Rushing rivers of reverse psychology spill from pharmaceutical sources. I used to be a gummy bear. Now I’m just juicy. I have to believe that Language, digging the shallow grave in my yard, doesn’t mean it for me, but he constantly sneaks up behind me with measuring tape. My hollow chest contains a snow owl for a heart, digesting always a scurrying sin that squeaks on the way down his gullet.
Tag: writer
Friends With No Benefits
Careful correlations kiss causation in the school bathroom. My youth was an opaque thing. It always is. In my eyes, many memories are stored alphabetically by aroma. I remember pencil sharpeners and friends made of knives, sharpening themselves and cutting into me. They told me the shivs were diamonds. I didn’t believe them, but they glittered, so I bled cooperatively on a table meant for autopsies.
What Was I Made For?
I wash my hair as most wishes do, with sea spray. My alabaster legs stick out at desperate angles as I trip in the surf. I think I was made by a 22 year old for whom graphic design is their “passion.” Or perhaps a logger, running from the ancient aliens in the woods. Either way, my eyes slice the fruit of man’s labor like an orange, dividing it up among the jackals. My hands are oxygen, a dream of sublime strangulation. My name is the river flowing backward, flooding her banks. I am a wish, a need, a woman varnished and unverified.
4 am
Light struggles to arise from her slumber. The deer feed on the past. In a duck blind, a man cold with isolation. Space watches, whispers. At my window, the powdery moonlight stays for a while on my desk while I write sonnets to stars.
Lisa Elsewhere
Cylindrical sisterhood rattles down my childhood lane like a can. The wind was never my friend. My feral blood echoes its request for a sedative. The life within me is hot and knows no peace. My sister rides a unicycle, holding hands with everything we mean when we say, “I had a good time. Really.” My bones slide safely from my skin, prop up a Lisa elsewhere who chews snowflakes for their originality and drinks the blood of the Lamb.
Our Civilization
Irrational idols feign indifference at my gestalt gesticulations toward the divine. I am always ensnared, like a rabbit, the fox behind me frozen in terror. I used to embroider while my daughter sewed. Tonight, the lighthouses will go dark, and the sea will scribble out our civilization.
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.
Miniature Moon 