Weight

I am their teddy bear
A trampoline of skin and muscle
Snot rag, or fetish object
Depending on the day.

It has been years since I belonged to myself,

But I still remember how it felt.

Lighter.

Salt (not a poem, but what just now happened)

Salt in its shaker hides in the
disposal.
I don't know this. Surely I couldn't.
Flipping the switch all casual, the glass shatters in metallic twisters,
mixed with the corn the children had for dinner,
old spaghetti strands, tilapia.
My hand, white and smooth, snakes inside to gather the shards,
watching the switch all the while.
Let's just trust the safety of the system, shall we?

Memorium

Each death is like it's own but just like a stone
Cast in a pond makes ripples,
Each death ripples memories out in the never still lake
of my little mind.
Ripples of him, and of him and of her.
And of him. Always him.

Azúcar y Verduras

The house, in her Spanish perfection
like a chapel aged and kept well over time.
I, welcome there for only a short hour.
In the bathroom, precise and clean,
I saw them.
Two small sugar ants traveling, uninvited guests.
Going where? Seeking water perhaps. Or a bath perhaps
with expensive soap.
A flaw, but flaws make me happy,
not out of gotcha glee, but the reminder that they
are always there.
They remind me to be gentle on myself,
which I am often not.
I waved at them, left them on their journey,
and went back to the salad course.

(un)Requited

I am not well known for my patience.
My patience is like a toddler, hungry or bored.
Or ants swarming out of nowhere
towards a crumble of cheese left from
that picnic you went to.
I want and I want big.
My pace is set wrong, wanting not yet the action
but the sureness of action to come. I want to read the ending
just to make sure I can handle the novel.
Life laughs at me sometimes.
I try to laugh back, be a good sport,
But sometimes it's just too hard.
How can people be so patient, I wonder.
I watch them as they sip coffee gently, or file their bills
Or chop onions so evenly and my gulps
make so much noise in the diner, my papers are bent
and my sauces are tasty but full of chunks.
Patience is a virtue, in love, and in so many other things.
I don't have much of it, but what I do have,
I'll hold like a bird dropped from the nest,
with a rapid heartbeat and breathless lungs,
hoping it will last the night.

Untitled

I dreamed last night of a dinner table,
and the napkins were red, like mine.
Covered in bees, a swarm of them,
all moving and hints of red would glint out
from where their bodies left space.
I lifted one corner to move them away,
but another blanket of bees,
blood red fabric remained.
I shook them off,
and one stung me.

Pumpkin

Did anyone see the moon tonight?
It was fat and lounging heavily on the horizon.
Fat and bloated and bloody red
Orange like a pumpkin turning towards rot.
Ants would make it a home and burrow in, in search of food,
Burrow into that earth dirt smell of flesh metallic and womblike
It hung in the sky, heavy like I just said and I watched it as I drove and between texting a friend as I watched it. It was huge and big and shadowed and
I nearly got in a car accident from the beauty of it.
That's the kind of moon it was tonight
A dying moon, even as it rose.

Seattle

Curved and tall and dark
Glinting wet rain and unending darkness
Night that came in afternoon and sun that outlasted dawn.
I was full of a fear I'd realize after the fact.
Me, 22 and scared like happiness finally breaking out of Georgia prison,
meeting drag queens in the hallway.
This city took me in hard and silent, me a duckling without a mother
This city that was glossy and black at night with neon, like blown glass,
salty delicate sea creatures, vaginal and open,
blown by rough men with callused hands.
This city with grit filled longing and cobblestones and salmon.
Driving around the shiny wet night alone, so alone,
this is the city that made me,
in the dark,
in the sideways shadows of fall,
in the cherry blossom snowstorm of spring,
in stained fingers and in black boxes,
in journals, old paper, and weeping.
There I gave birth and grew into myself even though
I didn't know it until now.

Weight

She is jagged, something hard and wedged in my side that makes it hard to breathe.
No wonder I laugh less these days, not enough tidal volume.
I am deeply failing and failing again.
I cannot save her, not this time, not like all the other times
and finally I don't want to.

My ghost mother, sit on my shoulder, a sack I carry.
And wear yourself heavy on me, like bricks of guilt, I'll carry.
What will remain, when this is done.
Her eyes as heavy and flat as stones
in a winter garden.
I'll carry that, too.

Sticky Bun

There were bees in her hair
Movement full and lively, and like neurons communicating
Through strands, a little dance telling each where the honey was hidden.
Bees buzzing, from crown to nape, living jewels
or humming barrettes keeping her eyes clear to see the road ahead.

Tablet

White powder pressed into shining white rounds
glossed and ready for down the hatch
to make me a better girl, a happier girl.
Sad,that I even need these pills, but I do.
I really do.

First

The moment
Towards a first, what?
Kiss, not even that, the moment just before that moment.
Distilled hope and heat.

Wisteria

being good sometimes twists up the insides of the good one
like a child's blanket as he plays it like a whip.
this good is exhausting like a slow suicide by smile,
a mask of my own making now isn't it,
that can't be removed for it's seared to skin from years of use.
the twisting more like vines,
choking out the very tree that holds them up,
choking passers by with their rotting sweetness.

Hunting

A bucket in hand, green old mildewed,
Used for beer mostly likely, last.
I search the yard for Legos, like Easter Eggs
Under grass, limbs, and ancient splash pools
Filled with sweat and dirt.
Red and blue and yellow.
Scattered, abandoned, firm in their plastic permanence.
Toys quite everywhere. And me ranging and hoping to find.
What?
All the eggs. I want all the eggs.
The only way I'll get the prize.

Like Jesus

He does things, like
make my computer screen work.
His tools and nimble fingers building,
make it so I can write again.

He does things, like
stare straight ahead, sacrificing grins, as I sing Lionel
Ritchie from Endless Love, and ask should that
be your ring tone, honey?

He does things, like
make me see God between my legs
between my legs, as he rests there,
and we are not unlike a church.

Round Trip

I flew back to Georgia
To memorize southern daybreak
Awake in feather pillows
To not forget a displaced mother, late night kisses
The times when humidity unhinged the mind
And sponged up sadness.
The sun provided shadows to hide behind
The air, it loved, it stuck to skin, it filled up mouths
Like velvet.
Thunder applauded sweat.
Insects pregnant with heatbuzz swarmed
Till they drowned in the electric whine of air conditioners and Iced Tea, sweetened.
I spoke to the man at the bus stop, about my new life,
In a land of grey days, darker nights and a constant state of rain.
The suffering of my southern temperment under Northwest clouds.
Is it better here? I asked him?
He said, just be quiet girl, hush up hush up
My history was sculpted from sweat and blood from displacement
Learning to love where you are, rather than where we should have been.
Make your way back through clouds and wet frustration
Be in the land and there you'll be, don't matter where it is.
flew back to the emerald city
To meet this state of constant rain
To sit with spring hail, whale song
And sea level snow
And fifteen words for grey
And rain which blackberry brambles its way into my heart
Sweet and thorny, to sit a spell.

Hive

Hive
The south in me drips
Like honey off a biscuit
Into his mouth
He swallows
Lulled by smoke wings
His bees buzz me to sleep
Large hands reach
And it tastes,
Like stings

Wind Chill

I could feel it in the air today, a distinctly different tone, note in the feel or fragrance or taste of the air. Coppery, like blood, not quite cold, but cool. Still a bit of wetness in the air, but it felt like summer was finally blowing away.
I watched the doppler today, envious that the storms picked up just east of us, over Houston. The night drops much faster these days, and I enjoy that, enjoy the long shadows and the slightly cool air threatening to turn cold and mean.
I want to walk alone at night at times like this, walk alone in the dark wearing black, unseen, stalking what? But it feels like hunting and it feels good. That feels better than being cooped up inside waiting.
I like the cycle of death as it comes, death of leaves and small insects, of flowers. I like it just as I like the birth of them in spring.
It feels, right. Fall is the dying time.
We'll be carving pumpkins soon and I will look forward to that night, with very special friends and with the children, taking sharp knives and cutting into hard but yielding skin. Smelling the deep dark rich smell of earth and heat and wet, touching pulp and eating the very seeds from inside.
We'll roast the seeds and eat them and sit in the dark watching pumpkins lit by candles and it will feel ancient and new all at once.
That moment past, we'll take children in, take them in from the chill and the real/illusion and put them in bed where they will hopefully dream of candy and witches and storms and they will count down the moments until the day when the veil between the worlds is at its thinnest.

Walls

There's this man
And the wall is thin between my office,
(a closet crumpled full of books and papers, pictures, the water heater holding cups of tea
like a butler, a small school desk, a chair and myself)
And his room.
He plays music
As people do in the evening.
Older, Steely Dan.
It's nice, cause I sit
And write and write and want melody
Only it would be too loud if
I played it.
But old walls are too thin, old buildings play tricks like mirrors for your ears and sound can
sneak behind you ghost, elderly and warm.
And sometimes he sings,
Just to himself.
Just loud enough so that I can hear.
He thinks no one can hear.
And that is beautiful cause he's free
And that's sad cause he'd stop up my ears with his silence
If he realized
That when he sings
Sometimes
I sing too.

Hammock

I lie in my netted bed.
Staring up at leaves
This must be how it is for the bee,
Caught, by spider.
I'd like that very much.
If only, in that moment, the paralytic injection
A Valium stream in my veins
And I'd wait, wrapped in silk
Rapt in sky
As I am cocooned, melting slowing inside,
Finally worrying about nothing,
Except how I'll taste for dinner.

Bended

I do not care if you are a man
Or woman, either.
If clit is as cock or
Vice versa.
There is joy in this holy vice and in the bending of male parts to female and back again
of female parts to tender lips slick with happiness made to order
Why do we worry, whose parts go where
When honey and stings and bees and birds should race
Into the fields together.
Resting in hammocks of grass and love, resisting the pull of the realistic world
That world that calls our love a vice, so dark.
Come with me and slick yourself,
Yourself to me and laugh and love and fret not,
You who are a man or a woman or both.
Let us not be either, but all.

Bouquet

Age 5, or so, doesn't matter.
Not quite the age of reason
But of memory, taking in snippets,
Filed in F for feeling.

Filed to fly back unwelcome as I walked today,
Age 39, past grass dotted with tiny yellow buds.

She was a friend? A neighbor?
Mother loved her, she was a delicate, fragile girl
Touching our piano, the keys, with gentle purpose,
Unlike me.

We sat, outside the apartment, spring like it is now, in grass
And picked tiny lemon stars together to make our bouquets.

It took longer than any child's limit, or mine
I looked from my rushed bundle, wilted and roughed together
To hers,
Fragile, delicate, purposeful.

I knew then something about myself, not gentle.

And went back inside to play.

Choice

I am weary from supplication,
Face lost cell by cell and word by word.
So much so that I question the reason I drew to my knees
To begin with.
To stand, even alone, would that be a better choice?

Alone or lonely, two faces on my face.

This is not a poem, but a key that locks a door.

Many things don't cause me fear.
Not spiders, thunderstorms, or slimy mud under my feet.
Nor diving into love or facing social justice.
Of white and black histories blending in anger and trust, or touching one who defies binary terms.

I can do those things.

I hold a pet fire bellied toad.
I stand on stage with nothing and make laughter happen.
I offer nakedness to strangers.
I watch doctors place needles in my arm,
In hers.
I don't faint at the site of anyone's blood.

I am more commonly terrified than that.

The things I fear, I do not think of.
My mind holds an ice house.
A locked door.
A wash of drag over a hideous face.

I dare not even write them,
Wasps, paralytic if released,
And I don't even get close to them here.
I don't even get close.

Rough Draft

What is the trick of it, this ballerina dancing?
Watched, but watching, watching them see me, and me unseeable.

Clumsy metaphors for this place I rest within, the place I sit.
A stage picture, a pattern, a road map
For other people's happiness.

I'm with my little doves tonight. They sleep
Curled and fragrant in their beds.

I sit, alone. And I wonder.

Far From The Tree

If, as they say, genetics is destiny
And my mind, like hers, will fail.

Her mind, like a hive abandoned by bees
Wax melted into honey drips, and dirt.
Detritus clogging passage ways.
A graveyard of nectar.

Have I extended this metaphor enough?

If this path comes my way, then
I'll act out.
I want to remember my sins now
So I have a lifetime's worth to forget.

Underworld on Parmer Lane

There was a kind of bedlam today, at the Garden House. My mother and her friends sat and ate their lunch, like so many pre-schoolers at little tables.
Paper napkins, plastic flowers, simulacrum dining.
She sat and looked wet eyed and confused to see me, and she told me how pretty I was.
I talked about the Olympics.
Her hair was dirty. Her shirt too.
The soup was passed by staff less than happy to be there, moving their stones up hills each day by the book.
Lunch at noon,
Meds at 12:30,
Naps.
A squabble began, perhaps over seating arrangements,
Or cake, I couldn't tell.
Shaky arms and trembling mouths, and one woman was very concerned that they all got the same juice.
These are things to be concerned about.
Sometimes she calls me her mama. Not today. Today was a good day for her.
I want to flee when I am there, but mostly I want to be in her arms and I want her to make it go away.
I want her to just wake up and hold me and tell me things will be alright.
I feel like Orpheus as I walk out the door, hearing it lock behind me,
And I've lost her one more time.

Stranglebirth

The mirror in the dream steers me backwards
Backwards with head twisted front
And the cord, the cord comes not
From belly,
But back
And it trails like a tail into darkness.

Following to its beginning,
Stepping toe heel toe and wrapping as I turn
In the cord.
In the cord, I strangle myself
Back to my source.

True, Rough, Heart

You rip and twist
Like metal through wind blasts
Metal twisting and blasting
And not lasting.

Unclipped in gardens
Are growing brambles
Brambles thorning and growing
With vines flowing.

You slip and cracking
Glass in soapy hands
Handling glass to splintering
Sounds of breaking.

Scratch

There is a nagging sensation
I can't rid myself of
Like an itch, unscratchable.
I wanted to tell you,
But you had coffee to make

Would a walk be nice?
We could hold hands, collect flowers and gardener's secrets
Oh yes, the wind might dust off our conversation.

There is this strange and lonely feeling
Hard to shake
I want to explain to you but
When I open my mouth
Rocks come out,
And you duck.

Just Another Friday

The bees are agitated today.
And beat about inside my brain.
And no amount of wine
Will smoke them down and quiet.

Linger

She sits each day in the same place
and each day is the same day
and the day is just like the last day
and she doesn't die.

They make sure she gets her medicine
I make sure they get their check
and each day is the same day for me
where she is concerned.

Her pain is a lingering which she forgets.
Mine is cast in sharp detail each day.
So many colors of guilt, like a tattoo on my flesh that continues
to needle in, even after the day has passed.

Nectar

There were no bees, though honey was not
missing from my years there.
Fertile and truthful that time was.
But not yet as poison sweet
as years of
warm summer nights
at home.

Rapunzel

And what is this, this sad and waiting pose,
sitting like that girl in her tower,
waiting for the inbox light to change.
No letter comes. No knight, certainly.

No love, for what is love but what you make it
It is already, in your hands, in the smile of a stranger,
In dirty dishes and schedules made by two, dishes made dirty
by life shared in time and effort.
And does it comes in a pleading missive from one, unwanted.

Casting all in and out of sight,
sight not seeing.

By pulling the strands of my rescue up and away
like so many wires from this box of silicon,
I turn the power off and face the world,
climbing down my own hair.

Slippery

There was this poem, last night, as I was drifting off
And lazy as I am, I couldn't quite reach it with my mind,
(Hands not supporting the idea of lights on and typing).
It slipped away like a failed sneeze or empty orgasm
(When the fingers move just wrong),
Leaving me to dream in deep frustration.

Bite

Love can be sweet and high and like a soaring through clouds
and it
can be bitter and hard and a slap in the face and sometimes I simply do not
know which
is which.

Tremble

The force of coursing dots of pleasure
darting through skin into tissue and back
a permanent feedback loop like a match to gasoline or not quite that
a fusion reaction, spots of sun bursting and catching fire inside, based
on breath, skin, and chemical ephemera.
Leaves muscles panting, tight, tired,
like a newborn limbs gently wobbling.
Take leaps and bounds and even baby steps leave you trembling and you fall,
but you try again, and walk better
next time.

Hollow

I have a heart like wet dank cave
Deep and dripping with cold water
Water that filters through, distills until finally it is pure
and no detritus remains
It is covered with moss and holds strange leggy creatures
Ugly and unwanted in the light.
They are safe here, in the moss and dark with large white eyes
and arms full of gentle poison.

What

What is it that we want
We humans
Dots of light trapped in skin bags
Separate from each other's sun.
We want the sun
to merge back
So we scratch and claw and bleed to do it
Through sex and power and money.
And we never quite get there,
Skin bears the scars of it,
Of the loss.

Communion

And I'll tear you open like warm bread
My teeth rip flesh protecting your heart
My blood falls into your eyes
Staining them eternally ruby
I pull in your sperm and push you out after,
Out of my fucking place and you rest
scourged, and panting like a new born baby.
I'll love you, breaking your back with my weight.
We'll sweat with mingled oils
Communion wine pouring from us both.

Thanks for a lovely evening

Later,

Her blue
Eyes like theaters darken,
Cherry Pop lips
Piston slip
Up....and.....down.

His clown face
Collapses with
His belly hips
As he breaks
Orbit
And spirals updown
(and out)
Into

Her
Salty Pop lips
Back slip
And eyes blue like wet windowshades
Close....

As he zips.

Pandora

Just like she, doomed by her curiosity,
So too I, open a box of magic and fly
Out bugs of all shapes and sized named
Fear
Anxiety
Paranoia
Love shouldn't be this, not this. It should be
Safe
Locked
Wrapped and warm in a blanket.
This is not that. This is me with a torn butterfly net
Leaping hopelessly after the pests, leaping close to the cliff
Where they cavort and taunt me,
Me hoping I don't go over the edge.

Shove

Like baby birds out of a nest,
I think about the pieces of my life I care about
And quitting them, knocking them out one by one.
Watching them fall and wondering, do they have enough wing to fly?
Broken beaks, legs and all and feathers strewn.
Can't do anything about it now.
People walk by and never see it.

Enter, Not.

I'd like to place a sign on the bathroom door.

A gimlet of some vodka and xanax and some Rose's Lime.

A hot, hot bath and just

All going on as it does with it's rot and fertilization, and nonsense,

murder and

birth and

class violence and

insipid requirements.

I'd like to, but I won't. Of course I won't.

Seams

When I was younger I'd dream of birth,
of being huge and swollen and reaching down and reeling, feeling the head emerge from me,
me pulling the baby out and joyful and tear-streaked in the dream,
presenting the child to my mother.

This happened, though in real life it was far more real and unreal and a body so huge,
with these waves of red blinding pain cracking me round the middle as if I were some kind of walnut,
a kind of pain that was ripping and large and a feeling that took me outside myself
and I could watch me being lifted and taken every two minutes and still I would not open. I could close my eyes and people would disappear and the pain wouldn't stop.

The greatest pleasure being the absence of pain and the epidural gave me that,
as doctors and midwives scurried, reaching arms, wrists inside me to check on my progress,
and liquid running, gushing from me,
hot and loud and my blushing from the dark nastiness and glory of it all.

I was truly a virgin until that point.

When finally, my mind cracked open by 30 hours and pain,
and my heart, cracked wide by the midwife asking me, "What is going on for you right now."
I opened, then.

And there it was, that passageway, and the reality of the blinding pain even with drugged relief, and my mother at my side crying with me as she witnessed her child giving birth,
her telling me
how I was her salvation after daddy died, died in front of us,
and I believed her for just one moment,
that I was.

I reached down and felt his head, soft and wet and like an animal,
more animal than I ever imagined,
I howled and pushed him out into this world,
not minding tears, not minding snot running down my face,
clenching my love's hand to the breaking point
and I said, as he left my body,
give him to me, give him to me.

I remember the sound I made.

Laid on my stomach, covered in blood, and wax, and me,
and olive oil drizzled on him by the midwife to ease his passage,
he smelled like the ocean and moss and copper,
and like me
and like nothing I would smell again.
Soft and wet and mine.
I was ripped apart at my seams, but whole.

Dream, Recurrent

It's this house, this old house
and the floors are covered in snakes
they leak out of pipes and curl
secretly by my face as I sleep

Slick and slither, past me, fast so I cannot catch them.

some fanged yellow, fat and thick, thin and quick,
some curled in small bodies of water I have to move through,
some coiled on the floor of my room and waiting.

I can't leave my bed.
Mother help me, I say.
She won't.
They pulse their poison into me, and I wait to die.

She does the crossword puzzle.

I like to sleep while the dishwasher is running.
I imagine that its the sound of a mother's bloodstream whirring next to me and I don't have to hear much else.
I like to lie in the hammock and rock.

Small

Small hands and tiny eyebrows resting over sweet skin, pink cheeks and cornsilk for hair
as they sleep and breath and exhale a sweet scent that I have breathed since it was inside me.
I made that scent from my blood and milk.
They are like honey to me honey filled still with bees that warm and sting,
that fly by my head and remind me of love and health and
my body a living sculpture growing life
which now grows me.

Not for the timid

I picked her up at the airport, hollow, practically deserted.
"She has Alzheimer's."
They quickly gave me a pass to meet her at the gate.
Calling a sweetheart while I wait, wishing for drunk.
She arrives 80, but girlish, looking happy, lucid and giddy.

It's so easy when she's like this to get a tiny bit of hope, like maybe the whole thing has been a bad dream and there she is my mom and she'll come to me and love me and touch me and things will be different.

But it isn't a bad dream, its real, it is a horrible thing.
Things took a bad turn at baggage.

"Did you bring my car?" her bloodstream, her legs and breath.
What to say at this moment? And I face the dragon then and there, as I am exceedingly brave, honest and very, very stupid.

"You got lost. The doctor said, he said...no."

I am trembling now,
I am 4 years old after breaking a vase,
I am 11 wishing she'd stop crying,
I am 16 wanting to date for the first time.

A bit better on the drive home, and we all had a plastic dinner like things were fine.

Later, surreal accusations of course, protestations of how she'll run away, I'll never see her again, no one else in her family thinks she's "horrible, dumb, a nothing."
And of course I don't think that but my love just is the kind of love that gets its face slapped, metaphorically, on a daily basis.

We get her home and the fear begins, I'm leaving her there again, alone and losing my own cool
I am 21 and packing to leave for Seattle,
I am 25 and not calling her back,
I am 33 and in denial of her memory changes.

I'm subject changing, fast as a hummingbird, please mama please let's talk about the leaves in Michigan, let's talk about the new baby, did you see the new Time magazine?
"I'll kill myself, she says."

I'm all the ages I ever was when she said that.

I tell her it looks like she's gained weight and how pink her cheeks look and how healthy she looks.
She beams.
And I go home.
And I know we'll pretty much do the same thing tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
And its painful and as much as I'd like to be witty and wry and make vodka tinted jokes, I can't right now.

I am 38 and a woman with power who feels powerless in the face of all of this.

Memory Stream

Lying awake late at night images from years and years ago tumbled through my mind.
1988 dancing on a beach alone at night in a thunderstorm feeling wild and holy and tracing phosporous in the sand and thinking this was the only church that existed.
1979 a surprise ice storm covering our home in cold glass, not long after my father died, sleeping by the fireplace with my mother both of us cold in so many ways, hearing the guncrack sound of limbs breaking off the trees.
1994 Seattle walking in late autumn as the evening shadows crept so quickly and I walked to Broadway past leathermen and old women and smelled the cold in the air and felt free.
2003 water breaking just like in the tv shows pain so incredible that it nearly needs to be experienced just to be believed. Smell of baby's head, bloody and wet, in my arms.
2007 mother waking up from surgery fighting like a animal eyes not seeing me.
1973 watching the neighbors dog come running over to see me and being both thrilled and deeply afraid.

Glazed

My eyes and throat and mind are glazed with sleeplessness. It becomes nearly pleasurable, the altering experience of lack of sleep, things seem both sillier and scarier than usual. There is a cost, not sleeping. Like the mafia giving a loan of fun and frolic, the interest on my lack of sleep builds.
Sometimes this lack of sleep is through no fault of my own, as if my ability to handle the devils of stress takes itself out in the deepest darkest parts of night. I sleep only to pop awake bright and tight and sharp.
Of course other times, the fault is mine entirely, giving in to wicked temptation and staying up and out and on until hours much later than is deemed medically necessary.
This time, both demons are at play.
Racing mind, thoughts dancing, body aching and desirous of nothing more than my soft sheets and silent breathing and floating into neverland where like a baby, safe and sound, I'll finally rest.

Mixed

Oily vinegar, brackish bay water fighting the sea, my emotions and opinions are usually mixed and fighting with themselves over small and petty details.
I'm tired this week, nervous like a cat for reasons both difficult and delightful.
I envy people who know what to do, who are settled and centered in their choices. Who are able to play in worlds of power, who can shift in real time from leading to following and not skip a beat.
I'm a ballet of skipped beats, most days. I feel clumsy and slow in this new world.
My time is limited, my responsibilities mammoth, my desire to connect with all my loves and friends overwhelming, and my guilt over my failing at the three a heavy yoke.
I wish I could find it in me to find comfort in that lack of control, but I cannot. I feel subsumed and invisible and disregarded unless I hold a steady iron hand over all these things.
Iron? No. I'm not that strong. A steady hand on a good day.

Vocalise

Children tonight, teeth scrubbed and faces washed, asked me to sing to them as they drifted, and so I did. Songs about sunshine and about pineapples and about the land of sleep and snoozy worlds. I sang and left them pretending to doze. Even now I can hear their laughing, arpeggios of little boy voices, trying hard to stay awake.
Love is so much like a light no matter how armored one's heart, that even the tiniest little crack will let the emotion break through and render you helpless in its arm, yourself like a child.

Vessel

This word keeps floating to me through women or internets or conversations having little to do with anything, and I wonder about myself, seeing my ability to trust as a leaky bucket. It can be filled and carry water, but it is faulty.
My broken little vessel.
There aren't places always to put the things I want to say, to place the feelings outside of myself for at least a little bit, without wearing my welcome out, or frightening more put together types.
I'm cracked and leaky, but I do know how to refill the vessel.
I'll do it again and again as long as it takes and I hope my drips and splashes on the floor are forgiveable.

Crone

I think she is near some kind of death, my mother.
Came the death of her independence today, in a quick blow. Little pieces of plastic freedom used to buy sandwiches at McDonalds, or bottles of wine, gone. A tiny key of freedom that now on my key chain will keep her safe and off the road. She was a teen-aged girl facing her motherdaughter in fear and need and loathing.
She was withered today.
Withered as a bare branch, like deep autumn into winter, like children dreaming of an ancient witch.

Orange

It is quite literally orange outside at the moment. Storming and sick, yellow with tinges of orange.
A wild noise brews outside and I reflect on my time in the deepest south with my mother.
It was a wild time, Georgia. It always was. That place was the devil incarnate to me. Tall pine trees always threatening to fall, kudzu taking over trees, humidity and crickets and broken hearts and so many thousands of sad, sad memories.
Lover is here. Must go now.

Jezebels

Women who are loud and domineering, hard, bold, impatient and for their time they were trapped in traditional roles and chose to surround themselves with people perhaps quieter, who were easily daunted by the insecure strength they possessed.
Now? I see it in my blood, a force that is strong and powerful, but perhaps pathological and ultimately unlovable. Am I a presence? Do I take the stage? Do I stomp on people in my own fear of being invisible.
Its this that I am, that I have seen my whole life, the rules I learned as a child, the energy contained inside me that should have been my salvation, but may ultimately be my downfall.

Brief Touch

Today I was sitting at the kitchen table and feeling so very ill. My mother's germs finally wore me down and, stomach sick, I rested. For a very small short moment, my mother came to me, standing, and reached her hand down and stroked my head and said, poor baby, I'm sorry you are sick. I cried and leaned my head into her hip and just tried to feel her hand on me and her comforting me and I felt so small. She so rarely touches me. So very rarely touched me. I need to hold on to that feeling and not its absence.

Waiting

My true love works late nights these nights, working for the legislature, writing down their words, their complex and arcane and difficult and carefully worded words, bible bills starting huge fights, taxes on strippers, and welcome to Texas with liberty and immigration bills for all. I spend each night mostly the same, cleaning, cooking, homework, prepping for the next day and longing for a moment where I could just get completely drunk with him, drunk for him, drunk. But alcohol leaves a painful residue the next day and with days starting early, with small ones being taken to this school and that and professional work needing to be done and both our minds needing to be as sharp as sleep deprived minds can be, I drink milk, warmed with vanilla. Or a single small glass of watered down chardonnay, remembering how easy it was to drink and be human in years past.

Wave

It has hit me, a wave of bone tiredness and impending sadness and I knew it was coming and I was hoping to wait a few days until having to face it. I'm paddling away, trying desperately to avoid feelings of disappointment, of this exhaustion, of all the doubt I feel about myself creeping back like wet fog, and wondering what the fuck I'm doing and worrying about the yard and the carpet and the children and the life and all and all and all.
Ride it, I guess, smiles and all, gritting teeth, downing wine and all, taking pills and all, standing up for myself and all, telling the lies the fog tells me to fuck off and all, waiting for rest and all, and try to be that laughing girl, not the sad one.

Snips and Snails

This boy is covered in shades of dirt and sweetly sweated grime, carrying a tiny slug on his index finger before tucking it into his shirt pocket for safe keeping. This boy wraps a bag of flour in a blanket and fiercely defends his baby against smaller hands, he crys that his baby, his love is in danger and that I must save them both. This boy enamored of my friends, treating grown-ups as his own personal playscape or trampoline, not interested in younger ones, not willing to play children's games. This boy who worries already that his brother is more loved, that he might risk hell over a casual lie, who wonders if souls come out of graveyards at night, if death is sleeping, he who asked me why he is so different than other children. This boy who asks me if he can make me more fabulous when I dress for an evening out. This boy with a cockeyed grin exactly like my father's. He is my first baby, and my heart expands, cracks and heals every day from his wonderment.

Ache

She does not sound well today, my mother. Her words are jumbled and tumble at me like little boulders, I try to view them, see them and interpret even as I’m tempted to dash out of the way by hanging up the phone. She makes little sense only, somewhere under the words, she does. I try to feel what she means, she’s so far away, so scared and angry with her doctor. She thinks she’s perfectly fine, but she knows she’s not, not with everyone telling her or avoiding confrontation.
I open my inner eye to track her in her muddled mind, her confusion palpable, her embarrassment visible even through phone lines.
Its this delicate dance I do with her each time we speak, and I’m always hoping that this time she’ll make sense and it will all be over and it will all have been a mistake and things won’t get worse, she won’t fade away more. But I know she will and her mumbled jumbled little wordstones lead me patiently me into a place where the ache is slow, but constant.

Mood Music

Today it stormed, is storming, will storm and I wish I could be away from work, and just in it, following the rain and thunder and running though woods, soaked, hiding from hail and wrenching screaming laughs from my throat and collapsing into moss and breathing the smell of dirt and opening up myself to the power that storms bring and being unafraid.

Witch

I worked for a state hospital when I was pregnant with my first. Beaming and swollen I brought kindly volunteers into dank green halls, filled with sad and frightened patients, volunteers who served cookies and punch and did their best to not stare at someone's haldol haze or that one's tremors. I felt safe there, funny that, my family history being what it is, with blood relatives having taken their time in such places for "episodes of madness", but as touched as I've been I felt untouched by fear of them.
She approached me, pale and skinny, matted hair, dirty sweatpants, and that now familiar wild eyed look and she spoke quickly and intently as if what she was to say to me was vital and she said, you have a baby I can see that, I had babies inside me but they all were cold, so cold but yours is warm can I touch you? And I let her. Like it was a blessing. And she moved away.
And seeing her wander back towards her madness, I feared at that moment in a dark frozen quiet place in the base of my spine that it was instead a curse on my child, that she would somehow release in him or in me into him, the genetic madness that is part of my legacy, my foolish naivete lowered whatever protective maternal shields were possible and that the monster from under my family's bed would claim this little one, this child.
I fear it now as well, as he clicks and grunts and cannot concentrate and has emotions like lighting bolts and his beautiful paintings are intense and abstract. When its daylight, I can see the genius in him. In the darkest part of night, I fear my sweet son is touched.

Unrequited

A special kind of pleasure saves itself for love unrequited, love for shoes, for homes, for comestibles, for lovers. One is never disappointed. The longing serves as the pleasure itself.

Memory from Seattle

We were walking to dinner, to Kitto on Broadway, my love and I. His family was in town and Japanese seemed the thing to do. We were walking and laughing, cherry blossoms bloomed. Laugher filled all the empty places we wanted to ignore. Laughter set us apart, we thought, from the others, the hungry street denizens, the vendors, the tin cups reaching to us for change, the young skin-heads thin jonesing, the old men, like zombies . "Sorry sir, sorry sir, I don't have any change." A lie. Our upwardly mobile stroll caught off guard then, by the suddenness of a baby bird falling from its nest above in concrete. Baby was cradled by our gasps, lodged deep in helpful hands made huge by its relative smallness. It breathed so rapidly, life glinting in its adreneline eyes, its body expanding to double, inhaling fleeting breath that soon left. I was amazed into smiling. Blood flecked its bill. Crimson froth, nearly like paint, nearly comic, red pain, end of life. We wanted to heal it, but our fingers were big as baseball bats and twice as clumsy. The mother bird, estimating her loss, peered down, her squawking cries an attempt at rescue. Our futile attempts to do good simply drove the baby further into cardiac arrest or shock, our scent killing it and, with embarrassed speed, we put it into a flowerpot on a nearby table. We walked into the restaurant, trying to reclaim our original mirth. We tried to scrub our hands. Life isn't always so clean, is it? We called each other good Samaritans, but I didn't think we were. Not after walking by so many tin cups outstretched from little rag men's arms. Rag men casting down their eyes as they begged, as if they would get more response from hell than heaven. If I had looked above them, what mama bird would I have seen peering down, full of judgement and vengence. I shuddered. I knew that by trying to help the bird we had added nothing to the equation that, by our failure to help the skin-heads, the rag men, we did not take away again. We justify, but the equation remains the same.

Mouth

She was a tiny woman, pale and thin as was the custom of course and she was silent, how could she not be. She had a husband whom she loved, and a daughter small and silent and so, so lovely. She did clever things, which her family enjoyed, like maintaining a lovely home, kept clean and neat. She lived in a quiet normal neighborhood full of tiny quiet women as was the custom. Her family was in all ways lovely. She thought of them always. Always, especially when walking, her bird like hand in his, especially when serving him meals.
She tried to believe in her happiness, in the fullness of her life, and she worked each day moving from room to room making things clever and lovely as if staying a step away from something, some odd feeling she shouldn’t feel, a gnawing feeling, a pang.
Her face began to itch one day, a small subtle itch just below her nose, where a mouth should be, for she did not have a mouth, as was the custom. It was a small itch, which then grew more pressing and urgent, with a noise, a sound behind it. She listened, frightened and fascinated, she looked, repulsed and drawn in. A tiny hole was forming.
She hid it from her family, from her neat and clever neighbors. She tried to figure out what it was. She opened and closed it. She moved the muscles around the gape, pulling a smile and a frown.
She put things in it and took them out, in the dark privacy of her home. It made noise. It made lots of noise. She listened and it told her things.
She did what it said and she began to eat the things left over from his meals.
She discovered to her surprise that she liked it. She liked to eat chocolate cake, richly iced, she like to eat peach pie with ice cream heated until its polar cap melted onto ski slopes of molten sugar. She liked the bubbles in the crust of hot yeasty bread. Steaks, she liked bloody rare, with juice staining her face, the charbroiled fat blackened to ash. She spread roasted garlic like lotion, rinse off with wine, suck noodles slowly one by one. She’d stab pot stickers with chopsticks and lick the soy sauce off her fingers. She’d devour a chicken whole, capturing each scrap of flesh and gristle before laying down to the marrow.
She liked vegetables and fruit, raw, steamed, poached, braised, broccoli forests, mashed potato pillows. She was omnivorous, bounty loving, all harboring. She was open all night. Her plate was a palate where harvests were painted, her mouth an asylum for victuals seeking shelter.
Such a clever thing this mouth, this hole. She grew accustomed to it.She began to think of it often.
The food was kind to her and over the weeks she began to grow. Her pale cheeks once hollow, blossomed and grew pink. Her new lips widened, rounded. Rings and bracelets grew too small and had to be discarded. She puffed up her arms with air and laughter, her waist expanding and creating waterfall rolls of flesh. Breasts now the size of newborns escaped their bindings and hips thundered out like pumpkins, watermelons, squash. Skin spread and softened, rolled and bulged. Her skin shone, her eyes were bright. She was caught off guard by the sensation that growing caused in her. It was like a pregnancy, but somehow, knowing that there was nothing to be lost, expelled, pushed out, it was more satisfying. She was mammoth.
She rolled over herself. She touched newfound hills and slopes. She lost parts of herself in flaps of skin and laughed upon finding them again. She tickled her belly and reached between her legs and breasts. She became so large, she could not hide it, could not avoid discovery and then stayed in her bed a cozy body in a cozy haven filled with oils and sauces and flavors. She’d reach fingers into her mouth and smile, amazed at the textures, wondering where this mouth had come from, not wanting to ever find it missing. She was happy.
Her husband however was not. The mouth had brought disturbing changes. He was worried about her, he said, he felt her health was in danger. Her self-esteem might be low, she might get sick, it wasn’t normal he said. Couldn’t she see a doctor? He could hardly recognize her with the deformity, the growth.
He tried tricking her, then pleading with her, he locked her in her room, unsure of the neighbors reaction to such abnormality. He felt loathing for her and for himself for feeling it, loathing for the mouth, that strange little hole that told her things and changed her. Perhaps it could be removed, he said. Where did this come from, he cried.
He couldn’t talk to anyone about it, it wouldn’t be right. It had never happened to anyone so far as he knew. He knew he’d eventually have to leave and take their daughter with him. He couldn’t bear to see her become afflicted as well. She was spending so much time with her mother and he was afraid the mouth would spread, migrate.
The woman was sad. His words hurt her greatly. She realized a choice was to be made.
The mouth told her what to do.
He came to her bedroom the next morning, as he did each morning, as was his custom by now to beg and plead. He gazed up at her and sought the unmarred face he married.
Darling, she said. Come here and hold my hand. I’ve made a decision. He came to her and sat on the bed, unsure. She took his hand, his swallowed by hers, and she kissed it and held it to her cheek.
I love you and don’t want to lose you, she said. I know, he replied. She looked at him and said, I have an idea as how to fix things. She paused. God, I could just eat you up.
She put his hand in her mouth. It seemed so very small. He looked embarrassed and tried to pull away. It was quite too late. Slowly she sucked him in, part by part, arm by leg. He was surprisingly quiet, his body heated and sweating from fear, his rabbit eyes staring with wonder and terror at the creature, who had been his wife. She he was all in her mouth, she swallowed him whole. Contented with her man in her belly, she took a sip of tea. The best meal yet.
A small face appeared at her door. The girl rubbed at her chin, at a rough cracking place just beneath her nose. A tiny slit appeared, stretched and widened. It opened and closed. She smiled and frowned. Is Daddy gone, she asked? She wandered in, still in her nightclothes. Why yes, how clever you are. See if you can find him, her mother answered. Laughing, the little girl jumped on to the bed, into her mother’s wide open arms, wide open smile. The little girl cocked and ear and listened for a moment. I’m hungry, she said. So am I, said her mother. What should we have for breakfast?

Engine

Engine revs at the stoplight
Fearful the cold wind with suck out its power.
Wizened leaves race or run or chase
Performing gymnastic death throes
The night is wet and cold
The first storm of the season
And I drive.
To just keep moving, to meet someone, I think,
To stay warm.
Engine shudders in the parking space on Broadway.
Coming quietly to a standstill I leave with my car
Waiting like a dog on a leash
Resentful but obedient.
I see an old woman begging change, thin in her coat.
She's a ruined painting and
Fine gentlemen in their leather coats
And cockrings pass her by.
Grandmothers clutching letters move towards the post
Scowling at me, in the way.
And me not sure who I was supposed to meet
Or how long I've stood waiting
The streetlights are too bright with the windy rain.
I wander back.
Engine stalls on the first turn
I left it alone for too long, the wind got to it.
The dying leaves laugh and roll forward as turning the key I say, "Please," and it starts.
Leaving the car is dangerous.
I drive again towards the next stopping place,
To meet the someone I thought I met before, did I?
To avoid the wind, the leaves.