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