I have been mistreated by myself in italics.
I was mistreated in italics.
I was in italics when I was mistreated.
I have threatened myself
And been threatened by people who loved me
with knives for hands.
I cut everything.
Life is a hallway.
God this hallway is a mess,
my clothes strewn everywhere.
Peripheral issues,
like where to raise fireflies,
consume my government.
My government,
not yours.
I don’t share,
And my whole bureaucracy is off their meds, anyways.
Stop staring at my nudity.
You aren’t supposed to be here.
Shades of slate and gun metal pursue me
in a way the other women wrapped in their profiles and friends
would understand more than they want to believe.
Our spirits dream while we say,
How much? That’s too much.
I have to have her there by 3.
We need to get away. It is never just us.
In the suburbs I drive over hillock after hillock
again and again,
for bread and milk,
my fingers searching beneath my skirt for something so dirty it is clean,
so corrupt as to be pure.
Church of memoir
of discovery
of chants.
Cloistered in my name are ten lives
I did not live
in favor of a sublime 11th.
What is better than best?
What can joy can be discarded for ecstasy?
The taste of salt lines my mouth
when I look back.
translated to Xhosa, Afrikaans, and back
Church of Love
I find joy
while I lay cloistered in my ten lives.
Auroras swirl beyond my reach.
They will not live.
There is a reason I am so inordinately fond of 11.
What is better than a lot?
Why have I ignored peace?
It tasted of salt in my mouth.
Power lines guiding me back home.
Church of Love
Separate the gaiety from the joy.
Lonely in my ten lives,
they live,
it is as though they live without me.
How do I dispose of gaiety?
Of me?
Fuzzy snowmen smell like turpentine.
Why all this wistful wind,
this heavy quiet,
these creative snowmen dancing in slow motion
to no music?
Not inaudible music,
or even illegible sound,
but nothing at all-
Machines with no factory.
This snow covers a ghost city.
The children scattered and died.
Yes, I am freezing.
Would you like to dance?
Look up water.
See what books,
so fearful of the subject,
refuse to stay.
Flowers gasp to stay afloat.
His desires spirit him away.
His desire to finger the piano,
her
with or without her face.
The touch of her mind on the water
regal red.
Life and I do not care who we have.
He is
crunched afterbirth.
The quality predictions
are grainy.
My name used to be July.
My clothes want butterflies.
I was born to rise.
The sky,
jealous,
buried me in his mire.
She needs sour apple vodka mixed with a tart schnapps.
On her way in the nonchalant dark her dignity escaped her.
At the counter a man wonders where fugitive dignity hides.
She leaves holding black bags,
tries not to notice that even with 6 clanging bags of bottles
her load is lighter than it was.
I have 22 pounds of wishes hidden among the weeping wisteria.
The flowers by the pond have been melancholy a long time.
I drink with them.
Look at Lily’s tattoos.
Kind of abstract, don’t you think?
I’ve been told some people are really into that.
But the roses and I share the best laughs because we know it is not about pattern
but all about color and that soft, sweet texture on the fingerpads.
Meanwhile the snapdragons do deep, twisted math at the waters edge
and I drop a wish in the water.
The sweet blue west calls me.
A vision of endless land is seared into my eyes.
Why take this seasick sailor
and set her in the lovelorn Prairie
where emptiness is everything
and loneliness is nothing,
only to drop her from a thunderous cloud
in a crowded coastal city
to drown?
Miniature Moon 