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.





We Will Never Reap

Unattended sparrows sow the fields with lavender. The fragrance betrays the eroticism of the fluffy clouds, looking down like a lover on a world that doesn’t know it’s asleep. When through the pearlescent gates the ocean begins to pour like a spilled drink, I made a raft from my studio desk, with an umbrella for a roof. Beneath the waves, Leviathan with centuries of teeth and an appetite for the twisted. The lavender will wash away. The warped odor of regrettable flesh will be all that is left. I sail to a  rippled shore covered in sunbathing dreams.



Eschatological Mess

Lightning embroiders excitement in the bruised sky. Clouds call my name in a whisper that smells like adventure. I have become one with my back porch. Not the one my father once painted red. The one coated in stardust and crass lemonade. My home is built from my rib and will submit to my will. Home is a flower with benzos in the petals, my tiredness a river of parasitic glass carving obscenities down a mountain. I long to make this eschatological mess into a nest for babies and birds, but my frazzled mind licks sunshine for the sour buzz.






Blood in the Water

At a plastic desk from a discount store, I pen my memoirs in lipstick with a raven who taught me everything I know about distrust and linoleum. The standard issue daylight won’t do anymore. I saw a shard of paradise, exuding every color, and now the manila boss of my waking hours can’t contain me. If I write anything less true than a martyr’s blood, the raven pecks my hands. If I don’t sweep soon, the dust will riot and burn, but the raven reviews my writing for salt or fish, and the hostile country of my face conceals no faults. In the variegated landscape of my mind’s private vineyard, thunder in the wine press and blood in the water.

Screaming

Time curves like a voluptuous, sumptuous woman. Around the bend of her hip, cave men paint my dreams on the walls of a cave that will cave in. My dreams, undiscovered by excitable paleo scientists, will lie dormant and mate with moss for years. My name is written in moss on the cliffside of my disagreeable mind. My moss minions mine my Mondays more and more for maturity. They find none. Just a crumbling psyche bent low over her blue screened mind machine, screaming –