My grandmother was a fish. Behind the iron bars of Memphis, she died slowly as my grandfather drained her blood to paint roses for his filthy lover. To me she was a wall made by the best mason, impossible to crack. Underneath, a heart poured out into a human sieve. The tragedy was she never said no. The bondage of the Southern Baptist woman, silent and sticky with secrets. She could have been in a condo in Florida with her little dog. Instead she swam in a tank in Memphis, her ocean of options breaking on someone else’s beach, and she dissipated into the vastness that is a God who sees every sacrifice.
Tag: writer
Suicide Attempt
The old blue slide will be missed. Girlhood runs to the river and ends in the cold, fishful waters. My best friends are penguins smoking weed in Bermuda. My best friends are narwhals holding a beach party in Marseille. My best friends are a collection of yellow pills with “Take in Case of Unbearable Pain” written on the label, and I do. My girlhood was a tender thing at the fringes of polite society, feral and always wondering where home was. Now I follow prescriptions, pain, my dayglo God.
Smells Faintly of Freedom
Music is the most mortal art form. A song dies and resurrects over and over in the thin cyan air. Poetry lives forever. My poems are drinking wine in a stranger’s cellar, making love with the darkness while the sprouting potatoes watch. Art is the mess on the back of the wall when I blow my mind out with a 22. So many colors. A cornucopia of textures and scents. The best art smells faintly of freedom.
Letter K
K is the wettest letter, black with red polka dots and wearing her sick yellow rain slicker. K dances the Charleston, and she pop,lock, and dropped it on my front yard with her pet penguin. K is a rose bush hugger – a brutal job, but she’s sharp enough to puncture back if she wants. Roses know she’s coming when they smell strawberry soda and old makeup. K will never lie to you – but she might omit a few key details. When is the end of the universe? She knows, but for your sake she won’t tell you.
Regret
The dreams in the deepest crevices of my electrified mind have evolved fangs. I have no equation through which to escape from my regret. Regret shadows my shadow, planning to fill in while she sleeps.
Like Sound into Silence
With holy, incalculable math, the snow falls to the dying earth like sound into silence. The world waits. I wait in my wedding dress washed in blood. Celestial somberness reminds me of how minute I am. The stars beleaguer me with questions I can’t answer. I lay my heart in His hands.
The Inside of My Tears
Seeing through a window darkly, I observe a cloud killing his coolness and I say nothing. The last time I dropped a mirror I saw my essence in a myriad of fragments, and I wept. Cover the house in shrouds. I cannot narrate my life to this typist in a clown suit while seeing inside my tears.
Lame Shadows Limp
The lame shadows limp in the apricity of a well worn January afternoon. My after thoughts are too big for your seismic detectors. I sell seashells by the seashore, and you better believe I make a profit. Behind the green screen of life, a ghost of a woman with eroding teeth.
Specially Designed Paper Airplanes For Bats
The fountain of fire flows through my hemispheres of storms and femininity. The light shining from my eyes has one brightness setting – supernova – and even the air sizzles with the static flowing from my bountiful word garden on the back porch. On the walls of this acorn, paintings of death doing gymnastics. My portfolio includes specially designed paper airplanes for bats, graphic misrepresentation of the intent of those clouds over there, and some semiannual irresponsibility.
Necrosis and Neurosis
All afternoon the heat races through my circulatory system like a typhoon. My life is ebbing away. On an unremarkable beach, an unremembered explorer. The sun hovers like a smothering mother. My skin slobbers. What wild daylight must be captured and cooled for my necrosis and neurosis to heal?
Miniature Moon 