Men, minerals
fill my dialects.
Wearing orange,
drugs worldwide
sing their song.
Something about lemonade.
Young women of wisteria,
Iron,
Zinc.
Xylem and phloem on two sides
Of the same love
thrown off
in autumn.
My body has lost something.
Bones are in my tongue of power
over the earth.
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.
My tinfoil moon is so cheap
and glitters prolifically,
unlike the gold sun jailed
in the center of the solar system,
mined to death for its light,
wasted resource above the
bickering buildings with their
fluorescent innards.
Perhaps my dearest half will tear just the
littlest piece of my moon
to fashion me a fashionable ring.
No one loves the crinkled moon as I do,
The glitz and glam of being second best.
I work to the tune of your aurora.
The floor wears away imperceptibly
as a woman whose dreams have
been munched by the wolf in her words.
The tundra of my inexperience thaws.
On the know-it-all breeze,
laughter that grips my heart
like a hand.
When the pollen heard you weep,
you were sainted by the grass.
Your greens, your purples.
Your lilting light that
whips through my space
like remorse.
Your song is dangerous,
damaging.
In the January flame everything
curls to the core to cure the cold.
The drool from your chin gleams
like seraphim.
When you became a hunting dog
in an incomparable cage,
I rose above the earth
like a nuclear cloud.
You’ve been hungry for so long,
my flowers asleep in their
bulbs dream of you as soil,
as a rain of blood.
Gnaw the chain link
and drop yourself as a wind
into the cold.
January burns like a wild
thing on the run.
In the kitchen,
electric suns and a scorched
rain roiling up from the metal
crust like the flood Noah would
not have survived.
Hungry, I still turn away
from the last few seconds
of deserved and unearned life.
My life lays over me like a bib.
What bullets does it block
from my breasts?
Through the window,
filthy afternoon trudges in
from the rails like a hobo.
Every table in the dining room
is set to the music of
scoundrels naming their children.
From the kitchen,
streaming remnants of
finish lines.
The blooms along the
pearlescent highway have something to say.
Something hard, heavy, fragile as
a newborn Monday.
Pastel clowns zoom past me in minivans,
with children in the back,
their desperate faces pressed to the glass
like cling wrap.
There was a rehearsal for the
unification of everything,
but I could not find my third
piece among my things,
which found me tangy
and burnt like pie.
Bees drink the oily nectar,
imagine heaven swelling up
from the soil in a
prefabricated hive,
and something sweeter than honey.
The clowns roll past with
children ensconced in their nightmares.
Nothing is unified, but more
and more steel is soldered
together by errant bakers.
The flowers breathe,
begin to speak their piece.
When the man who makes moths
asked me what I thought of independence,
I told him it had already been cleared away,
a spill on aisle 90 of the syphilitic
warehouse on I-25.
There is a question in my purse
and an answer hiding in the
milk I won’t drink.
I bound my breasts and thanked
God for tension and pressure.
For his newest moths,
he asks me to raise orange lights
from the depths of my instincts.
But I have poured my instincts
like wishing wet water
into the mouth of a butterfly,
who even in the dark seeks
flowers on someone else’s estate.
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.
Moonlight is braille,
pointed beams patterned for
hands with eyes.
On the prairie,
the hellbent train pierces the cool,
callous night like a needlegun.
The town will loop the gold
through in the morning.
Hands clasped as though to pray,
I cannot read that foreign,
bright light writing
on my cool, white face.
My hands are blind.
But the dark slips into my
ears like a rumor,
the utter loss that is my birthright.
This poem will be revised.
Miniature Moon 