliated wicks.
