Tag: poetry

Cooking

In the kitchen,

electric suns and a scorched

rain roiling up from the metal

crust like the flood Noah would

not have survived.

Hungry, I still turn away

from the last few seconds

of deserved and unearned life.

My life lays over me like a bib.

What bullets does it block

from my breasts?

Through the window,

filthy afternoon trudges in

from the rails like a hobo.

Every table in the dining room

is set to the music of

scoundrels naming their children.

From the kitchen,

streaming remnants of

finish lines.

Of Clowns and Flowers

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.

Moths

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.

Les Fleurs du Mal

This was my favorite volume of poetry in high school. I had read one of Baudelaire’s poems in my 10th grade honors English class, and when I saw an entire collection of his poems at Barnes & Noble one night I just had to buy it. At the time I was not supposed to be spending any money on books, but I went ahead and bought the book. I snuck it into the house and then for a very long time I kept it hidden under the clothes in my dresser. I would wait till everybody had gone to bed and sit by the dim light and read Baudelaire’s poetry.

Falling House

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.

Like a Rumor

Moonlight is braille,

pointed beams patterned for

hands with eyes.

 

On the prairie,

the hellbent train pierces the cool,

callous night like a needlegun.

The town will loop the gold

through in the morning.

 

Hands clasped as though to pray,

I cannot read that foreign,

bright light writing

on my cool, white face.

 

My hands are blind.

But the dark slips into my

ears like a rumor,

the utter loss that is my birthright.

 

 

This poem will be revised.

Schumann

Diagnostic rock stars

light the pink sickness

on my forehead

with the squeal of a spirochete.

I am sick.

The antibiotics climbed

the mountain

and blew away like ashes

at the top.

Who will I turn to

when the music stops,

perched on one screaming

foot in my box?

The seats in the crowd

are filled with the

whisperers.

On stage, the fully

realized monsters of

scientific sound.

Actualized mindfucks

who are going somewhere

because the conveyor

belt from the stage

runs only for them.

They see through me.

The extra vision in

my head a hammock

supporting the exhaustion

of my pine cone.

I have thoughts of lances,

of silver mercury

waiting for a cog rail

that sleeps.

I will take the mercury,

apply it to my forehead

like Ash Wednesday.

My Easter is on tour

with the band.