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