The new moon tonight comes at the same time as snow showers, the first fresh white quickening in more than a week. Already the city is quieter, muffled, it's sounds and lights refracted in a thousand ways. The traffic light outside my bedroom window cycles endlessly, and I imagine the pedestrian tracks and tires in the street impressing themselves onto a surface at once marked and endlessly changing. In this place I too have learned to be a cycle. The moon pulls me up toward the sky and north toward the lake, a pale insistence I can hear in my blood and my guts. Tonight it's slight presence leaves me loosened, boundless, a cacophony in my heartbeat just waiting to take flight. There is carrion in the middle distance and I am hungry, but they will call it scavenging and judge my curved talons for the drip of old blood. I am too ready for a clean heart, heavy mouth, empty street. I feed and leave the carcass bones as slim and white as the moon that showed me the way.

The more time I spend on this planet the ore I am convinced
That women are the only ones who actually do work
That women are the impetus behind every decision
That women are the muscle behind every straightened path
That women are the emotion before and after every drink
That women comprise the whole arc and ark and every parable we have ever told is lost, languid, without the female witness and the female audience

 I hold onto you because I need something to tell my hands where gravity is  other than my eyes, because when you're around neither my eyes or my hands are trustworthy

I suppose that the fetal position is a natural inclination, that something in our guts or marrow or lizard brain tells us that we'll somehow be safer with our knees in our chest. It isn't true. The only safe posture is offense, not defense, fierce, not fallow. I know now that there is no safer body la gauge than standing straight up, eyes open.

Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences. -Freud

 The little voice in my head continued on it's narrative journey, talking away in a reasonable manner, but my emotions had shut down. -- Siri Hustvedt

Things that survived:
my high school prom tiara, your senior recital
sheet music. My drinking problem, your anger,
that ratty old blue tshirt you've worn for six years,
my cat. The Christmas lights we hung
in our second winter together, your college
finance textbook. The box of mint tea
I never finished, your mouthpiece but not
the euphonium. The desk I repainted sloppily
on the deck of our first house, the dig
you left in its soft wood when you slammed down
the bottle of cheap red. My little black dress,
your old headphones with the worn cord.
My self-righteousness, your hatred,
my regret, your face.

We took off in the storm, snowflakes so fat and heavy
I swore the wings would warp under their weight.
The blinding light of them, lit up methodically red
red red as we flashed our existence across the sky.
The skyline wasn't ever visible; the runway fell away
quickly, and we were alone, a slim grey tube
in the dark bright wasteland of night snow. Like stars
the flakes appeared in the windows, each instant
a new crew of shapes and crystals, faster than blinking.
The tilt of takeoff pushed us up into the clouds
till we broke free, topped the giant domes,
shouldered out into the clear black night.

"I painted myself as the man you might have met in sleep" --Matthea Harvey

I have traced you out on the kitchen floor
oh dozens of times, in milk, faint wisps of white on
the tile older than your mother, in cardamom,
in sage. You will not leave me. I have
drawn your face but never seen it, tasted
your mouth but never kissed it. You are a loss.

In a dream I was a lioness and combed burrs
out of my own heaving, yellow silk. With
giant paws I tore up shrubs and saplings and wrenched
whole alligators apart, scale by scale.
Even there you danced on a whisker's end,
even there you splayed across my desires, raw and
bloody and fresh, trap for a hungry predator.

Things I assume when interacting with any woman:

You will approach me as an equal
We will greet each other
You will maintain behavior appropriate to the social mores by which we both behave
If I am with a child, you will be kind to the child
If I am with a partner, you will be polite to the partner
You will expect the same of me
The interaction will be of a length and depth that we both find acceptable
We will close amicably

I keep watching slam poetry like it's gonna bring my breath back
I read the same old posts I have loved forever thinking that it's gonna bring my words back
I am scared to face the possibility that I don't have anything to say any more
That I have bought in enough to the dominant narrative that anything
I could say any more will only be reflective, instead of subversive

With cardamom and Jesus on your breath you whisper to me
Sinners cannot be saved, only individually redeemed
Through blood-- mine and Christ's-- so you keep me here
Leering, more eventuality than threat.
Even when I am away from you, even when I have chosen
Self protection and self love, I smell the reek
of whiteness, conflation of loss and plenty.

My life condenses without you
Crystallized down, I am sugar or acid by the mouthful
Hard-edged and waiting for dissolution

And I 

with chalk in my mouth

and fear cradled close, my infant, my heart 

wait for you here in the crush:

violent, moontossed, 

a green that fades to grey then black.

Sing me your verses. 

My counterpoint is dull, delivered

in an exhale of grime, halo around my mouth

where the chalk 

and carbon and salt and ice 

balloons out, crest of a tideless moan.

I fall silent.

Feverish and full of anxiety

for all the ways you will hurt me, my blood

seizes the chance to escape.

Lunar, waning, I am a trough,

hollowed for your words and your nails.

After awhile all I can see is the ways in which you are with someone comparable or incomparable to me

I thought to try peace, once, and
returned to you, chastened, a helpmeet;
but you laughed at me and

said i could never be anything i am not.
windburned, seaborne, I am more vessel

than captain, more belly than prow.
in that long, grey trek I thought to follow you

back home, or past home, back up

to dry land or the beacon of your face.

i could never have succeeded.

I thought if I held a course I might steady, but 

creatures of the swell do not stay still.

I idle now in the trough 

and return the slow, blank stare of the water 
in the rising wave.

I have missed my own voice, the only authentic crop I've ever grown. Even the words cannot be mine, are only borrowed, mined from someone else's cairn. At best I am a colonizer, a parasite, a vacuum for all the worlds that are not mine. I recycle your dust, and call it coal. I compost your dreams and call them hope.

Please, see me. I am entirely without future.

Ink on the sheets, lightning in the sky.

The amber heat of you, lit

in the fervency of your fear. In this moment

I cannot pick a battle with you at all.

Ink on my skin, lightning in my mouth.

Your ego and I, we conspire. We lay traps

you will never see. I glow,

hot, caged in the iron grip of your stress.

I twist in the veins of your light,

dust motes in the dark swirl where you turn

away from me, tired, afraid.

Ink on your skin, where I drew myself in.

Your hate, in the dark, is low

and rolls deeper than the thunder. 

I am strong. I will leave you, come morning.

I have been gathering the pebbles for years (sandy point, hocking hills, lakeshores, dunes, that cave in the Pennsylvania mountains) so that when I do decide
to walk the waves, finally,
the decision will require no second guessing. I am too well prepared, I have earned this moment over and over again for years.

You'll get old and there will be no one left to protect

The weather will turn and you'll be alone with your words 

shortened sugar sepulchres,
a mighty magma quells the mist.
I raise the rightness of my fist,
am found in foolish contraband.
sidling sickly into sight:
the grassy knoll, the city slick.
sirens gleeful, each too quick
to sing the copper terror down.
stunted egos, yellow beaks,
a yawning paw that gathers dreams.
taut blue bubbles, doors that scream
a throaty paunch of mold immured.

This is my problem.

You speak.

I listen.

You speak.

You pause.

I tamp down the first response;

tamp down the second response;

by the time I have arrived

at the third, tame, response,

you are speaking 

and I listen.

When you leave me-- as all my partners do, when they realize my core is made of hot, hard anger-- I will still have a straight spine, long talons, and a bright smile, because my core is made of hot, hard anger.

Since I am not heard 

I will not speak. There is no need

to explain to You how

the world should work, after all; nor

any need to explain what I want

or do not want, because 

You, already, know. And will give these things to me

if I sit still, look pretty, keep quiet.

Keep sweet. 

Tithe my daily portion, raise up 

more than my time or my money or my body:

all this and also my Self, I give to You.

For salvation. For penance.

For careful ignorance, for physical safety.

All this and also my Self.

It is not, for You, too much to ask.

Mourning something I never had, a reality I never experienced. I've left you so far behind, I cannot remember the ways in which you hemmed me in or caged me, though I am sure that you did. Was the cage transparent enough? Am I seeing a falconer who uses the hood effectively? I would rather not see all the things I cannot be. I will be what you want: an oversexed housewife: I will do your dishes and listen to your opinions and be ravenous in bed later: I will worship at your feet for the right to be blind. Mourning something I never had: there was always a void in our bed. Pull me back, now. Help me remember all the ways I failed myself.

My favorite thing that has happened lately was on the training call for All Access after reviewing guidelines for nonconfrontation with protestors, Ben asks if there are any questions, and there is silence. The sound of 30 fierce women and their determination.

I sit with your ashes:

whether the wind or my memory fades, you are gone.

You are soft, here, a palate 

of grey heresy through the grope of my fingers.

Silo of grief: rosetted, engraved, bequeathed. 

What should I do with you except bring you here

to the wind and the sand and the waves? Here the sun

remembers your skin, here the wind 

remembers the soft blue of your eyes.

I am too tired for art, too angry for splicing our hearts.

The tiny cairn of you is my heart, your voice is my bones. 

I am beyond you, you have been gone for years.

You like to speak in maps

--Francine J Harris

All your paths are me and after the crush 

of the ink and your hot breath, heaved weight, hunched spine I slink 

unnoticed to the tray, grab the steel, 

scrub until the skin is rust is red.

Water between my legs, pale till clear for lack of salt.

The blood could fix it, so I invite you back, even when I don't. 

Six months from now I will pack on the weight: pound after pound to cover up

what the wool couldn't cleanse, because 

if you can't see me, you can't hurt me. And if that fails then

if all you see is disfigured, you'll choose to hurt someone else.

Which guilt is uglier? Which leg is bloodier after you 

turn me over and begin again? The mattress bows, there is a stain next to the ceiling fan, how? 

The floor creaks, my hips speak back, a vain epileptic shock. 

The windows turn their pale faces inward, we are reflected unto ourselves, and I 

wish we could take the grate to my face.

How ugly do I have to be, to be safe? I think 

I will find out. 

I grow used to the turn of your shoulders at night.

I grow used to the wall of your back. 

What am I worth to you, without conception?

What am I worth, without my body?

Price out: my mind, my time, the labor and creation of my will.

For comparison: obeisance, wetness, heat. Your dreams.

The mouth, the hands. Your cum.

Ignore the parts that make you uncomfortable (I will learn

to be silent someday, I swear)

and see: the rubble you are left with

cannot build a home. 

Your hands in my guts, you wrench, I lurch. I could crack beneath the weight

of expectation that you set down

gently, heavy, between my hips. 

What am I without motherhood, without breasts,

without food and a kitchen and a desire to provide? 

What am I without open legs and a shut mouth? What am I 

worth as a madonna if I only understand my pricing structure as a whore?

I could charge you hourly, but for the privilege of

your back, your glare, your thrusts, I keep my peace, 

I run your bath, I become host. 

Creased, her cheek, the morning. 

In between the dust and shafted sun, she yawns, her jaw askew.

Her long limbs in the cold. 

I cover her. She smells like copper,

like Dial and cheap wine and copper. 

Curves on curves, her lashes, the blue

they rest on, brown when open.

I guess we forgot to be good, last night.

I cover her. I guess we forgot to make peace.

You like to speak in maps

--Francine J Harris

You delineate me and after the crush 

of the ink and your hot breath, hot weight, hot need I slink 

unnoticed to the tray, grab the steel, 

scrub until the skin is rust is red.

Water between my legs, pale till clear for lack of salt.

The blood could fix it, so I invite you back, even when I don't. 

Six months from now I will pack on the weight: pound after pound to cover up

what the wool couldn't cleanse, because 

if you can't see me, you can't hurt me, and if that fails then

if all you see is ugly, you'll choose to hurt someone else.

Which guilt is uglier? Which leg is bloodier after you 

turn me over and begin again? The mattress bows, stains, creaks.

My hips speak back, a vain epileptic shock. Together they and I 

wish we could take the grate to my face.

How ugly do I have to be, to be safe? I think 

I will find out. 

To watch a death trickle outwards

like water, down through the ranks 

of family and friends to rest at the roots

of the tree that housed you: your loss

is not ripples or waves or raindrops

or tears. Your death is seismic, an uprooting,

a dangerous precedent, a prophecy

which stands dripping on a dry day

and insists on its own rightful weight.

The leaves bow under the stress, the branches

dip their heads lower for your loss.

I have lost every sense of what makes me happy

I have no idea who to be

I love you best in the morning 

when, quiet and unkempt, your hands

reach for me under the blankets, your voice

husks my name in the grey dawn.

I love you best in the morning 

and the warm weight of you, heavy-handed, 

pulling me back to your arms and your heart,

the crush of your sweet, simple need.

I love you best in the morning with your nose

in the crook of my neck, with your lips

against the pearl of my ear.

I love you best in the morning when we

start our days with a rejection

of the wrench of parting: five minutes more,

stay. I just want

to stay here with you like this. Stay.

I clamber around your neck, eager and sharp, 

twisting folds of skin between my horned hands. I am

bright-eyes, pest-bearing. 

Touch me here, where the flesh fades out to pink.

What were we in another life? 

I threaten you now, perverse, dear, trained and untenable.

Whether we were meant to meet is inconsequential. 

The import of this moment is its own affirmation.

You will be heavy in the casket, light in the grave. Your blue eyes

crest at the mouth of me. Your warm hands

clutch at the grip of me. I am never

full, I am always empty, and I will never

be fulfilled.

Your hands always at my stomach, grubbing unkempt lines.

Your desire crosses my skin, leans into my intestines, crawls

through the blood of your disappointment each month.

What am I worth to you, without conception?

What am I worth, without my body?

Price out: my mind, my skills, my potential, my ability.

Ignore even the parts that make you uncomfortable (I will learn

to be silent someday, I swear)

and still: the rubble you are left with

cannot build a home. 

Your pressure between my hips, I could crack beneath the weight

of expectation that you set down

gently in my gut. What am I without motherhood, without breasts,

without food and a desire to provide? 

What am I without open legs and a shut mouth what am I 

worth as a madonna if I only understand my pricing structure as a whore 

Like the haunted child's laughter I invite you

to follow me, here, this labyrinth, this maze of tall hedges

or black cave where you cannot see:

join me here, in the deep primacy 

of my anger, my spite, my justice. 

Dig in, but it will not save you.

Wear armor, but it will not protect you.

This battleground is strewn with others' lives, others' blood;

I am not ashamed. I am not done.

You needed me: 

you relied on me, on my strong hands and fierce teeth, 

to kill and conquer and build a Zion all our own.

You lived in my sandcastle, slept in my wolves' fur.

You needed me. And when the sun came up 

and you could see the sweeter groves, the wildflowers, so simple, pink,

I fell out of fashion. 

My bitter strength is no longer of use.

The power of my muscles and the taste of my sweat 

is no longer desirable.

Have I built my last soundscape? Fill me

with the noise of your fear. 

Blow this red sky open with the weight of your insistence:

that I cannot keep you, that I am not worthy. 

The sun will set again, crimson 

flames in an indigo sky, and Mercury will loom again 

over my dark horizon. The sun will set

and your summer child will have no sap left to sell. 

When the vultures come, they will tell you that I sent them. 

When the maggots rise, they will already know your name. 

Something is wrong with me.

--what?

If Mercury was here I would say cosmic

but for now I am stuck with continental.

Heartsick. I feel moon-beaten, like Sylvia.

--how do you know?

Doves with their necks broken, mud pits

full of flies, corn kernels undergrown and callused.

Come with me, I will show you.

--where are we going?

Always back to the water, little sister.

Bring your limestone heart, your coal eyes,

your granite bones. Come with me, I 

will show you.

She said, if this is what peace is

I don't want it, and resumed chewing

her fathers tobacco. The round tin

pressed into her hip, her pockets

flattened against her flat brown body

in the skin tight jeans she wore for you.

They don't even live here, I want to hiss.

They will never know you.

She crosses the bridge with them, plank

by plank sounding under their truck tires,

each thump another movement away from me.

She stays overnight most nights, reappearing

at lunch, smelling of sweat and grass 

and something I can't name, nighttime.

Or she slips silently back into the house

in the dark-dim of predawn, backlit

with lavender and secrets. 

I am a little black spider, she teases me,

crouching in the corners of the rooms.

I call her a wasp and run before she can swat me.

Ink on the sheets, lightning in the sky.

The amber heat of you, stretched smooth and gold

between your shoulders and elbows, elbows and wrists,

wrists to each determined, scarred knuckle.

I cannot pick a battle with you at all.

Ink on my skin, lightning in my mouth,

I entreat you, parlay you, assuage you.

Your ego and I, we conspire against you, we lay traps

you will never see. See how much I need you. See me

collapse inward, dying star, when you leave.

Stellar, cosmic, universal, I twist in the veins of your light,

full of dust and mysterious metal.

The spine of me, iron where there should be fluid, magnets

where cartilage should bend, snaps me

back to your arms quicker than the hiss of the incoming rain.

Ink on your skin, where I drew myself in.

Your fear, in the dark, is low

and rolls deeper than the thunder. I am elated.

I am strong.

You and me and that old Chevelle, the way the trees hung over us, a canopy.

Night and you and me, all of us hiding from streetlights and scenery.

Like if I could only see you, could only smell you, could only taste you

then I might belong to you, and the night, and the heat, and this car.

We are too old for this now, bound up in obligations and money and stress.

I could take you back there but the memories would not make it beautiful.

The streetlights slant in through the blinds, you are not entranced by me.

The cadence of your mouth on my skin, a breathable moment where

Christ and kinship and charity come together as a moment of heat:

blood of my heart, grip of my hands, bless me here

where I stand, arm in arm with you.

Sing hallelujah here under the open sky, praise these landscapes 

with me, these homes we lay ourselves down in, corn and concrete 

and the ache of new growth forests. We are yet young

and neither I nor anyone could predict this moment between us:

crush me to the wholeness of your need, drown me in the river of 

your pain, grow me strong and proud in the soil of your father.

Push with me toward the future, our easterly prize:

see me, taste me, hear me. I am yours, you are mine.

Take me back take me home take me to bed take me

back to myself let me crawl up your skin and into your mouth I will rake

ten half-bit nails across your back when you push into me tell me

I'm beautiful tell me I'm yours tell me you and I are something real

and less perfect and more human than anything I have ever been alone say

you love me while you look me in the eye let me look

at your body beneath me in the sunshine my temple my pool

you bring all the submergence of me to light let me taste 

the truth of us on your tongue

The places you and I choose to fight:

landlocked, hemmed in by concrete and corn.

I have never been so cozened.

You are sugar on my tongue: foliage in my hands, 

an ease in movement, pride and pleasure.

I would rather be tectonic, pyrrhic, 

an embodiment of the violence in my heart.

Silence and sugar mark me here, bruise me, but

heavy tongues demand crying time.

I can hear the doves from my bed. They whisper

pretty secrets, small complaints, bustled up

into your nest with self-important breasts.

I wish for their deaths, for foxes and hawks

to crest the hill in packs and flocks and rip them 

wing from ill-used wing. I pluck mint

and dill and thistle and consider

all the ways I cannot die.

Forty years is not so long.

I bet I could do that time with my eyes closed

and my legs open.

What is freedom? When you call me

Baby 

and wait for me to smile and croon

(I should never 

have sung to you in the first place I should never 

have used my voice at all)

but, strung out, kicking and choking, I 

trust you'll find me here.

Plate and pacify me,

bear me gold and oiled as the centerpiece 

of your traitor table

Else demand service. I rise for you, uncoiled 

at last. 

I will sharpen the knife. 

I light the candles: force my skin to soften

under hot wax and heavy hands. 

You cannot make a human into a home

Somebody should have told you that

You cannot house yourself in the space between his shoulders

You cannot burrow into the cave of his throat and say you are safe

There are no cupped hands large enough to contain the tornado that you are

There is no pale body that can conquer the tectonic motion that is you

You will not sit, aged, on an old couch holding hands

With an old lover watching daytime tv.

You will not sit, middle-aged, in a school or a daycare 

With your partner, sorting out kids needs.

You will not sit, blissed and wet, in a moment of peace

With your boyfriend, soaking up time away from the world.

Oceans do not crave algae.

They simply grow, and roar, and weave

Their own paths across the globe,

Making habitats where they will

And destroying environs that do not suit.

Earthquakes do not seek electricity, but

Decisively digest entire urban blocks 

And light the rest up with downed lines

And swallowed poles, on a whim, at their pleasure,

Without remorse. You are global:

A natural ferocity which cannot be bounded. 

Do not sink to the cravings of lesser beasts.

Without a violent relationship I have no outlet for the rage I feel

Without an uncaring relationship I have no outlet for the ice I create

Without an unstable relationship I have no outlet for the disquiet I feel

Without a substance-dependent relationship I have no recourse for the need I feel 

I dream of you and I

in places neither of us have yet been

in bodies we have not yet built

with history we have not yet lived.

I will love you there, beneath that future sky

I will taste your mouth and bless your tongue and,

under stars that are older than 

the deep tradition of you and I, brighter than 

the burning in my blood for your gaze,

farther away from us now than ever they have been:

there in the dark calm we will find our fears

and conquer them wholly.

somewhere under my sky you perch:

and because I will not leave without you,

my cold air and sullen stars and grinning predators

leave me before dawn gasps its pressure.

inhale here with me, now: what are we

but doves, caught soft and crooning?

your name has its own life

in my mouth, red and heavy and sweet.

when the stars fade I fear I'll lose

my direction but I cling to a faint memory

that the last time the sun rose, your voice

in the distance called me home.

Feral at midnight, a pair

of green lanterns in the underbrush,

I wait motionless

for your mistake and your misstep.

Ten curled claws and four incisors

will all meet in your flesh:

you are hot for me, you taste like iron,

you are the kindling for this inferno.

One taste will make me tame;

for a second I will 

purl the claws away, twist

and wind up into your lap like a lover.

Give it to me: give

me a mouthful of your sap, let the scent

of your injury climb my nose

and perch inside my mind.

Iron, chlorine, nitrites, pheromone:

you are my insistence, you are

the same instinct as keeps me kicking

up against the bark, climbing

to the canopy for protection and peace.

You are my drive toward aging, my only

need aside from rain and sun and meat.

Touch me here in

the deep deciduous night, rub your palms

against the beating body of me.

"In six hours, the sun will come up, and it will shine all day. And you'll get to see it."

I wish I was up in my bright city

Where the wind is hard and cold

Where, pressed between red bricks 

And new concrete, we become

Rock ourselves, sedimentary, imprinted

With the grit and grime of this place

I wish I was up in my bright city

I wish I was built of your dirt

I'll hang a sign above my door that says

You're welcome here

I'll lay a carpet down for your feet

And show a path with hot gold light

You crest the gateway of my heart and

I wait for you at the end of the road

I cannot take your hand, where in these forests

I am too afraid to roam alone; I see

Their eyes in every pine knot, hear their threats

In the moaning of the owls. This place

Is more wild than you know, and you

Will cross safer for that ignorance.

Forty years is not so long

I bet I could do that time with my eyes closed

and my legs open

What is freedom? When you call me

Baby 

and wait for me to smile, and croon

(I should never 

have sung to you in the first place I should never 

have used my voice at all)

but strung out, kicking and choking, I 

trust you'll find me here

Plate and pacify me,

bear me gold and oiled as the centerpiece 

of your traitor table

Soon

I will sharpen

the carving knife 

(Whether I am like you or you are like me does not matter,

one of us should stop)

You are the blood of me: somehow a whole heart.

Rising and red and smoking, motionless on a steel top table. (I 

have never been a cadaver but I would like to be)

but I am Lot's wife: a quiet, a crater.

I turned back for the salt of you.

I saw your face, and I loved you when you smiled.

I am Lot's wife, I am Herod's daughters, I am Joseph's promised bride.

Tell the story expecting not to see it in real life, and I 

will show you a pillar of salt, a pool run red with blood.

I am Lazarus' daughter, overcome 

with hatred for your body and your soul.

I refuse to rise, I refuse

to let you see the shape of me, lithe

and free and whole: I refuse

to let you take pleasure in my body.

I am David's thousand concubines: captured, purled

into a thousand sunlit poses

to capture your glance or your glare.

I pour resin over bruises, kohl the corners of my eyes.

The damage of you, your fists and 

your dust and your inability to hear me speak, 

will not take root here. I am Samaritan, 

I am come to heal my own. 

For me, women are

intuitively easy to love. You are

femme, the feminine, my goddess, enchantress, 

my witch of a thousand hearts. I burn for you.

I tell you all the things that I

will never allow myself to hear: you are

precious, you are beloved, I will hear you,

I will keep you safe.

You fall in love with me.

I house myself in the space between

your neck and your collarbone, that

slight divot where with breath 

or tongue or touch, you will shiver for me,  you will moan.

I wish for a copse, a sanctuary, 

a moment further in and far away where

surrounded by tall, dark trees 

and all their pine eyes I could whisper to you all my secrets.

This place does not exist, so neither do I.

I touch your chin, bring your 

mouth to mine. Goddess-child, in my hands

you are known, you are fire.

You burn me and my forests down, you birth us

wretched and charred into our next lives.

Your hands are so well remembered, here. Your mouth

my prize, my craving, my hope.

The peace of you sits in my heart 

and croons for itself, light on wing, softly slipped into the nest of me.

Where carefully stockaded mouths open

individually, the need

a tiny noise, attractive to predators,

instead your song lies alongside the rounded edges of me 

protective, precious.

My hands as fledglings against your chest land and fly

while you move within me, please

stay in the canopy with me:

please crest with me here, in the heights.

I pray for the safety of your arms

and the sky together, 

for the lifting of shoulders and pinions

in the face of all winds. 

What I need to say is that

If you put up with the next six months I can be

I can BE

I CAN be whole and true and real

If you can put up with the fear and anxiety and adjustment 

I will be loyal, i will be sweet, I will be honest, I will be kind

I will be worthy 

If you come thru this with me 

I will do right by you 

"You're pushing against years of being alone"

"Yes but I am not the only one pushing"

Oh god how fucking empowering 

What a blessed beautiful man 

Your face is a Möbius strip

 

In the beginning

(which is to say, after the end)

I keep the memories in my body,

poured in close to my cells, pond scum on my skin, 

algae in bloom.

After the end, or in the beginning,

I focus on how full I feel,

stockpiled and shored up against the coming drought

when I cannot hear the hum of you

or taste the salt of your body.

I focus on progress, the machinations of daily movements so that 

I keep plodding, easily, into the future

and towards the end, or the next beginning. 

Am I home? Am I lost? I am 

perpetually unsure, drunk on location, dazed

by the multiplicity of homelessness.

Show me a path, phosphorous-lit, with

little bug lanterns along the way,

and I will follow it. 

Let me sink deep in the mud, black with ferment,

let me swim in your brackish swamp, but I need

permission, a path, some placement.

I flirt with the mire and call you home

and wait for my next beginning.

Where I, a cat, stretch lithe

into the sunlight, unearned pleasure,

you are the cairn of rocks where

someday my pleasures and I will be herded.

Darkened into the future we lean:

and whether long limbs

carousing in the sunset will hurry

us there, or save us from going at all,

is a lost argument. Come purgatory, your hook

will still lay quiet in my sternum. 

in dreams that have become anathema
I crave the being of me for you:
I could be pretty &
clean, could be the anthem
of your desire, the rising pulse of you.
what I lose to the taste of you,
the quiet where now is
a wide grassland rippling with grasp.
you mar me, mark me, spread me
pale against an orange sunset.
here in my prairie
you are my lost shepherd, you are
my return to herd, my claimant.
sing me smooth:
my million wheat-heads tilt
to listen, the buds of me ripe and heavy
in the pressure of your mouth.
silence, later, becomes a lack.
I wish for weather, craving thunder
and a pale green sky above my earth.

Siren

You choose intractability:

I whirl as water around rocks in the shallows, 

I will sing you back to sleep.

The pressure of the atmosphere bows you down, sticks you

wriggling to the surface, pinned, appended.

Since I cannot give you empathy, I give

you music instead:

breathe for me, now, in tempo, bring your heart

to beat in this tune. If this is respite

then close your eyes, still your tongue, give me

that last slow smile.

You are slow in me, a catastrophe long and pure in development:

The soft suck of water off sand before the tall wave,

The hush under a green sky when the thunderheads begin to spin.

You are the still in the center of my storm,

The sight of me: show me gentle, show me dusk, show me warm.

Show me safe. In your heart I am smoothed of my edges,

Burnished instead of ragged. You touch the healed skin

Over long, old scars, and call me miraculous.

I look for something to prove that the body of you 

Was here, was hot, was love:

To sting as hard as the memories do, to prove

A physical truth

things justice is not:

Facebook statuses

hashtags

thoughts & prayers

the outcome of an election

philanthropy

public awareness

adequate time to grieve before the next tragedy 

don't make a home for it

don't let it get comfortable in your heart

don't make space for it under your skin

stop the electrical current in my brain that reads

I don't love anyone but dead people 

streetlight by streetlight the length between us grows.
every handshake, every side glance, another block.
you and i are miles apart in this city.

i am barefoot in the kitchen, coffee, hot and bittersweet,
the dregs sliding down the mug toward your lips
where you, in the living room, ignoring me, are feet up
and waiting for comfort and service and quiet. (when will
this shit find equilibrium, fuck) -- (you are
so eloquent) --

i am in bed after you've left, knees up, praying
that i am not barren. i have never hated you more.

years ago we laid in a baseball diamond under
a heated fog sky, you laughed at me, you reached for my
legs and hips. years ago there were long trips
in unstable cars, apartments dim in moonlight,
thin walls and neighboring conflicts. years ago
there was pressure, assurance, desire, the weight of our unborn
pressed into the pit of my stomach.

yellow globe by yellow globe i traverse this city.
you stopped waiting for me, and started standing still.

without this, then

you looking at me looking at you or

the crumbling facade of what i felt-- Roman, obscured, mosaic.

we must eat, sleep, shit, speak, or else

a murky kind of decay, the gradual disarray of the body:

sweat stains, unkempt curls on shoulders, blisters. 

perspective and the ability to write are all well and good but

equationally speaking, they do not even us out. 

without your demeaning attention i grow too large, secure,

find myself adrift in shipping lanes, directionless and valued.

diminution or some other challenge:

else loud, outrageous, captain and crew and seastorms for days.

breakers, tall grey thunderheads that charge an ornate prow.

your semen, desireless or not, adept at drowning.

somewhere in the dense swamp, a path, or light, or firm land may be--

but-- ten weeks later it closes, darkens, floods.

the blood of untold cells, the grinding of my flesh in the expulsion.

a rift where there was never space before. 

you must look past me now: or i might be freed to own

that hope, democratic surplus, bodily Pompeii. 

i might have named her Demeter, else

saltwater in the afterbirth, a warmth in the current.

me in the kitchen, bleeding, silence; or else

admission, honesty, a cold or underdone dinner. 

I am just now getting to the point where I feel myself to be at home 

The detritus of a woman made slow, made whole 

So much of the language of impact is masculine: heavyweight, bull, predator, slugger; even the hidden masculine of philosopher, academician, champion.

Yes I feel that way too

I read race books because nobody writes beautiful haunting polemics on rape

I read race books because no one ever tells rape survivors to expect, much less embrace, the white-clean rage that becomes a prescribed burning

I read race books because microaggressions against rape survivors are constant, everywhere, socially supported, the whisper that says don't jump so obviously when the door behind you slams

I read race books because my well-meaning therapist couldn't trace the deep fear of realizing that the criminal justice system was set up to protect my aggressor and not me 

I read race books because I needed someone to tell me that they too knew what it was to be wholly ostracized and wholly written off as of no further capitalist or socioeconomic worth 

I read race books because no one writes grounded, historical studies on the pervasive violence of men upon women from a vantage point that does not privilege the view of masculine primacy 

I read race books because James told me what it was to be invisible, Zora told me what it was to be hunted, Frantz told me what it was to carry a burden, and Toni told me what it meant to reclaim humanity in the face of deep injury

I read race books because the voices that I found there knew what it was to designate a whole swath of humanity as violent, criminal, aggressive, to be feared, to be avoided, to hold at arms length even the individuals who do not seem to behave in the way of the group they belong to, to expect hurt from an entire demographic, and be right 

when the people around you start finding out you put hennessey in your morning coffee

the jokes you will make:

I've been around you too long

(I've been around that black man too long)

the best part of waking up

is henny in my cup

it's not problem drinking when the problem is I'm not drinking AMIRITE

the slips you will make:

yes it really helps me I feel better all morning

all Saturday

morning

I meant 

none of this matters.

they will still slaughter elephants for ivory, they will still

sell 12-year-olds at the Super Bowl.

my mother will still tell me I can't wear horizontal stripes and I 

will still curl up to you, lonely in a big brick city,

and ask you why we do not fuck any more.

the jokes you will make:

are you never lettin go cause Kanye warned a boy

do you want some water for your thirst

(I don't)

(I have coffee with hennessey)

i wake up deafened from the volume at which my dreams have been screaming at me
my grandpa forgot he wanted to die in january and by the time he remembered it was may

i wake tired from running, immured from the fear by sheer exhaustion
i dream of the state mental hospital where they shut him up with the weather channel

i wake slow with images still real for my eyes, my pulse too fast from the fight
the cold fragility of his hands, five slim bones collected in my hot, fleshy grasp

i wake with skin scraped pure from the purl of the carpet where i twisted and retched
i could not save him from the smell of vomit, the taste of pill casings, the glare on linoleum tile

gifts i accept from your mouth:
acceptance, charity, understanding, story.
i do not know what to say to you but i know that you will listen while
my errant tongue spits out ire and fear and self-protection
faster than your warmth can disarm me.
for you i might be beautiful, who could say?
for you i might be peace or solidarity or support,
or produce some amalgam between your mouth and mine:
i should be so careful, to capture you in this way.
secrets i cannot even whisper to myself
insist on writhing out over the breakfast table,
wet and trailing seed as they arc toward your hands.
they are limp for you, a relaxed twining
of the worst of me, a seeking of stillness and rot.
and you will only listen, and tell me i am wrong--
you will not notice these entrails
till the heart of me, red and steaming, is laid out
before you like a lie i couldn't keep.

some days you are called to let someone's heart break
at your kitchen table, in your car, on your phone
some days you are called to witness their breaking
with your eyes, with your hands, in your lap, in your mouth

i hope we heard you
i hope we touched you

i want to sit with my grief
look it in the eye
sing with it
but it won't sit still

it ranges, restless, between the extreme and obscene
between mimicry and denunciation
it insists on action where i would seek pause
it insists in community where i would seek solitude
it insists on meaning where i would seek space
perhaps following
grief
is the best direction i can take

i have underestimated the necessity of reflection

this winter i am alone but you are somehow still everywhere i am
i walk, hunched shoulders against the howl, down
icy sidewalks where no one would catch me if i fell and
somewhere in the rush of that cold and the bricks
is your name, somewhere between home and the vacuous hiss
of snow around my ears is the timbre of your voice

this winter i am present but still somehow you pull on me
away from what this is, the ease of connection to one's body when
knees and biceps and cheeks all tremble together
in the bitter wind, i have lost the ability to speak back
to the rhythm of my blood when you take me so by surprise:
on every streetcorner, a flickering lamp of your heartbeat