My sheath is made of leather.
I am a woman.
I am a knife.
Tonight I will dine
on an industrial
Dynasty,
eating in the workspace
of men –
Eating men.
Iron rising from my pulse
To the air
I see my doppelganger –
The pregnant cat
Luring the mouse.
This is part of my project to write poems that pair with colors and textures, or the other way around.
After fate untwisted,
she left a trail of
disastrous death in my driveway.
I need an incantation
to summon the voice in my
hands.
Sprawled lazily across
the concrete,
hieroglyphics bleeding
with age.
I drew them.
My people ran down
the lane years ago
to hunt the sneaky beast.
I am the only one left,
struggling to clutch my ochre
with broken hands.
The dawn makes much of me,
flooding as she does
over the delta of dark.
The cowardice of night,
the dryness on the dark,
amaze me like
the paranoia at the foot of
my bed,
gnawing his hands
and begging for bandages.
Dawn always grows up.
Noon holds me in
a vice grip,
and I yearn for my shadow
and his praise of me.
Slowly,
sun turns to chaos
and things separate.
Evening falls like linen
on my hair.
Holier,
I brave the coming dark,
already thirsty,
as the light flows
to her next season.
No matter how busy motherhood gets, I can’t imagine giving up my creative activities. I just read an article by a woman who did exactly that. She was a blogger and photographer, and she did no work for two years while she took care of her children. She said that she needed to be more present with them. She’s not the only one I have heard of who has done that. I have friends who have done that as well.
I admire the self-sacrifice and self-control, but I can’t really imagine doing that myself. Maybe it’s good that I have to stop at one child, as much as I wanted to have more. But if I had 10 kids I have a feeling I would still be squeezing in time to write poems or to paint. That maybe I would be in a situation at that point where I shouldn’t be doing those things, but I would do them anyway.
Poetry is such a part of me that I can’t imagine giving it up. I go through spells where I primarily read poetry rather than write it. When I do that I am often soaking up inspiration and gearing up for a period of intense writing. But to simply not have poetry in my life? I can’t even imagine.
Painting and photography have become primal urges for me. I can’t imagine putting my camera down as some of the mother photographers do. I might sometimes get lazy or too busy to take out my expensive camera, but I’ll at the very least be taking photos on my phone.
Perhaps all of this is selfish or self-absorbed, but I’m not so sure about that. Everyone needs their own identity. Everyone needs something that they love to do and an opportunity to do it. Naturally your husband and children have to take priority, but you can’t draw from an empty well. If you want to give them more, then you have to give yourself something. So many women say they’ve lost their identity in motherhood, and I just can’t relate. When I had my daughter I became even more myself. I still had all the artistic aspects of myself, all the general personality traits like introversion, I still liked the same foods and movies, only I was finally fully tapped into my maternal potential. Having a child didn’t sap my sense of identity. It completed it.
Not that I think I am really at risk of this, but I pray that I never put down the pen or the camera or the brush. These things are apart of me. Without them I think I would fall to pieces.
My sentences are sprinkled
with snowy asterisks.
So many cold specific species
of special considerations.
Compounding the temerity of
this informational vacation
through the paradise of lingua franca
*commonality hell*
A virga, purple and inconsistent.
My tongue,
dry,
cracking,
goes on.
In the meadow between my
thoughts and their definitions
snowstorm as crepuscular ballet.
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.
Seeing is cataclysmic.
Hearing has rendered me mute as a portrait.
Beauty’s pelerine flows behind
my shoulder,
and the gift of slender hands
unties the bow,
to get to the realness of me.
I once made a mop from my hair.
Now it has grown back,
glossy but hollow.
In my nutrient dense curves
(where does a curve belong?
everywhere wrapped like
legs around a lover)
she licks lightly.
the spider that wove my house
has only loaned it to me.
At my table,
cigarettes burn and puff
from nothing.
Everything is an appearing act
in a universe of inexplicable birth.
When the spider lumbers back from
his hunt,
I will be given a key to my blood,
and I will live in my life
like wet in water.
Moving faster than math,
I ride the train to the city.
Lines, gradations, numbers.
So many nice colors,
Cool chaos,
The air slick with liquid nitrogen.
An ornament,
My education dangles
from the tree in city center.
In the reservoir,
My distilled ambition eddying.
Through the equation of church bells,
A garland of neon loss.
Which sun is silent, low?
The near one that blinds
Or the farther that fries?
In a clear city,
rumors
give you an inert art.
Miniature Moon 