The Future Comes to Collect

The future comes to collect minutes from my aging face. Mitosis carries out in every cell to the rhythm of Bailamos. The code corrupts like a politician. The future wears a blue gown and a crimson pelerine. Minutes vacuumed off the edge of my life now will make daisies grow in the future.  I tell her to take them. My bones walked off the job, and I’ve been melting into new days. From the back of my telepathic woods, the past comes to compete for my guilt and my telomeres.

The Love of a Woman is a Desert Dweller

Cool sonnets soak the sweat off my cracking skin. Here in the desert, ghosts made of love hover everywhere. The cacti are ringed in bubblegum pink halos. The love of a woman is a desert dweller. If you water it a little bit once a century, it will cling on, carving your name on grains of sand. Just the tiniest drop will keep it alive. He met me in the onyx city shellacked with heat. My dance card was full, and then he tattooed his name on my silky spirit and wiped my mismanaged hours away. Somewhere, my old self dances and dances because if she stops, she will die. But here in the parched peace of premium paradise, I can rest my weary bones with the ghosts and count my pinkest wounds.

Buttons

Violet fancies whisk me away to a paradise of buttons and zippers. Imagine being able to hang into every good thing, tight fisted like a covetous toddler. Buttons are images of togetherness. My dress, the way it drapes over my body like a sheet hiding old furniture. This house is haunted by the ghost of fall. Zipper in Spanish is a beautiful word. My language doesn’t have a word for the feeling I’m surviving right now, but my blood pulses to the cadence of someone else’s imperial march. The Button Museum is in Connecticut, a short drive from the land of split seams and cruel themes.

Flowers

Friendly flowers clamor
For my scantily clad attention
And my runaway money.
We bring corpses into the house
To freshen our rooms,
Our wounds,
Our wombs.
I press grass,
Leaves.
My leaving a black spatter on my mother’s door.
Flowers are gregarious narcissists.
My mother is a flower
I plucked from my rib cage.
See how the sun croaks her old song,
Raining dry energy and
Nefarious bruises on us all.

Victim

Heavy happenings stain me like ink. When the clouds tease me, they rain just enough to mist my hair. I can never quench my thirst or rinse the shine from my skin. The world is a foil sparkling in my kitchen. Darkness darkness everywhere and not a drop to drink. The crashes out on the train tracks are daily now. I am a victim not yet assigned a death.

Salvation…a Vision

Christmas is a plot line in a novel I sew with the soft pink silk of my lungs. How God, as vanilla voiced as He is, could write a letter of love to a spider with a breathing addiction is beyond me. But I’m grateful. I wear my garnets to the foyer of Bliss and reconfigure my name. When the lightning bug veers too close to me, I cut him free, and I bleed.