Frazzled fire
licks me frenetically.
My mind is the Monday after a holiday weekend
that meandered into a new month,
and the paperwork in me chafes and squeaks.
Behind my eyes I am filing.
I have begun 178 projects.
177 are exactly what I have been needing, what I have been waiting for.
1 is even better.
My eyes,
my hands,
my judgment ache,
and all I can hear is agitated paper.
Scrape scrape scrape.
My watermother holds my heat for me
ambles through my mind reminding me
Hair won’t comb itself.
Yellow cables radiate sunshine and trigonometry.
I think about all the weeds in the sidewalk cracks
of the neighborhood where I grew up.
One woman planted roses,
A confused cloud asked no one in particular,
What does it mean to rain?
Watermother is tender.
She helps me take off my aluminum slippers,
my slummy makeup,
her mind an ever-growing equation like a cancer.
The machine is a tap dancer,
is silver,
has nightmares of rust.
She wears the moon on her face in a chalk.
She glows purple when she is near wisdom.
She glows purple among the trees.
The ribbon in her hair is forked,
tastes danger on the horizon.
And the robot who has been terrified to bathe for years
clicks his heels ever closer,
curious and cold,
while the ribbon hisses poison in her ear
Soft flesh
Pressable everywhere,
Pleasurable everywhere
To be teased and tickled everywhere.
Cornerless,
Sublime,
Full,
Generous,
Gentle,
Forbidden.
I am her and she is me,
sashaying in a voluminous dress,
100 percent feminine.
I fall in love with myself,
a monologue of fingers and sliding and heat.
Branches etch messages in the window panes.
I stare out at the asylums chewing on the victims.
A man has a web server where his heart should be.
A woman saunters past, laminated, glossy, unremarkable and perfect.
and he does not glance up.
His hands are writing a wiki of the world.
His eyes already own hordes of long, tan legs,
trunks of breasts that stand as zeniths of desire.
He has entire folders of ass.
The woman struts smiling.
There will be another man she can pass,
being made only to turn necks and catch eyes.
There has to be.
She cannot plan for another possibility.
His height like the distance between me and the universe
musculature spicy beneath my hands.
Take me over,
woman as Kingdom to command,
woman as Empire to be appeased with bread and circuses.
Chocolate syrup and heating pads are bread.
Deftly his fingers will do stunts beneath the canopy of my dress.
I am snow. Not real snow. I am too thick and fat and warm for that. But I am equally fickle, white, storm tossed, blinding. There are many just like me swirling in this orb. And who I love is this boy. He is so little, his smile almost too wide for the edges of the plane on which we live. He is a good boy, quiet and sad. I know that if I am not his mother I was meant to be. Still, his life is thin, will tear at a touch, and he will slip out of existence like a mirage of water. I will be left tumbling over strange faces who may have that sweet jaw line or wiry hair, but are not my son.
DNA
At sea level a serpent. Tells time by the rhythm of the scorching land
God. Can see how to strike while it’s hot
Memoir of a Rhinestone
The light boils and boils within me.
I grin without skin
and color gushes out.
I was born in the dark and dirt.
Everyone around me was just like me.
Everyone around me knew they were special.
And some of us held onto that belief,
and I in my green translucency was not the least of them,
until buried in a wood of polished trees I saw
a green so pure,
so somber with the weight of effort and intention-
formed like a tooth of God,
and I felt my plastic disintegrate .
My organs are organza,
my greetings chiffon.
He liked me when he saw me I think,
except he seemed to peer right through me.
Her entire point in having me
was to turn heads with me and then discard me.
Tonight they will both have what they want,
the sun having set and the blinds drawn
so the neighbors don’t exist.
It will be quiet. I know her.
It will be forgettable. I know him.
Miniature Moon 