Mifepristone

Breath to glass like she always is during afternoon thunderstorms, palms pressed down against her guts.

She and the cat both noses to the open window, scent of the sun going down, warm asphalt to cold wet grass.

The apartment has been too quiet today. I have only been here to watch.

The bleeding continues from last night, she lays claim to all of it, the blood is no one’s but hers.

It rained all day, gray sheets that kept the nausea down as she keened out over our neighbor’s rooftops.

This is the morning we have bought ourselves, we can be nowhere but here.

When she stands in the bathroom doorway, little moth in overgrown wings, I can see her breathing steadying.

She has been everything: pounding, heaving, pleading, trusting.

She weathers the storm, inhabits each moment. The blood is no one’s but hers.

The list expanding on its own

A girl head back and wheeling under the starlight that starts to look like fluorescent bars.

She is tired of wondering, waiting, she would rather be swimming, stealing.

When they talk to her, are they the soft-gentle-dangerous of a parent speaking to a toddler?

How can she be sure that the law of gravity still applies?

The clock is moving backwards now, its traitor hands envisioning a world where she is not.

She breathes deep: diaphragm, shoulders lifting, playing the counting games that Nancy taught.

They are speaking still, but the words slide, sideways, grazing against her ears and making no impact.

Milk is on the grocery list three separate times, the grocery list is scrawled into her inner thighs, where no one else can help her read it.

There are church bells, somewhere, not here, but still she can hear them.

Her ears ring, she thinks angels are probably silent, and that’s why the men in the Bible were so afraid while the women took peace, took strength, took harmony.

The shower is a bodily horror, ten thousand pinpricks on skin that sloughs off too easily.

How can she be sure that the law of gravity still applies?

White men in white coats who want her to five things she can see, four things she can hear, but

When she says what she sees, what she hears, they shake their heads, goats in the field, bearded in distrust and illness.

She smells the swisher sweets Marshawn used to smoke, she wonders what his afterlife smells like.

Gravity must apply, because the feeling ebbs, the tears still fall straight down.

Who is touching me? She screams. Lightning behind her eyes, thunder between her ribs. More awake than alive.

I was born with Orion hunting over my head. My skin is the color of the Midwest late winter, my eyes the color of light pollution refracted in industrial smog and falling snow.
I too am a hunter, proud and shouldering up among the predators to ease my hunger. The hunger is carbon-based, salt-scented, the taste of steel and sweat.

if i still know you tomorrow, i will want to keep learning you; i will want more of your stories, more of your jokes, more of your laughter in my ears.
if i still know you next week, i will want more experiences of you: let us go together into the old and the new, to see and revision all that we could know.
if i still know you next month, i will want a deeper understanding of you; what is truth, if not your dark eyes? where is truth, if not between us, face to face?
if i still know you next year, i will want to love you better: help me learn the best ways to support you, give me opportunities to keep showing up for you.
if i still know you in the next decade, i will want you. i will want your reactions, your intentions, your ideas, your journeys, your dreams. i will have wanted you, every day for years. and i will still want to walk by your side.

i have struggled with the parlance of the new genealogy: for the resurgence in popularity of naming your ancestors, naming their presence in your body and your instincts and your desires. i have struggled for years with any closeness with my family: i have broken those bonds in irreparable ways, in needed ways, in freeing ways, and the result is a gulf that cannot be bridged, a freedom that cannot be removed.

i think that all my ancestresses followed the rules. i think they lived hard, and worked hard, and raised families that were complex and damaged and normal. i think my mother, and her mother, and her mother raised daughters who followed the rules. straitlaced is not a metaphor when the only four-generation photo we have is three women in corsets and a baby.

i imagine that they died silent, that they simply quieted down, worn out, worn away. i imagine their frail hands, pale as the parchment paper they lined pastry pans with, folded across their sunken bellies, old cotton as their last embrace. i imagine that they followed the rules even in death, keeping their secrets and their sins and the sins and secrets of others. i imagine that they died silent because their last words are on my lips.

the christian scientist gets an abortion

Throwing off bell curves and bell jars since high school, I have lived and suffered all of what you praise me for now. I have testified in front of my mother and my legislators  the same number of times. Why can’t you see me?

I have written, over and over and over, of all the ways I was hemmed into preordained ingredients, sewed piece by piece after a pattern and baked into place, and I have been lying to myself the whole time.

IF I was brought up to believe that man is god’s perfect image and likeness

AND that angels are god’s thoughts passing to man

AND who I am is a crumbling wreck of fabric remnants strewn across the shining linoleum of my mother’s house

AND the thoughts that live with me are those of adherence to chemicals and all the ways that sex and violence leave the same taste in the mouth

THEREFORE what conclusion can be drawn but that I have been lying?

IF I have been an addict my whole life

AND addiction is a disease

THEN my entire upbringing has failed.

But still. Who has lied to whom? And who has failed?

The history of my body reads as an opening in the earth, a growing chasm with unknown depth, a quarry they’ll mark as dangerous, for others to keep away. Synonymous with fail, the action of aborting has defined me in ways I can’t quantify. Two is a wrong number, when the outcomes have been manifold. One partner is a wrong number, when the ramifications have touched every partner I’ve had since.

have i gone crazy: a checklist

When people talk to me, are they using a regular tone of voice or the kind of tone one generally reserves for irate toddlers?

When I look around, are objects generally behaving according to the law of gravity?

When I check the clock, is it a chronologically later time than the last time I checked the clock?

Am I breathing from my diaphragm or has my breath always been hanging out somewhere between my shoulder blades?

When someone speaks to me, am I processing their words in a way that enables me to respond?

Why is milk on the grocery list three separate times? Nancy said lists would help have I listed enough things?

Am I actually hearing church bells? Is there a church within earshot?

Have I been able to care for my body adequately today? Have I eaten? Have I showered?

Where is my action plan? What did I say that I would do in these moments?

Have I called Nancy too many times this week?

Have I done a grounding exercise? What can I feel, taste, hear, hear, hear, hear

Am I injured? If yes, can I feel it? Am I reacting appropriately to the injury? If no, where is all this blood coming from?

MarShawn isn’t here, why do I smell his cigarettes? Can dead people still smoke?

Is someone telling me where I am? Is it likely that I don’t know where I am?

Who is touching me?

Am I safe? Am I safe? Am I sane?

we have both learned, you and i, the hard lessons of penance for our decisions. for years spent in wrong endeavors and the years of absolution that come when the end result is wrong: the doing and undoing, the pushing and stalling. the need for a catalog of what we've had to swallow, the lists of wrongs we've righted for ourselves and for others.

these are my confessions:
that i have taken pride in your presence: that i am proud to offer you my broken spine and tangled mind.
that i lust for you: that i write sonnets for your hands, couplets comprised of your eyes and mouth, gospel rhythm for the twining of your legs between mine.
that i have a wandering heart: that when you touch me it leaps to your fingertips, following you across my skin and aching for closeness.
that i am gluttonous: that i will eat memories of you for each meal, soak up every spare minute in your day, chase down every dream you seek and present them with apples in their mouths, shining, on a golden platter.
that i have transgressed, and that i will transgress again: i have broken every trite norm that stood between me and my absolute love for you, that i will violate history and geography and meteorology to predict a beautiful future in which we are whole, and easy, and purely ourselves.

bless me, lover, for i have sinned, and will sin against any deity who crosses the path i lay for us. bless me, lover, with more grace, and forgiveness, and all the time you will allot me: i am grateful for every moment.

there are always freckles across the bridge of your nose, i wait for the dimple in your left cheek to appear. i promise i will not take so long, this time.

i wax full for you, a lunacy all my own: distemper that is immediate, flourishing, rose-colored and thick with the many lives light lives while it travels to your eyes. i circle you, pulling on you, with gravity for hope.

there are always flecks of green and gold in the dark of your eyes, there is always one loose curl along your jaw. for you i return, and return, and return.

I would do so much more for your voice than just listen. The dark doorways of your eyes and your words, walking me up to them, will you let me in? I am here, I am here for you.
I wait for the lilt of your laughter, the rising capriciousness of your voice, an octave up and explicating all the ways I deviate for you. Tell me again where the poetry lies, between your hands and mine. The hot of your mouth, the soft of your skin, and all the ways you see me: I will always stop for the timbre of your song.
What could be more of a blessing? The intonation of you overlaid in my life: that I could see through the golden spectrum of you, a warmer vision of the future, a gentler self in my shining later days. That you would hold my hand through all of this, and on the other side, we will both taste honey and daffodils.

In the center of your mouth, under your warm tongue, is the home of all my designs and desires. For the taste of you, what wouldn’t I build? A future rapt with happiness, taut with promise. For the touch of you, what wouldn’t I destroy? I am no diplomat, I am not peaceable, but for the slowness and sureness of your breathing at night I too will keep a patient pace. The blueprints written between your hands and mine shine with future work. I graft a shelter against your goodness, prop myself up in the safety of your heart; you grow me stronger, prouder, absolved in the soft structure of your love.

Self fulfilling prophecy

I woke up calm today. Do you know what that means? To wake up calm, after weeks of hurricanes and riptides, chunks of me swept out into that grey expanse. I woke up calm, and even looking something like myself again.

You’ve figured out how to look me in the eyes. You even had a whole word for me this time. And I? Have nothing left to give you in return.

For a heart so used to love, and then so filled with hate, I am surprised it remembers how to beat with no emotion left to turn the wheels.

That if I could spend all the time and depth of my days pleasing you, it would please me—that if I could anchor your smile in the works of my hands, it would give me reason for joy—I am no Bethsheba, I am not temperate or a peacemaker or a diplomat but that if I could only solve for the problems of your heart I would be at peace—that I can learn patience for the slowness and sureness of your breathing soft at night—that the labor of my body is bent toward the trajectory of finding you at the end of my roads. I am exhausted, emptied, pressed gross and hard into the template of my last ten years but for you my bones creak over old breaks, skin heals over old holes, I am reaching for a wholeness I thought I’d never find. In the center of your mouth under your warm tongue my soul grovels for you.

The very special time I had in the suburbs with you

I daydream about threatening to tell your wife that we fucked
Responding to your next invasion of my space with a retort spat syllable by syllable through a decade of withheld  contempt
On the days when I want to kill myself I think maybe you are the only man I ever actually wanted
I remember, you see? I cannot forget.

On the bridge over the river in Ohio, on the bridge over the creek in Maryland, on the bridge over the metro in DC, you never tried to hold my hand.

I dream about pulling your teeth out with pliers, sometimes all of them and sometimes just one, in the front, handing you gauze, wordlessly walking away.
I dream about my workplace being shot up by a man in a mask, having to smear my body with the blood of others and hold my breath while a man in a mask inspects my body for signs of life.

Generations ago the women who stood close to death were part of how we all saw ourselves. They presided over births, deaths, weddings, the digging of new foundations. They watched as death roamed farther and closer, and lent help where they could, knowledge where it was actionable, solace where it was palatable.

We think ourselves so removed, now. Safe in bubbles of technology and isolation and security and noise. How safe are you really? Blinded as I am by modern anxieties and frailties I can’t see death on its paths, but I can feel it as it waxes and wanes. We are not so far from it now. How do you know the next bar fight won’t be your last? How do you know the furnace isn’t spitting out invisible, odorless death? How do you know that I won’t turn the ignition the next time you’re pumping gas into the tank?

i am holding myself together, two hands wrapped around a mess of raw and bloody meat. my dependencies rise like so many maggot children from the spoils of my guts, feasting on the decay and every declaration that i am sane, or safe, or sober. i entrench straitlaced behavior into all of my interactions, cinch artificial boning up tight around the stack of compromises that i am, but there is no corralling the sweet slop. wrecked, i am holding myself together, but in my grip the marrow slides out of the bones, and the rot is my gradual destruction.

Loving you is my heart stopping when you express dissatisfaction in how we interact. Loving you is terror when you begin a sentence with “can you not”. Loving you is exhaustion after an emotional exchange. Loving you is navigating different communication styles. Loving you is recognizing my trauma and my mental illness and owning them in our interactions. Loving you is supporting your need for space, for expression, for absolute honesty. Loving you is finding solutions.

I build an altar in my house, then tear it down for lack of devotions. My prayers are bruises left on the inside of your thigh, each mark one word in the sentence that climbs toward ascension. The litany of graces I am asking for: purple blooming on your neck, your chest, your shoulders, your hips. I purl you like a rosary, turning you over and over and over in my rough hands. 

In the beginning there was heaven and earth and rage, which mixed with mud to build my home. I have been void, restless, crawling over the face of this planet in search of soul, or apex predators. And then I saw your face, and I saw that it was good. 

When the grey clouds gather, they will already know your name: I have whispered it to every drop of mist that waits, like me, to fall. In the quiet moments before the thunderstorm sinks its teeth into the earth, I call you to service: let me worship with you, in the grace of your body. Let me earn, inch by inch, the sacrament of your taste. 

to love someone with the freedom of acknowledging and putting down all the baggage i have accumulated in loving those who came before

i am not pleasant to you because i have forgiven you, i do not keep my peace because i have forgotten. when you stalk someone, you prove them negligible, make them silent, erase their visibility: there is no boundary that can keep me safe, there is no sentence that will make you understand. i wait for your next harm, i expect your next transgression. i accept you in the public circles of my life because there is no space in which my presence is prized more than yours, there is no world in which my safety is more important than your ego and self-assurance. i will never be believed over you. but do not mistake me not picking this battle for the quiet of a truce.

dark your heart at rest on the mantel, loosing time with your grandfather's clock. crouched over your ill-lit desk, hunched over your minuscule work, the minutiae of gestures you make as you fix the small broken things that you fix. in silence here you groom the grief, burnishing old emotions and letting them rise like reflections in the curve of old brass. with oiled talons you separate each strand and make them gleam with your mourning. whatever cannot be gained on this perch was never worth having, an affirmation with each self-loving stroke.

once, you and i (a chapter, a story) were carving an exit. one hand on you, one hand for the axe that gets us through, in your hand the light that glows blue. once, you and i (a limerick, a pun) were pacing through graveyards. eulogies and obituaries dredge up around our ankles, our knees, our hips, but the brightness glows between our mouths. once, you and i (a boulder, a breakwater) were learning the shore, finding the inlets, gracing new ground. the sun rises and falls but between us, the light does not falter. once, you and i (a bet, a lifeline) stumbled separately, then found each other's hands.

The silent house nags at me, magnifying what can be heard—the slow leak of the faucet I can’t fix, the whining of a stomach digesting cheap food—but I keep it bone quiet at night now because it assures me that no other human is in here with me. The rattle of my own lungs is so audible I am sure there are no other beating hearts.
Still I startle at the wind, verify locked doors, overinspect dark corners and closets I know are empty. I am not being chased by him any longer, i dont think—it’s been years since the last contact—and my exes have learned to stay away in the same manner by which my friends have learned to call first and expect little.
What I am being stalked by now is my own fear, the murmuring of my terrors inside my veins. What haunts me now is not a spirit, not even a memory, but a possibility: I have had enough near misses, surely my death has figured me out. How many lives am I granted? How many escapes, how many guardians, how many serendipitues? Behind my bedroom door a car crash, in the attic an active shooter, in the back of my closet an intruder. Under my bed, the long, slow arc of cancer; in my bed, the hush and hurry of overdose.
At best I am an uneasy sleeper, and more likely than not to get up when my brain prompts me at 3am to listen more closely for a second heartbeat. Walking through the dark house in the middle of the night each night, throwing open doors and cabinets, standing motionless in the dining room to be sure I haven’t heard footsteps in the basement. Barefoot, fearful, the pressure of my mounting luck bearing down between my shoulder blades. How much longer can I go unharmed, when there is so much harm to encounter in the world? This streak has been too long, I am preparing for its end.

i miss the whiskey wet of myself, my own outstretched heart, solvent in the bright beers of this city, reaching for others' smiles and jokes and bright eyes. dried up i lurch against the plaster walls that patch this poor town together, evasive, alone, and scared, scraping elbows and wrists against limestone, coming up red with brick dust. the me that once floated through half-lit streets, arm in arm with laughing dancers and stumbling grace, lurks in the center of my guts, twisting remembered happiness in her fists, throwing handfuls of past adorations up into my mouth. half-dry brain forgets what its goal was, reviews dormant friendships and stalled socializing and decides regret has always been my home base anyway. wasted or unlubricated, i have never been far from guilt.

in the cashier's line and my heart begins to race, my pulse begins to rise, erratic, thrusting my body into reaction. my head swims and my cheeks heat and i think i could faint standing right here in this convenience store for no better reason than that i am sober.
at work someone drops a stapler behind me and my reaction is too blatant to not have to laugh off to those around me. but the panic that has risen in my chest still threatens to choke me, my breath is shallow and high and fast. my hands are shaking and i wish i could physically press the anxiety down back into my stomach, but it spreads and spreads for no better reason than that i am sober.
interaction after interaction, i deal with the surprise, the doubt, the you're-joking-right questions of people i used to down bottle after bottle alongside. one raised eyebrow and i think i could sink into the floor, or possibly self-immolate, based just on how i feel in these moments. the depression has already risen above my throat, wet and still rising, and i think maybe my next drink will be a nice long dose of self-hatred, the mud of my loathing and fears, for no better reason than that i am sober.
quiet, calm, alone in my home, the thought crosses my mind that i will probably die the next time i do coke. and this doesn't cause sadness, or worry, or fear, but a tight, sarcastic smile, and a whole embrace of that eventuality. my death and i hold hands comfortably now for no better reason than that i am sober.

in the morning i thrill towards the sunrise, the pale plate of the lifting sun across a horizon where you and i have walked. the pink of your mouth, the bright of your skin, the retreating darkness of your eyes as they open to mine, there is nothing here that does not remind me of you. the birds that race across the horizon call your laughter back to me, trill the pert melody of my heartbeat when your hands are on my face. when, finally, i must bow my head and walk into my day, it is with you applied to my parched soul, memories burnishing my desert skin, the taste of you strung across me tip to tip.

Cirrus like skeletons in the sky, and the waxing moon like a heart in a cage. Adam lost a rib, and the world flourished in myth: but you and I are not bone, or clay and spit, or padlocked boxes of the sensuous unknown. Standing in your kitchen, chest to chest, palm to palm, we are as much the wind and shadows and moon as we are bloodborne mammals, cold and hot with longing. If I am gentler for your touch, I will later prick myself on my own claws to be sure of my sting; if I am hardened to your grace, I have lost already the key to the padlock on the box. Be soft here with me, and refuse to be mute. I wish for your teeth meeting in my throat, I wish for the hush of your breath against my cheek. Whisper to me all your secrets, breadcrumbs to the place where you hide. Where neither of us is asked to go, we build a garden, and grow.

Vows, month 3

Resign yourself to the wholeness of my love. Stop fighting me, and I will stop fighting you. Our resistance is so similar, yours and mine, born of wary self determination and staunch independence. You trace my scars with kind words, I put my mouth to your hard-won skin. Be soft here with me, and refuse to be mute. Where neither of us is asked to go, we build a garden, and grow.

when i am king you will be first against the wall -- "paranoid android", radiohead

when the revolution comes, we will all be asleep in our beds. we will be asleep in times square, we will be asleep at the wheel, we will be asleep in our cubicles and on airplanes. we have slept so well, beloved, but soon it will be time to wake.

when the revolution comes, it will be quiet. it will be the word "no", whispered at first. it will be a routine changing of the guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier. it will be an easy, purple dawn. it will be the rhythm of the iron wheels on wooden tracks, but not the whistle, not the warning, not yet.

six weeks post-withdrawal

Eating less and throwing up more, you've lost weight? You look great! Thank you, thank you. I am made of coal, layers of dead things condensed into fuel that is only kindling, only kindling, but thank you, I think the black looks good on me too.
Waking up during the night crying, your skin is so clear! Thank you, I scrub with salt every morning, burnish with bar soap and dollar store body lotion. The minerals feel at home with me, become part of my sedimentary complexion, the grit that sloughs off of me when I sweat for the cum of my lover.
Social aversion tickling the edge of agoraphobia, why aren't you coming out tonight? So that when I do go out, I am standing in a crowd of people daydreaming about my attic, with the windows that won't open and the dust begetting dust begetting dust, and how easy it would be to dismantle myself cell by cell into that same dust, to let my blood and spit and bile evaporate and crack apart bits of my own bones and grind my teeth enough that the next owner can only wonder at the amount of dust in the attic in the house that they buy.
Smoking so much that the cough has come back, isn't it a lovely night? Just look at the moon. The moon and Mercury and Mars, triumvirate of my body, two elbows and a rib cage beating. The pretentiousness of war, who am I fighting? What is there to say to myself other than that I am yellow cowardly, yellow foolish, yellow bruise-just-healed. Red inside of my eyelids, red where I bit my nails down too far, red between the teeth I can't bring myself to care for, great riptide that swamps me in loathing and fear. The moon and Mercury and Mars, and I a compass between them, retching up the beauty and the bracing of their weight.

Damaged and unguarded, the length of me cast haphazard over your bed, I barely hold my own head up in the presence of your grace. My hands feel heavy, heavy, slow, casting long arcs out over your skin, hoping to catch at your pleasure, lure your soft sighs. Mouth to mouth, I would no sooner give up the taste of you than my own heat-making, heat-seeking tongue. The startle of the word love on your lips never gets old, never gets worn, never loses its glitter and promise.

I am tired, love. I have met you at the crest of a long journey, a thankless chore of a decade which took its measure from my soul and skin. I touch your jaw, circle your ear, brush back your beautiful unruly hair, sapping tiny bits of life from your body. If I asked you to fill me, we would both waste away.

Instead we build a new scaffolding, a sturdy tower of intertwined brawn: we are neither of us too scared, we are neither of us too weak, we are neither of us too lost to raise this up. My grip on your arms, the soft lean of you late at night onto my chest. A perfect faith: that when we ascend what we have built, we will still have our feet in the earth and our souls in the sea.

I don’t owe you my story.

None of us do. #metoo was powered by the overwhelming rage of wronged people, rage which was never dormant but that has burned in so many hearts for so many years, actively, souring every day and every interaction until it could see the sun. We do not owe you the buried memories, the hidden tears, the shaking hands, the long, bleak nights. We do not owe you our truths, or even the names of our abusers and attackers.

But we have given them in the name of community: so that we could reach out and find others, so that others could find us, and so that together we could show you all the gravity and the breadth of the tragedy we face.

And if you think that survivors can’t see who among us is reading these stories with acceptance or apology versus who is getting off on them—if you think that people who list among their achievements not being dead yet can’t see the remaining predators and all the ways they continue to stalk prey—then you’ll learn, when the magma overflows. No volcano stays quiet, no fault line refuses to rupture.

The intentions of this morning:
grey, and chill, and the promise of your heat
kept quiet under covers that smell like sex.
And I am too restless, too choked with what I leave unsaid
so I leave too, to the grey, still chill of morning concrete
where cigarette smoke twines up my body
lovingly, appreciative of all the places you have touched me.

What do we build? The blueprints are illegible, we spend
hours deciphering their greyed text. We spend hours
face to face reading, trying, editing, rereading, retrying.
I am a simple book. Keep me by your bedside;
I am content.

I am watching your hips sway, your hands expand,
the note of pleasure growing from your eyes to your smile.
I am rapt, wrapped in the glory of attention and attentiveness.
If this were my last dawn, if this lightning strike
was the end of my hurricane season—still I would take your hand,
pull you down the iron stairs, sink us deep
into the receiving earth, green for when the rains begin.
Your fingerprints remain visible, of all
the tired patterns of my skin.

For Sophie on your one year anniversary of sobriety—

There is no benediction that can offer you more grace than what you have already given yourself. 

You are a blessing: your words, your decisions, your actions, your presence. 

Jonah, while still inside the whale, said: what I have promised, I will make good. 

And you have made so much good in the past year. 

May you find your footing on every sidewalk, and on every rocky beach. 

May the stars and the moon and the sun greet you, touch you, inspire you. 

May the music you write prove to you the beauty and the power of your creativity.

May the many labors of your body and your heart and your mind demonstrate your capabilities and all your contributions. 

May the wind coming in off the lake remind you always of your ability to be refreshed, regrowing, revisioning, renewed. 

May the coming year shine with all the good that you make. 

the sensory nearness of you after i've left: ankle deep in wet grass in my backyard, watching quick clouds recover the moon. your mouth and its smiling, gasping, whispering, laughing, twisting in my heart, echoing in the strings of stars that curve above my face. bury me here, in the summer wet, that i will always remember the slick of you between my hands.

below this darling cliff are the rocks of bitter lies and cold years, but i have already leapt the edge, your face and the ghosts that offer to catch me as i fall. glowing, i attract metallic swarms of late season insects to my sides, aphrodite attended by the thoughtless hordes. and whether i am feeding on the insects or the swarm is feeding on me is too close to call, so i drift freely in the humid night, thatching my dreams together with spit. a peace, a calm, your voice, a thousand times your name.

i am not worthy of what you give me; this does not prevent me from asking for more.

your hands on my skin and i am searching, i am lost, lost, lost. your breath is a command and i am following you down, closer to heat, closer to grace. this is one path i know i can find without signs, reading only the direction of your hips. i press my lips to your skin, i would leave a trail of my own, know that i was here, remember my taste. you are the king of my mouth and i am loyal, loyal, loyal.

who could say what you did out there under the moon? i can speak only to the wind i heard, its increase as your voice pitched upward. who could repeat what you cast out into the night sky?

Garish, the color of my lips on your skin, but I am never ashamed of how much I want you. Stark the bruises I leave on your chest: blame the way I need to taste you, grind the texture of you against my tongue. The red of me hunting down the red of you, a chase I cannot see an end for. Hide me in the dark corners of your room, the breath of calm before the rising sun, and let me wrap my arms around you: know me here, where quiet reigns, and there is only the pulse of our blood.

I know you’ve been hurt and my scars show too
But I’ll never let anyone else get to you
She took safety from you, took assurance, took pride
And the memories still tear you up inside
I can see that you’re scared but I need you to know
I’ll give back what was taken, I’m gonna show
You all the ways that I love you, all the ways you can trust
And tonight we’ll find time to focus only on us
And I’ll tell you I love you, and you’ll hear my heart
We can practice this love as our own healing art


I know you’ve been hurt and my scars show too.  I’ll never let anyone else get to you. She took safety from you, took assurance, took pride, and the memories still tear you up inside. I can see that you’re scared but I need you to know: I’ll give back what was taken, I’m gonna show you all the ways that I love you, all the ways you can trust. And tonight we’ll find time to focus only on us: I’ll tell you I love you, and you’ll hear my heart. We can practice this love as our own healing art.

blessed as i am by your presence, i wonder what penance i will pay later. deep in the rapture of your mouth, crossed by the insistence of your thighs, i dread already the wrench of your eventual loss. break my heart before the plagues arrive, abandon me before armageddon; let the cost mete itself from me every day until i am sufficiently contrite. for the taste and touch of you, i would give up every sin.

it rains and i remember the scent of your hair; at night i can think only of the stars in your eyes. wet to the root with adoration for you, i grow new muscles, bud new bones. in the garden i suspect that eve is all of them, instead of either of us. you and i stand waist-deep in the mud as pillars of abstention, flirting in the sunset with history, myth, and mire.

sylvia said that the heart beats i am, but these days mine boasts you are, you are, you are. 

One day a woman that I love is pressed against my side on a very old couch that we have treated twice for bedbugs and she says, quietly, “healing takes too long.”
And she is right, though I won’t realize it for several more years. My experiences of injury and healing are limited to minor and medium physical ailments. I have sprained a wrist, had my wisdom teeth out, run jagged scars across an arm by falling out of a tree and onto concrete. Healing in this sense can be long, but has a timeline, has a nurse who will lift a bandage and say, oh just about another week now.
I have not yet begun to work through the spiritual scars that I bear, but she and I bonded first over having left restrictive religions and the ways they can etch constraint into your soul. So when she says, healing takes too long, I do not realize that she means, I am looking for a shortcut.
We break up some weeks later but stay in touch for a few more years; she moves to New York and I will not disentangle myself from the life I’ve painstakingly built and am already paying steep costs for.
I see her once more, some two years after the breakup, a year into her stint in Brooklyn. She is frighteningly skinny, effervescently cool, angular in ways that make me sure I will break her if I breathe on her. We meet, she drinks her dinner, and when she drags me to the bathroom I am filled with reminiscences of past ardor, moments in which we could not separate, but she is offering a key bump, and my hands on her waist are grasping raw hips, sharp skin, old grief.

On having a panic attack immediately after an orgasm with a new partner

what is it about me that so clearly telegraphs to the people around me that I want to be hurt? but, this isn’t the right question.
on what part of my body is the sign hung that reads, hit me—jolt me—loosen me, deaden me, bruise me, please—please try to break me—
and how did he know, the first one that did it, that I would like to be choked? that I would not just allow the vise of his fist meeting in my throat but press up into it, eager for incapacitation?
this still is not the right question. I am assuming intention when I wonder if he thought about whether I would like it. I am assuming that some groveling part of my soul did not come leaking out of my mouth, begging from the corners of my eyes—please—take more than my body—take air too—take the rhythm on which every animal relies, on which we predicate every idea of what it means to be alive—take that—it is too heavy for me to hear—
and so here, in this bed, with a new lover whose good heart and good intentions are foundational to why I am in this bed in the first place, here I go silent, when inside my head I can hear my own first scream, and it is echoing in every cell of my body and every cell is screaming back WE REMEMBER THIS
YOU DID NOT LEAVE THIS BEHIND and the vise that crunches my muscles into my bones is not here, not now, it is years old and thousands of miles away, and I am still suffocating, and I am still fighting toward my first scream

Accepting new beginnings as next steps:
Not demanding the penultimate of each twist in the road

Accepting each heart as its own blessing:
Not cataloguing all the things I could be, or ask

Collecting each wave as it comes, the lessons I can learn, and longevity:
Existing in each tide, not just waiting for the next

The joy in the motion of each step:
The joy of selecting where to put my feet

Take what is beautiful and make it hurt
Take the single best gesture of commitment and connectivity, and let it drive you away from the person who offers it
Take affection and desire and adoration and let them trigger you
Let the purest thing you want, embody your trauma
Let it drive you away from open hands and an honest heart and those dark eyes and that laugh and the mouth it comes from

Or else what? What path can be charred beyond the confines of the body and its neurotic keeper?
What can you hope for beyond strict walls, righteous guilt of your upbringing, all the ways you were taught to crush emotion?

If you want this, you will break new ground
If you trust this, you will speak on what you need
If you are capable of this, you will find a wan

for what do I thank you now, Lord?
for what blessings—which experiences—
which skill sets gifted via trauma and lack—
for what I was told when I was young?
who shall I trust now except my mortal self?
You could not even save me from myself—
there is no redemption, no grace in this plan.

I am god now: arbiter, judgment, creator of pain.
I am god now: aloof, invisible, untenured and ultimate.
who can tame me now? the works of my hands are many,
and I am not afraid of consequences only I can leverage.
you leave me and I grow: abandon me, and I am untempered and unmeted in my ability.
ectoplasmic, stellar, sequential. I am a spore.
who can tame me now?

All day I spin my single wheel of waiting for peace, or quiet. All day I press the fiber to itself, cowl it around the spindle draped in its own soft, animal scent. For years I have sat here, just like this, spinning soft cloth out of the detritus of your lives and bodies.
You have all left here so much of yourselves: unthinking, putting down the loads of your hearts and mouths. You leave me your discarded winter clothes, assuming it will stay warm; you drop your skin cells, your aged-off hairs, your eyelashes, assuming you will not need a layered armor.
I could have told you what would be required. I could have shown you battlescars, hardwon, and the divots left in my bones and skin. I could have told you the great gross strength that would be needed but your smiles were so bright, when you left me, unencumbered and headed out into the summer breeze.
So I keep my peace. I spin and lift, watching others’ bodies rise.

Slow starts the steady drip of me into your bed at night. Thought by thought, cell by cell, the conversion of me and my fear into a new beast.
My tense heart has watched you for weeks, searching your face for what I think is inevitable: the abandonment, the reversal, the punch line. Icy with the anxiety in my bones I have tried to respond to your prompts, your kind touch. I am too stiff to swim, and the current feels like a threat.
But the mammal in me cannot lie. Bloodwarmth in my veins and in the quiet of each morning I am already reaching for your mouth, for your curls in my greedy hands.
The memories make me pause. I wonder what your eyes see, what your mouth tastes, what your hands touch, and I am afraid. But the tide has already turned, the dam has already cracked.
I think about your dark eyes. I think about your laugh. I think about your hips, and your hands, and your kiss. I am irredeemable; I am ready to drown.

On bringing a new lover home for the first time

The awkward of turning my back on you at the door, I have spent the whole night working so hard to read your body and your face and your mind.
It’s dark and I know every inch so I have never bothered putting lamps by doors, there is never anyone in this place who does not belong here,
so you wait, silhouetted, for me to cross the room and flip the switch and then your eyes go up and out and I am scared of what you will notice.
I see dirty floors, dishes in the sink, a full recycling bin, all the things I cannot bring myself to care about. I have been too focused perhaps.
You see my piano, you sit down and make it sing.
You ask me where a piece of art came from, you inspect my bookshelf, and we head to the back porch to restlessly rest.
Half my plants are yellowed in over zealous care, half the cats in the neighborhood take naps on this porch. You see this, and light up.
Where can I be but here? I am content only in the place where all my secrets are housed.

In hours you will ask me, where is this one from? And I will tell you the story of a fourth grade playground fall, a bottle of peroxide the only medical care I received.
Your hands on my skin are slow and I am learning to trust them.
And after, when my heartbeat has stopped pounding louder than your voice, and my hands have unclenched from around your forearms,
when my spine and knees have loosened from their gesture of protection and fear, you will ask,
where did that scar come from?
And in my silence, still not see me for the wraith that I am, the half-gone soul I inhabit.

the philosophers say we will be terrified, the artists say we will be blind. the mountain holds its tongue, keeps even the pines quiet in the wind, forces us farther into the peak before we can descend: climb, or fall.

lover of my mouth, are you ready for my words? you worship at my thighs, but i think you are not ready for my pace.

stop here, and listen a moment in this place where the water flies off the crest, where the precipice is so neatly defined and then refracted in a thousand shining ways. here the danger peaks, so too the beauty. here my soul threatens to fly, keens in the bright sky to be followed by your eyes.

the crash at the bottom would be inaudible from this height. your atoms and mine were made to be joined.

lacan's theory of the sublime says we will be terrified: that, standing at the precipice, or swallowed in the pure black of a cave, we will see beauty, and cower. 

the bloodletting here is too easy: follow me instead to the mountains, into the sparkling canyons, and touch the shaking walls. here is where disaster waits. here is where, soul in mouth, you can finally touch perfection, and be known. 

without your demeaning attention i grow too large, too secure. i began toes-deep at the shoreline, sniffing for the swirls where all the kestrels rise. i gathered the discarded feathers, studied the skittish patterns, and decided to stay in the oily waves.

i find myself adrift in shipping lanes now, directionless but valued. i see now that i need diminution, neglect or some other challenge: without these i grow loud, courageous, captain and crew and seastorms for days. breakers, tall grey thunderheads that charge an ornate prow. irredeemable and unsinkable, at home in the violent heights.

we have been so adept at drowning. somewhere in that dense swamp, there may have been a brief spit of firm land; in wading toward it i lost the surest sign that we would sink or swim. i recognize now that i could never have survived on the flat firmness of the dirt we dredged between us.

i wake deafened from the volume at which my dreams have been screaming at me.

for you i might be beautiful, who could say? for you i might be peace or solidarity or support, or produce some new anagram of your mouth and mine: built of entrails and a thousand old promises, perhaps you will not notice as it rots.

a small pebble from the monolith of my fear has been retched up into the recesses of my throat, and i am sure that in this quiet moment, peaceful between the two of us and all the ways we journey toward each other, you can hear me try to swallow past it.

because i cannot exist simply-- because i cannot be at peace in my own body-- you will leave me eventually. so for now, i stockpile the sensory experiences of your nearness, the feral way you size me up. i tangle myself in your hair, taste the gentle skin under your ear, wrap my legs around your hard hips. i inhale you: warm, dark, cigarettes and the way we are both driven by inchoate need. tongue my terror: these phantoms become realer with your acknowledgement, the pressure of your attention. crash me gentle onto the rocks below this darling cliff, your face and the ghosts that offer to catch me as i fall.

i am not worthy of the love you give me; this does not prevent me from asking for more.

steeped in twilight, i walk as softly as i can, the rusted steps that ascend to the place where i will attempt to commune with your wild heart. the bloodbeat of me echoes in my steps and every bone in my body, but i can only go forward. i know the universe will damage me when it can. the winds are only just beginning to rise; i hear my past echoed back to me in the hiss of the swaying trees.

open palms, open wrists, i streak the walls, i scuff the concrete, the brick gritty in old smoke and grime. at least now i know whose blood this is. dirt has ruled me since birth, the limey concourse of my body in this imperfect state, and i will always open myself to it again.

named, my holes are immense: it is clear that i can neither see nor hear. in the last gasp before the thunderstorm sinks its grey teeth into the earth, i am mesmerized by the ends that you are. i welcome you, beautiful heart, into the swirling chasms of my body, the battleground of my mouth, the gathering greenness of my flood.

Alternating hurry and hush, the climb and brake of my fear and adoration. In turns, I am all of me a catastrophic lover. You will have to lead me, over and over and over, to the mountaintop where I have already planted a pomegranate tree.

Push me pull you drown me dust you, the gravity between us growing lighter by the second. Water or sand or the way I cannot bring myself to say your name at climax. A journey at night, alone, through the desert, where quick-tailed coyotes shy and are never seen. The oasis of your mouth, and the cut heat of your eyes when they turn from mine.

After all, what shift in the quicksand could have brought me to your path? I am no bard, I am not looking for audience or capitulation. Pride and all the mouthy ways I shy away from truth: between my breasts a battleground, the lantern that could not be put out. And at the close, only gratitude: the broken verses I breathe for you at the altar of time and chance.

your voice, the clear sky: a million ways to know that we are in our right moment. the conspiracy of the stars and the crickets now defined by the pressure of your body, the warmth of your laugh.

i am ancient without you, renewed by you and the kind way you say, can i kiss you? i am lack, an ache, Persephone digging toward starlight. the history of my body reads as a gulf opened up in the earth but with you: a sprite, free and clear, in the depths of the quarry.

whether I lure you or you have called me, the result is the same: meteoric, the rising of my pulse when your fingers brush my skin.

before I shower

your eyes dark in a dark room, your hips rocked hard against mine
the taste of your mouth, the scent of your skin
the curls of your hair in my hands, tousled, held rough so I can kiss you
a first night wholly remembered, you are my only recent history
the story of your body pressed to mine and I will never be done listening
give me the slope of your back, the globe of your ear
and all the ways we can be together and apart.
if I could preserve one moment forever it would be this:
your laugh, a golden moment of connection, where in the midst
of heat and rush and pull you pause and say
I like you just like this.

Walking through a forest at night is learning to trust your ears
Having faith that the life of the forest includes you, does not preclude you

I am walking through a forest at night with terror in my mouth
And where my ears are listening and my eyes are obeying and my feet are walking
Still I feel fear of the darkness, the shadows, the movements of the tree limbs
Cast by the half-lit moon I am convinced each sound is an ending
Each catch of grass and twig at my clothing is a threat
But just as I am full of fear of going forward, I am sure there is no going back
There will be no turning back for a poorly built campfire even if it is familiar
I’ll take my chances in the underbrush, with the other small mammals
All of us pacing through this forest in search of the safety of your heart

Start by running from everything
Run from attachment, from indebtedness, from the thousand fears of your mother
Run too from the expectations of your father and all the strictures of your church
Run from the boy who rejects you in 10th grade and the girl who rejects you in 11th
Run from the stack of notes you passed with your best friend and all the secrets you told
Run too from the habit of secret sharing, the habit of connection, the grace of friendship
End while still running
Run from the instinct to leave
Abandon the drive to separate, abandon the hope of new spaces
Run from your fear of intimacy, run from your fear of love
Run from the chorus of voices that expresses surprise

It is true that you need only yourself to survive
It is true that you are owed more than survival

how many miles have you walked in your life to get to the place where you are right now? how many miles have you run? or crawled?

how many birds have you seen drawing circles in the blue grey sky? how many hawks, hunched on telephone poles, hunting songbirds?

how many meals have you cooked? how many people have you fed? how many conversations at your kitchen table, how many heart to hearts on your porch, how many broken hearts at night, alone, in your bedroom?

mildew, cold on an unused shelf, the smell of disuse prevalent in your house. a dampness in the sheets that suggests absence rather than physicality. glacial, you follow me apace.

in the sky there are a thousand stories of all the ways i could hunt and harm you: i could send a monster, i could use a sword, i could let the thousand barbs of your ego drag you across the searing sun. i could let you die, squalid, entranced by your own reflection, on this silent afternoon in midwinter.

but where then would i go? in what bed would i purl my tiny rages, string my soft hates out along the brittle branch of someone else's mouth? when the egg cracked they thought i was a condor but in this age, i am pure, i am rotted, and my claws are longer than the carrion i seek.

silence: it is not a lack. your voice, the clear sky: a million ways to know that we are for each other. the conspiracy of the stars and the crickets now defined by the smell of wet, warm asphalt.

i am ancient without you, renewed by you and the kind way you say, can i kiss you? i am lack, an ache, a gulf opened up in the earth but with you: a sprite, free and clear, in the depths of the quarry.

i am a traffic light with no lit bulbs, a map with no lines drawn, puzzle pieces with no image, white paint on a white wall. i am water without a cup, a mask with no face, staff lines without notes, a window without a ledge. i am a highway without berms or medians, just a wide swath of concrete cutting across your landscape, curving and sloping without warning. i am eyes without color, hands without fingers, a mouth without teeth, saying ________

you do not have to be ambitious. you do not have to let your professional labor be the encompassing labor of your life.

the faint lilt of the voice of a lover, singing her way through the trees at night, refusing to come in from the wind. her untucked shirt, her long hair, her tangled limbs as she dances under mercury, under mars. the pines lean down to her, offering branches bowed heavy with lush needles and fragrant sap. when she comes in, her skin is sticky, her eyes wild, her mouth soft.

tender as children we are to each other
having both just been rebirthed
the muscles are sore, the blood is low
but we carry each other's names gently.
in the gap between my hips is space
for both of us to grow.
in this garden we can both bear fruit
and neither lose ourselves for it.

toward what is possible:
the glow of each day, and rising
to meet it as it comes.
where i am never alone, and crossed
by both grace and fortune,
where my great grandmother opens doors
and the heart of me flies free
over a slate blue lake.
in the clay dreams of the future
there is time to build and time to rest
and you will hold my hand in each,
and you will hold my hand until
we are called to other mornings.

what if we were not strangers?
what if i could count on my hands
your heartbeats, strung out moment to moment,
and always heard. what if we
were not lovers? i would still cherish your voice
and the breaths of your lungs, and bless
your aptitude for loving others.
what if we were birds, with visible talons
instead? what if we were pipes in
the same organ, what interval would we sing?
you are the ascendance of my kestrel cry,
the major third and delight of my windburned heart.
what if we were not strangers but two
pigeons on a city street? what better place
has there ever been for two odd ducks to meet?

blown wild in the weeds of your encouragement,
raucous hope and i would find a common kin.
or at least, a belonging: a restful hope,
where others could only pause.
neatly you resheath your claws, i am
ever grateful for the glamour of rebuke but
you refused, and so i wounded myself.
etched in my skin is years of decisions:
did you mean that? did i?
grace is chief in your arsenal but
i am too tired to witness it.
rest awhile with me, you've said, but
little rest can be allowed.

i have been a mountain cat for so long,
and decisive: quick claws and an easy heart.
i evade so easily that i have even forgotten
the sound of my own voice.

the hills are always deep enough.
we dredge our sins entirely: vacant cliffs
but full with sound and sky.
i am a predator inside my own skin.

shake loose my preening mouth and look
at my red red tongue: the blood
that pulses, thick, the root
of me keeping sharp company, slavered dreams.

i am not a victim, and never was.
i peel my claws down the bark
of five fresh elms. they bow too
to my weight and insistence.

where the heart of me is still a child
running a stick across the fence slats for the rhythm of it--
hearmehearmehearmehearme--
this body was bred for insistence.

with hands flecked in paint colors and ink
we meet in the newsprint, uncovering relics,
stories wrapped in stories.
the dust is in my pores, my nose.
i welcome my self home.

the creek where all my dreams waded idly in the murk:
slow, with many penchants for variation.
the bridge where we dropped bright yellow leaves,
letting chance dictate our outcomes.
why did we stop screaming into the train whistles?
i still remember how to pick leeches off.

we will play those games again, you
and i and cassiopeia, the lukewarm sky
she retires in.
an opening where we can go together:
where, under no obligation, you point me forward.

i have burned the red candle without looking
and saged the interiors of my heart
above my driveway, orion points me
but this is not a hunt
and we are neither predators nor prey.

i write your memories across past lovers' letters
and till the ashes into my back garden.

the length of your eyelashes and your expressions of preference
and the mark of your acceptance on my skin--
signs, all. i am not afraid.

we meet in other layers of the universe, you and i.
another us lays bare the works of our hearts and hands
and we are both grateful.

for the quiet voice that asks
     what is hurting you right now

i know that whatever is coming out of my eyes or mouth
is honest enough for this moment

after you

things you let me put down:
my expectations of the world
my expectations of myself
my expectations of how i will be received
all of the guilt that remains in my body

you are a blessing
i will not be blind or deaf to who you are
i praise your presence,
and seek nothing

i have never been able to start writing in a new notebook at the beginning because i am not the narrator of my own speech
the first time i tried to write a book, i shrank the margins of the word document down to a couple inches by a couple inches so that my words wouldn't seem too weighty
in a world that tells me constantly to take up less space, the act of putting words on paper feels deliberately antisocial, against the rules of being social
insistently rebellious, the way i was when i was twelve
juvenile, pretentious, without knowledge or context
these are the ways that i think about the act of writing of my self

Companion planting

Some text here revised from the Farmer’s Almanac

As older sisters often do struggle to get enough

for themselves plants that require a lot the giving

sister pulls the air sprawling and minimizing

open areas where tangle the vines, wind the stalks

a living mulch that shades the soil the prickly

squash to keep away combatants, vermin,

pests make a mound of soil at least four feet

wide where weeds typically take hold six kernels an inch

deep ash to increase fertility as older sisters often do

grown poorly in the company of

sunflowers, potatoes make an excellent companion

they hold the sisters close together when the danger

of frost has passed even the spaces

around each stalk walk the perimeter of the mound offer

the vines needed support weeds typically

take hold although closely related they don’t

like each other prepare the soil by adding scraps of

fish through the tangle of the vines they wind

sprawling, you don’t want to step on them grow

poorly in the company of large leaves and giving sisters.

Seed catalog

The year she decides to learn to be

quiet she sticks her hands in the dirt she keep her

cool in the heat, remaining productive

and tasty longer she grows the herbs the vegetables in

pots in pots with lids and handles in kitchen pots she

stole from her mother flavorful, stringless, quick to

grow and prepare to leave, kitchen pots that

gathered dust and now they gather self-supporting plain,

flat, deeply cut dreams that are dark and

resistant to heat-induced bolting, she

buries her voice in the soil, turns the loam with

fish guts and banana peels and odd ends of

rotted things and their extremely sweet flesh red especially

for heavy or poor conditions which is

how she grew up and how she knows that someday

she will cover herself with flowers.

Things I want to be when I grow up:
Quieter
Respectful
Aware
Balanced
Easy
Open
Macro
Connected
Possible
Changing

Storytelling

They say that storytelling is how we organize now, it’s our authentic selves arguing through our experiences for our right to exist as we are: which may be true but it does not change the fact that of all the communities I am a member of, none of them can sit thru a telling of my whole story

I agitate for abortion rights but in that community nobody wants to hear about how my second abortion also scraped away bits of my soul 

I organize for queer justice but I wrote an earlier poem with the opening line, dear gay community, when will I be allowed to belong? And performed it in a space that I curate, and was told it was too negative, that it reflected badly on the community

I am a fierce truthteller but I am not stupid enough to think that my communities will come with me through every verse of the poem that I would write for you now 

I am a woman with fire in her bones but I know it’s easier to ignite anger than it is to create change. For once, I am not here to burn your house down

At a political gala wherein I am trying to establish that I can hang with the big dogs, a woman at my table entertains with anecdotes about the trials and tribulations of her and her husband attempting to purchase the perfect vacation home. There are members of my family who are proud of their double wide, who text us pictures of the new porch Scotty just put on it. If I put that photo on Pinterest it would be called a reclaimed wood bespoke project but to Scotty it is the materials he could scrounge up from his work sites. 

On the other side of my family is four car garages, wave runners, and ample gun collections. Tobacco money, they say. Tobacco money. In Maryland in the 1800s? I guess nobody is finna speak on who collected that tobacco. I asked my great aunt what she remembered of the plantation and she told me it was just a commercial farm, and then my mom sent me out of the house to go buy more ice. 

I live now at the lakes edge, most often envisioning myself as a big grey tern, keen sighted above the waves and scooping low for a rising perch. I crawl along the breakwater at dusk, the wind reddening my face with its whip and whirl. 

I had a partner who thought it was romantic that I told my secrets to the lake. And it sounds very haunted, right, very compelling. The lake and its repetitive answers, its rhythmic affirmations. I told the lake what I could not tell my partner. 

The lake remains with me. The fire in my bones is always in me. The stories I do not tell grumble around in my skin, grubbing up against my pores so hard I am afraid I will sweat them out. 

relics of your past lives:
a bowl, a fern, a painting, a woman's anger.

and i do look for inspiration among these stones
because who will tell me otherwise?
i fill my pockets with dirt, my mouth with clay.
but it's not my mouth i need to lose, it's
my ears, that i might never have to hear your voice
my hands, that i could forget the texture of you
my eyes, that i might never see you again
but none of this would make me heal or
any less in need of everything that you are, only
leave me gasping for more of you
each day. and it's not as though
i ever touched you, or kissed you, or
heard your voice, or saw you.
i never managed any of these
truly. i never knew you in the least.

solidarity too will leak.

you forgot to stay.
i never wanted to leave you there
(it only serves to tempt your aim)
someday the pot stirs, the plot thickens, the clock ticks
and the consistency of our anger thickens

i would give almost anything and certainly
not everything to have you
as i wanted you in the beginning,
to watch you in your moment of insistence, pushing.
but we are still young.

musk and twilight mask my lost enthusiasm.
a thousand folded promises given while
waiting for something else to sell.
i melt icily against you.
i have never wanted less, and ached more.

this kind of day, this kind of morning is leaving us slowly, slipping away.
you are a lovers' poem, to be sure.

On why I didn’t file a police report

Bathsheba in her pool dreaming of

her husband, of freedom, of rain, is seen

but never heard. She is “made pregnant,”

but never raped. How can you rape

an object? How can you rape a possession?

Jane Doe of Steubenville, Ohio, dreaming

of college, of freedom, of coal, is seen

around the world, but never heard.

CNN wants to know why two young, handsome

rapists have had to face such harsh treatment.

On the days when they draw

the noose a bit too close, let them tug

a little longer, let them cinch it in tight.

I heard the orgasm is better

for the men who like to watch.

what if instead of placenta we could go to the lake
and wallow there in the possible? the gap between my hips
is wide, but the depth to the sandy floor will grow
us larger lives. what if instead of the labor of one,
we go together and labor as two? tender as children
we are to each other, since both of us have been rebirthed.

come with me to the steps
we will climb them hand in hand
i am not afraid of falling
since there is nowhere left to fall
come with me to the lakeside
we can sing to the grey waves
you'll see me for the fish i am
we'll wallow in the troughs
come with me to the forest
where we'll listen to the trees
your voice an elm, and mine a fern
the dirt sustains us all
come with me to the wall
we can build it all again
i am not afraid of heights here
since there is nowhere left to fall

women have been flowers for millennia--
o let me paint you my lily of the valley, my narcissa,
my wild rose let me tell you what you look like
and therefore who you are-- but
here in this room, with all of these femme faces
lifted up to mine, i find myself
for once not at odds with a traditional telling of beauty.
we are a garden, here and now, and in our hands
rest petal and stamen both, and when we dance
we are the breeze and the bees.
tell me your story, sister, and i'll let you pick which blossom you are.

in this group are many stories and only in this group
exist the ears to hear them all. though we are
all flowers, wearing our difference and identity
and color and scent and familiarity and memories on our bodies
out in the world, it is into this dirt
that we sink delicate roots.
most of us do not think the roots will hold.

but we grow anyway: raucous against each other,
with varied moments of blossom and bloom and decay.
queer femmes have always built the garden
in which to keep themselves.
first because we are the only ones we trust
to do the pruning, and second
because every other bed has proven dangerous.
in this group there are many differences but
on one subject, we approach totality.

and so the roots do hold. the more of us that grow
together, the more stable the soil in which
new plants can bloom. the roots are tired, pale and frail
as newborn fingers curling around
a satisfying piece of loam, we are always rebirthing each other
and the roots do hold.

I am always the type to feel guilt
in snapping off the dead done-blooming flowerheads
from the shrubs. My mother
tried to reassure me, showing me how already
new, plump buds begin to sprout,
orange cheeks beginning to purse. She said
we had to snap off the dead to allow
for the growth of the new,
but I could never follow in her footsteps
through the garden, browned and shriveled
buds in her wake, my own
hands too guilty to do the same,
plump and shivering under the June sun.

Who I am

when the rains come 

(not who I am when the words come, not 

who I am when the smoke and I commune, silent

in the backyard over the grave I made of your letters) and

the juniper is foreign here. I have needed it. 

The oil grubs, stuck in my hands. Your blood

is grit under my nails. 

Who I am when the lightning strikes: 

barely visible, decisive talon, junkie hearted

and throbbing on the stoop.

Invite me in. 

Don’t give

up

on my open heart petri putrid gush.

I am a spore. 

If ever you, my dearly dead, have doubted me, then come

and tell me of it now.

I invoke cloture and withstand you. 

The mint grows thick and wild around my ankles, the lemongrass

saws at my calves. 

I do not bleed. 

Who I am when I am just remains, regrubs, regains.

Moldy, a plethora of life. Who

can tame me now? 

Already, without you, I am a long dark highway:
a journey, taken alone, at great risk.
So many rules, as we grew, hemmed us in:
don’t shout, don’t run, don’t cuss, don’t blush, don’t show.
Now we must be encouraged,
like so many little birds,
to fall or fly or sing, or other foreign things.
So I head west, alone:
a pair of bright lights, climbing and falling among the mountains.
The steep inclines, the tree line, pines.
clinging fog, sticky and multiplying,
folding the mountaintops into the sky,
all but evangelical.
We were easier then: we are dying, now.
Bury me here in the limey dirt:
with cups and bowls and spoons and soap,
mint leaves and the dozen ways we call the moon.
Open your dark coal heart,
and let me find my way home.

I had no idea of the extent of my rage until I threw the first punch. The act of completing the arc of the swing, the impact echoing up my arm, uncorked a virulent pit of anger that I had never been able to reach before. Not in therapy, not in active meditation, not in kickboxing. It was like shaking a piece of moldy, ancient fabric clean under a jet of water only to find out that the fabric is, in fact, black even under the black mold.

Red lips to say, follow me, here: into this maze of tall hedges,

this black cave where you cannot see.

Red lips, red tongue to say: 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.

Red lips, red tongue, red teeth, and the tapering

of ten beloved claws.

If you read my weaponry as coquette, why would I save 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 mud walls, slept in my wolves’ fur.

You needed me. And when the sun came up

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

you did not want me.

My bitter strength was no longer of use.

The power of my muscles and the taste of my sweat

was no longer desirable.

But, mouth to the moon, I have not built

my last soundscape: fill me

with the noise of your fear.

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

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

The sun will rise again, crimson

flames in an indigo sky; Mars and Mercury loom

over my dark horizon.

My mud will stand, my claws stay sharp, you know

the sun will set. Long nights will reign, 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.