My Old Personality

Feral, calendar scented clouds claw their way across a luxury ultramarine sky. Twilight – and the storms are tucking in for the night – typhoons sleeping off shore, waiting to pounce during union working hours. I sit on the porch smoking memories of multidisciplinary Mondays where every day was a synthesis of time and color. I am not on speaking terms with line, but texture knows my home phone number. The used Mondays are aromatic like my old personality, years before my diseased mind wiped my name off my birth certificate. What is the most effective way to move a mountain through my veins?

My Heart

Rushing rivers of reverse psychology spill from pharmaceutical sources. I used to be a gummy bear. Now I’m just juicy. I have to believe that Language, digging the shallow grave in my yard, doesn’t mean it for me, but he constantly sneaks up behind me with measuring tape. My hollow chest contains a snow owl for a heart, digesting always a scurrying sin that squeaks on the way down his gullet.

What Was I Made For?

I wash my hair as most wishes do, with sea spray. My alabaster legs stick out at desperate angles as I trip in the surf.  I think I was made by a 22 year old for whom graphic design is their “passion.” Or perhaps a logger, running from the ancient aliens in the woods. Either way, my eyes slice the fruit of man’s labor like an orange, dividing it up among the jackals. My hands are oxygen, a dream of sublime strangulation. My name is the river flowing backward, flooding her banks. I am a wish, a need, a woman varnished and unverified.

The Male Gaze

Feminine breeze tousles the leaves. Autumn candy and coolness and customary costume. Bashfully, I look away from my plate of autumnal goodness and feel him touch the sweater of my cable knit body. The male gaze is so kind and generous compared to the female gaze. Where my female gaze sees stretch marks and drinks my absinthe, the male gaze sees my generosity of softness and toasts the haunting video poetics of my hair communing with the breeze. He makes me a sandwich. I dance for him in octopus octave, my intelligence in compliant arms and luscious, plump living. This language feels weirdly spacious. I need a poetics with room for me. The male gaze strokes my breasts with a silken touch, while the female auditions for the laundry list. I feel powerful and delicate when he plants me in fleece and calls me snow flower.

Enough?

The sun was not enough for me. My face was his rose, tender with fragility and sweet spice. My voice is a cornerless sonnet wandering over the badlands of my curving, roiling psyche. I needed more to wrap the soft landscape of my body in a dream of domesticity and feral, fertile goodness. He selects me for his vase. I smile, a horizon stretching across my floral face, my eyes the blue moons good things happen in once.

No Satisfaction

Wrapped in the same name as my nemesis, a theory frictioning frantically with a reality so sharp that it cuts, and the theory is bleeding, and we drink too much at lunch. Too much. The ice in the pond is too much. A patchwork of cold. The theory of feminine wild wiles can get no satisfaction. She bares her hair to a hillside of honor and visibility. An elevator, snipped from its cable, floats toward frosty regions of unprepared wine.










Biggest Regret

Red code of dawn for love letters from Hades. The grass is always greener -or sharper- on the other side. The machine buzzes in my head, strips memories from me like old wallpaper. Treatment, they said. The forlorn math of always being emptier than you should be. Suffering souls singe. Early in the morning, I drove over the alligator river. Not I. My husband drove. And I went. I was a cave. A crayon. They broke me, but I still color. I just can’t see lines anymore. It’s all a disarray of color and exultation and expectation, and everywhere the smell of terrarium.