Unacceptable thorns line my private, licentious rose. My rose is a carnal red and her cardinal virtue is that she contains a world. Stars everywhere but in my eyes as I bring the toasted apocalypse into fruition. I used to live in a jar. Now I live in a cottage on the shores of Lake Forgetfulness. Roses are a language unto themselves. I cultivate roses because I cannot hold back the sea. The sea, for his part, clutches my windpipe.

Silky stars lay languidly over liquid space time. The waves are gigantic, but the stars bob along nonplussed. In one star, a cartographic adventure for the minute minutes that compose our lives like a symphony of laughter. In another, hell in all its fury. My fear is a feral, focused thing. It escapes fire only to be crushed by brimstone. I wish that I was a star beaming out over a thirsty universe. Instead, I am dark matter. I sever and shiver.

Gladly the marigolds smile into the first gentle breezes of Autumn. Angels watch me cavort in a field of four leaf clovers. Nature as vast tundra of self reflection. Nature as guilt and verdict. Nature as a mother possum, hissing at me as she brings her babies across the distant fence. Ignore the deer here. They badmouth me – gossips all of them. Autumn will find me older, aged like a hope and as lined as paper.

Under the fireworks I kiss him with my sensitivity and he sticks his longing down my tongue. All day the sky has been weeping, dreading the maniacal stabbing of fireworks that would pierce it. I wept with the sky, but he wiped away my tears with a newspaper article from 1988. The fact of his warm, strong body being here is some kind of miracle. His presence is wrapped up in dollar store wrapping paper, and I slice it open deftly with my eyes. I will give him the timeless chanting of my heart, echoing as it does in my spacious body.

Beams of light burst into my core, bubbly and not too self aware. The electron amusement park is quaint and charming. The magnetic field of my metallic sight is baby pink and shifting constantly. My secrets are eating me one bite at a time. I am the bottom of the rainbow being devoured by neon glowing fungi. But in this radical light brimming up to the top of my head, I feel a hope larger than Pike’s Peak.

My body is a soft petting zoo. My husband cleans his feral wife with kisses day after day. Wandering across the house, sailing over waves of pain, I search for my glowing glory. My body is a plush country of purpose. My breasts conceal secrets. Under his hands I feel my blood pulse to a spicy rhythm. My body is juicy like a 1990s waterbed, squeezing, bouncing, and always a little wet and tacky. He loves me when I bloom like a rose in the hothouse of seismic love he built for me with his gentle hands.

Language dreams – verbs dashing over the landscape of human thought. Pungent petunias grow along the borders of my knowing. Math has always been an honest enemy, language a lying, lascivious friend. What does English see when she closes her lavender eyes? Beneath her lashes, nouns cavort like bacteria, so small and yet so vital to life as we know it. The great pronoun stalks among the verbage, the 9th letter of an alphabet intimate and exotic. But the greatest pronoun, the capital H pronoun, skips through space time looking for nouns who need prayer.