The 1st of November
A photogenic witch is caught
with her jeans down
(Do you know even traditional witches shop at Abercrombie and Fitch?)
the day after Halloween.
Gets in trouble for being out the day after Halloween.
There is a season for everyone.
and mine for you was the summer of my life
when you were the glare I saw reflected in everything.
It is the 1st of November now.
Go.
What if love is a yellow gel pen?
Bright, beautiful, illegible?
And if you have left your vision in someone else’s well,
what then?
Seasons of castles, cathedrasl, fortresses
go by.
Pride with his transparent wings buzzes outside the window.
What if Cinderella was as awful as her step-sisters?
The mortar between the bricks says,
Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Beneath the cathedral floor princely hands wring desperately
to extricate themselves from a promise.
Inside the house there are ghosts gnashing their teeth,
whispering into the baby monitor.
At the other end of the house I freeze
hear the voices amid crackles of static,
stop folding towels.
She is the final holdout,
but the bread has crossed over to our side.
My friendships are all pastel.
Neat
Trim.
Tidy.
If I do not hold them close by their mint fingers,
children in a meadow of death,
they will fly away.
Frazzled fire
licks me frenetically.
My mind is the Monday after a holiday weekend
that meandered into a new month,
and the paperwork in me chafes and squeaks.
Behind my eyes I am filing.
I have begun 178 projects.
177 are exactly what I have been needing, what I have been waiting for.
1 is even better.
My eyes,
my hands,
my judgment ache,
and all I can hear is agitated paper.
Scrape scrape scrape.
My watermother holds my heat for me
ambles through my mind reminding me
Hair won’t comb itself.
Yellow cables radiate sunshine and trigonometry.
I think about all the weeds in the sidewalk cracks
of the neighborhood where I grew up.
One woman planted roses,
A confused cloud asked no one in particular,
What does it mean to rain?
Watermother is tender.
She helps me take off my aluminum slippers,
my slummy makeup,
her mind an ever-growing equation like a cancer.
The machine is a tap dancer,
is silver,
has nightmares of rust.
She wears the moon on her face in a chalk.
She glows purple when she is near wisdom.
She glows purple among the trees.
The ribbon in her hair is forked,
tastes danger on the horizon.
And the robot who has been terrified to bathe for years
clicks his heels ever closer,
curious and cold,
while the ribbon hisses poison in her ear
Soft flesh
Pressable everywhere,
Pleasurable everywhere
To be teased and tickled everywhere.
Cornerless,
Sublime,
Full,
Generous,
Gentle,
Forbidden.
I am her and she is me,
sashaying in a voluminous dress,
100 percent feminine.
I fall in love with myself,
a monologue of fingers and sliding and heat.
Her name is Tracy and she looks at men all day
on screens and streets and books.
She is made of desires women are not supposed to have,
her sisters rendered blind by modesty.
Her dearest friend looks only at the swirl of turquoise
feelings that envelope her man
and never the back or the shoulders that Tracy hungers for
at every party,
unwrapping him from his suit while her friend prays over the meal.
And what no one knows except the pantry of his brain,
is he longs to be kissed by her lashes,
loves to be seen as a thrill,
as a man sees a woman
and a woman is forbidden to see a man.
Miniature Moon 