February 2012
43 posts
2 tags
why i’ll always have nothing.
if i had light i’d let it burn out if i had color i’d let it fade away if i had love i’d give it all to you
3 tags
Streaming February
I sometimes do silly-silly child-like things. I blow bubbles into my peppermint tea through a cinnamon stick. I chew my bottom lip. I spike my hair straight up with lavender shampoo in the shower.
But then sometimes, I do serious-sullen adult-like things. I pay the phone bill two-days early by check and I buy my own stamps by the book-full. I read the directions and separate my laundry. ...
4 tags
the other woman.
you called me honey-honey one time but i still tell everyone that was your name for me when i fill their organs with sugary accounts of us and you never-ever kissed me on the mouth i’m sure that was the agreement you’d come to with her but honey-honey, your tongue tastes so good i stored your sticky-sweet in my taste buds and i pop them and swallow when i’m...
5 tags
4 tags
missing you.
desire has me doing lines of bone dust off of your closed casket
3 tags
I’m so tired of performing magic spells with my mascara wand. Ribbon curling my lashes and lining them in gold pollen powder. I’m tired of dusty pink petal polish on my lips. Pinched cheeks and diamond drops dripping from my ears. I’m tired and for once I want to look that way and have it be okay. The birth canal punctured blood vessels under my eyes and left twilight moons...
2 tags
house.
this house, mostly empty besides the lace curtains oriental rugs and invisible ink on my fingers and your ghost, is where i wait for you but the echoes from my breathing chase me back out into the february air and amoung the trees i know they’ll never find me
3 tags
The Heating Bill
I keep the heat cranked and gladly pay the bills. I love the way the roses I bought myself this week are already weeping over their glass vase. Their stems turn to rubber. I feed them crushed aspirin dust and pick off their leaves but they stay soft and bent. I think they look lovely that way. Visitors ask why I don’t toss them away, then politely ask if we can lower the temperature. ...
4 tags
wired.
my leisurely plan is to leave and to let these lines sink deep into the warm wires and spinning dials that make your laptop hum and buzz and moan along with music you play or i plan to inhale and take each word back into my body where they can settle safely into the bottom of my lungs, my belly and fold around my joints to soften the creaking there
2 tags
and the kettle.
all this rain does is swell the walls and it’s making the paint peel it makes nothing grow, not love and not life and it’s leaving me trapped here inside bloated wood with nothing but the kettle’s whistle as my song so my fingers take to sharpening needles and stroking silk petals of false flowering promises of spring and i stare at photographs of your...
2 tags
We're Going To Die
I wear gold rings that wrap tight and strangle my fingers until the tips go numb. I wear bronze doves that hook through tiny holes in my ears and dangle down to my shoulders. I can hear them cooing their metallic bird calls when I turn my head. I can hear the bones in my neck crack, too. There’s a burnt wood emblem that hangs down over my breasts from a string. My hair is pulled away from my...
2 tags
skin.
your skin cells cover my walls still sticky with your lipstick violet and pink and dry flakes of your kiss and your taste buds like tiny flower bulbs that i plant in the muck beneath my floorboards hoping that if i water the cracks between the wood your veins will take shape and sprout up around me and scale the walls, collecting all of your dna and leaving me with some lifeless version of...
2 tags
how to take your mind off her.
if i’ve got a fresh cigarette and a book of matches some hot water and peppermint tea leaves i can ruin my tongue and throat and not think much about her
but the smoke takes on her curves and the peppermint, her perfume my tongue is less ruined than it is numb and then she’s right back there on my mind, again
2 tags
Sunday.
Sunday with book forts and greasy hair. Flannel pants that end at the calf and leave me goosebumped. Coffee with caramel and deleting words by the line-full. Redhead glossies that always lead to masturbation. Rainbow chips of white chocolate over strawberry sponge cake. Sunday. Sunday with Bukowski and a chewed split lip. Got to water the bamboo plant in the elephant vase and...
3 tags
just visiting.
Strange, how we can tuck our memories into shoe boxes and slide them under our bed frames. Cardboard walls that hold bits of you and gather little clouds of grey dust around the battered corners. A receipt from the Inn, dated Halloween night. A gold condom wrapper with your teeth marks near the tear. There are Christmas cards and the glitter from the printed angel wings...
3 tags
prose bones.
you woke in the eerie glow of early morning, spitting gold from between your teeth like a fountain filled with diamonds and magic even in the fever of nightmare your words slice my skin and expose my bones i feel the cold from your breath and wish you could see yourself now your poem blood and bedhead tangled up in metaphor i hold my tongue out like a child catching snowflakes and...
3 tags
Ms. Night
Night is the kind of mistress who keeps her voice hushed. Her moans are low growls trapped in her throat, as not to wake the neighbors. We have paper-thin walls that Night paints black and silver. Night nips at my bottom lip and sucks the blood. Kisses the skin until it clots. Night braids her fingers with mine while the record player hums lullabies straight into our pores. She covers me in...
3 tags
False Witness
you rolled tobacco into the thin torn out page of a bible i watched as you torched the holy passage and let it fill your throat
6 tags
Label
I am not a slut. I am not a bitch, a cheater, alcoholic, smoker, liar or afraid. But I fuck and snarl. I cheat, I drink and I smoke. I tell lie after lie and I am terrified of them all. I may spread my legs and lips, my lungs and my heart, wide open on the stage. Everything is lit up by neon but the bartender only carries house liquor so I don’t need your labels either. This bottle,...
3 tags
Stalk
I became invisible tonight in what felt like a dream come close to true. Invisible, now that i am hiding behind the dusty curtains of your damn dirty studio apartment. You’re spitting tangerine seeds into a tin cup and I hear the clatter in your mind and feel the bend in your knuckles.
I see you through the sheer and the ceiling fan threatens to blow my cover right out from around...
4 tags
indiana.
i measured my mid-western nights by half moon lime slices molding, defeated at the bottoms of beer bottles and when the bulky curves of a pickup truck began to look like poetic slants and the spidered windshields like well plotted line breaks i knew it was time i got out of indiana smash a bottle and pick the glass away from the rind and suck pack my pockets with state bird feathers and...
3 tags
The Problem With My Thighs
The problem with my thighs is that I’ve got a problem with my thighs. They’re not used to this dependence I’ve put on them. Hold me up. Don’t wobble and most certainly don’t stretch your skin out to fit around your flesh. Spiderweb knees are not allowed. They’ve grown accustom to braces made of your bones but you chipped yourself free and fled. I fell. ...
2 tags
Numbers
every thought i have is a frag ment of a whole thought someone else had and i always round up when i’m counting calories and chances but how do you calculate how much you’ve had when you can’t formulate a full-feeling thought of your own
2 tags
Pie
she’s got the bitter of jazz apple skins between her teeth orange peel tongue poppy seed taste buds talk about a sweet machine salivating liquid sugar i watch it bubble and brown until the caramel drips drips drips down the back of her throat and she chokes on her own existence
4 tags
Collection
There’s a perfect line of bottles under my basement stairs. Largest to smallest. A flavorful rainbow of tin twist-off caps, sticky. There isn’t pride in the display, only reminders and the need for reminders. Banana vodka, sometime in November. Call Christopher, he’ll fill you in. These are the things I never write about. The goosebumps and lacerations. The dried vomit on...
3 tags
Tom
Eight in the morning. Thinking about the car. Broken axles and the side of the road. I can’t believe you kept that mix tape I made. Can’t believe you still listen to those same songs. Can’t believe you remember me. You were always so high. The broken staircase you taught me to maneuver. The house they tore down. I wrote all of your papers for you. You stayed in my bed...
3 tags
Plum
Here is how I died. Tax forms. Jammed stapleguns. Laminated posters, Reduce Your Risk. A pack a day or a bummed drag behind the building. Mid February with only a tee shirt on. A papercut on Monday morning before the big meeting. An infected flesh wound, down to the bone by Friday. The boys hide vodka in water bottles out back. They’ll let me pour some over the cut. For a price. ...
4 tags
Uninspired
today i am uninspired by love it bores me but we talked for a while face to face and sipping coffee chewing on the plastic stirring stick and working it over with my tongue your lips looked good but i didn’t want them to whisper sweet things to me anymore i only wanted them to part in time with my own and for you to swell from the want and explode from the need and maybe the color of your...
2 tags
Peep
When I was eight-years-old I remember one afternoon in Autumn. My mother was humming, boiling water with salt over the stove for pasta and chopping white onions for sauce. From my bedroom floor, surrounded by a skinny little army of Barbie dolls in pink plastic high heels, I felt eyes on me. My jeans were torn at the knee, grass stains over the thighs and I stared at them for a long time before...
6 tags
The Twenty-Fourth Second
It’s terrifying how fleeting a thought can be. Inspiration expires more quickly than the milk I buy to make coffee clouds. It’s a hiccup. The world goes bright white in a flash, a silence and then the wonderful image of your muse, the image you wait up all night for, knowing she’s nocturnal. It’s like the screen during a bad horror film. A strobe of light and a quick...
2 tags
Thread
she held together by black tights and lace i find a run and pull twist the thread around my finger and watch her skin begin to spill out into the room bruises, freckles, scars and scratches blisters and blemishes stretchmarks like a road map leading up to her chest i walk my fingertip along the lines pausing on pulse points she unraveled and exposed goosebumped by a sudden rush of air coming from...
2 tags
i will heat soup for you over the tiny flames of bic lighters if these walls fall down and we’re banished to the edge of the woods i will wash your clothes in the stream no matter how cold and raw the current makes my hands i will put a bed of flowers over the pine needle carpet of the ground so you might find a softer place to sleep if you find yourself kept awake by the moon bouncing off...
2 tags
the inside of my body scares me it’s acidic and threatens to erupt blood, piss and bile with a dying urge to rust everything within a three-mile radius i’ve got emetophobia and i’ve never plunged my finger inside of my throat or my pussy i leave that exploration for foreign objects and you are about as foreign as they come in tongue and intent and once inside i hope you’ll...
3 tags
antlers
i love how she wears braids like velvet antlers and skirts above the knee
4 tags
Clutter
I love your walls. You buy colorful pushpins in big buckets at discount stores and you stab them through the junk you find at the bottom of your knapsack or deep in the pockets of your old overcoats. There isn’t a bit of white paint that I can still see. I sit at the end of your bed, your floral sheets bunched up over my thighs. I make a list of your things when I can’t find my...
4 tags
Vibrant
She swirled a rainbow of bright colors over my exposed breasts with the tip of a paintbrush. I lay naked, drunk or high depending on the night. I don’t remember which night this was though. They all merge now, the same way those colors did, eventually. I was smiling. I know because her voice is icy in my memory, hanging like a cloud of breath.
“I’ll paint your teeth...
3 tags
lights
the moon is just a smudge on a photo-negative sky and the stars are just dust over the protective plastic there’s nothing up there that I’d ever trust to lead me home
2 tags
i wear my heart on the outside of my chest, on top of my skin and some days when i want to feel pretty i braid the valves and tie them off with a little pink bow made of soft tissue and blood clot jewels pressed into the meat of it and sure, my overcoats are ruined by the stain it leaves while i try to shelter it from the harsh elements of their winter words but i’d much rather shop for new...
3 tags
Smoke & Mirrors
i live mostly in my mind where there are endless strings of ten minutes poems about sexual positions and getting high next to warehouse graffiti and it’s safe there because out here there is nothing but the confining strangle of this floral blouse and the way the buttons bruise my belly and my fingers shake a bit while i smoke and try to hold out with water and summer squash alone in there...
4 tags
February
There is an elegant edge to the first of February. The soft struggle of the ground trying to stay alive, clinging to emerald tints and wilted yellow buds. Mud puddles frozen over and melting to let the last of the fattened robins sip and play. Hollow little icicles drip over the doorways of elaborate hotels where, inside, women wrap and unwrap mink shawls around their throats, unable to predict...
2 tags
Victoria
little bits of victoria stick with me like they’re part of my skin cells or swimming in my blood, liquid gold and iodine through a needle the follicles of her hair lay attached to split ends discarded all over the city, draped over stop signs and long out of use telephone boxes held in place through windstorms by chewed bubble gum and dried blood and the office lights at night cast an image...
January 2012
114 posts
5 tags
Drags
There’s a gag reflex on the first inhale of the first cigarette I’ve had in months. A closed throat and pink lungs. A punishment in peeling skin and hang nails. Winter hands and fingers, cut up but never quite bleeding. There’s a lonely leather glove balled up in the pocket of my coat. Big brass buttons and one hanging by a thread at the hip. A second drag and I am the...
3 tags
false lashes
i admire the way my false lashes float like black swan’s feathers on the surface of my soup and fake fingernails sink like sugar cubes in my martini i feel less heavy now
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3 tags
Shadow Box
everything you see, freckles and light fragments, tiny teeth, tangled hair, spinning copter blades and tangerine smiles, will melt in the rain it’s all made of sugar our blood and skin and our sundresses and snakeskin suits it’s sugar and wax and it will melt everything we know is tucked inside a shadow box an acrylic navy paint night sky splashed over the bottom of a shoe box and...
2 tags
Building Walls
The words ‘I love you’ chipped off of my lips as easy as ever and the wind carried them in your direction. I barely had time to watch your eyes darken before I was being thrown backwards by the force of something hard. A wall, 100 feet tall shot up out of the soft Spring ground like the roots of a radish, encircling you. It was strong, sturdy. I pushed my fingers against the...
3 tags
Barefoot
in my sleep last night there was a rush of air down the chimney, a wintery howl, a moan and a soft layer of soot was scattered like moon dust across the hardwood floors your footprints were there this morning, pressed into the mess, their filthy trail leading down the winding staircase heels and arches powdering each step that was careful not to touch down on the boards that would creak, scream...
1 tag
The Weight
Uninspired, I seek your body in the dark and find you naked and on your belly. The wooden slats in the shutters paint moonbeams across your back in a bar-code of light. Each panel of your skin holds a splatter of freckles and birthmarks like paint specks and tiny suns. I imagine you being the blueprint for the galaxy. The Creator placing bits of glitter onto a sheet of velvet, held between the...