May 2012
50 posts
7 tags
How?
How do I love thee? Let me count the whimpers in the bedroom, moans behind the shower door, the bitten lips, bruises on my hips.
How do I love thee? Let me count the broken bedside lamps, snapped silver chains, wet patches on the sheets.
How do I love thee? Let me count to five, take a breath and start to count again.
5 tags
a sharp dressed man stopped me on the street.
hold my hand, fuck my attention span as it rolls over the valley of the dip in my lower back watch the bones over the tops of my feet dance like piano keys as i flex my toes and come find the pulse points hidden behind my knees keep your thumbs on them while you support the whole weight of my legs and count the number of tick-tick-tick beats keep...
1 tag
I want to follow all of you wonderful writers so please, if I don’t already follow you (from my personal blog thefoxbones), heart this post so I can follow you. xox
5 tags
I drove inbound on a bad trip, a potent mixture of crushed lilac, dust and crystallized sweat that I inhaled from your hairline.
I thought you might like to know that the planets are exploding, somewhere far off where we can’t see and that suntan on your shoulders is an allergic reaction
to an emphysemic atmosphere....
6 tags
Poem Pregnancy
I sat today pouring your words as if from a kettle, hot, down my throat into my womb, thinking maybe something sweet will bloom. And I lay tonight will the bloated heaviness of too much tea, honey, sugar, poems about death sloshing but somehow stagnant inside.
And I press my palms onto the swell of it feeling pink bubbles rising like shaken rose wine after dinner fried in oil. So...
5 tags
Johnny.
I drove past your old house today. Saw the shutters and wrap around porch. Saw a young couple planting marigolds around the mailbox post. Saw that they’d repaired the screen door in front, grown grass in the patch of sand where I’d stomp my cigarettes out while you worked under the car. I slowed to peer up through a sky of pollen and sun to see the window where your...
7 tags
10 Things
your heart is swollen to make your breasts appear larger and flowers have more colors, even the dying ones and some mornings, you see him across the room and some mornings, perfume bottles sit empty near the sink and you drink more wine, less beer and your hair curls on its own and your tongue to him, “speak to me in spanish, but only the dirty things” and all of your dresses have big...
7 tags
for sale.
if you have fifteen dollars i can sell you a list like this one but more beautiful, and for twenty, i can write your name into the title i’ll sell you a list that isn’t like this list at all: the muscle ache of the clock hands the tooth ache of the tiger and the noise our molars make when our jawbone shifts the soft groan of our tongues the bell over the door of the liquor...
7 tags
smear.
the only galaxies i’ve ever seen are the insects smeared across the windshield green and black with bug-eyed moons catching the streetlights and speckled legs caught in the motion of freeway wind they were quite beautiful and sticky and so easy to wash away
5 tags
The way I read Poems is in tiny little spurts. Poems on toast with half a sugared grapefruit. A glass of orange juice, no pulp.
I read Poems in little bundles like nerve endings, A Poem after I’ve brushed my teeth and Pretended to floss. These are spearmint Poems.
I’ll read a Poem between sending two emails But never will I read a collection of Poems from beginning to the end. They...
3 tags
4 tags
Clorox.
I’m watching a butterfly dance drunk circles around the porch light, contemplating its markings, sipping beer with ice, chewing hang nails, waiting like a silly young thing for love to come find me, smelling the Clorox scent of the dryer vent, frowning all the while, at the butterfly. Stupid thing, I think. Stupid thing, you don’t know how beautiful we all think you are. ...
5 tags
bundle.
today feels more like yesterday wrapped inside tomorrow
8 tags
seven years of twenty (27).
i suppose, by way of measurement i have been twenty for seven years twirling in a waving sea of party balloons and wilted streamers, whiskey and bathwater and dinner wine dead candles and wax fingertips
i suppose, by way of mathematics i will die in three years twisted and old in a glorious fire of melting diamond rings and unused ovaries, eviction notices and...
5 tags
fearophobic.
i fear extreme cold and deep water solar flares and tight spaces, hard water and whip lash i feel that at any moment i might be lifted in a hurricane or splinter my tongue on a popcicle stick, terrified of sharp teeth and stories without endings so when you came to me a blurry shadow on the ceiling, from far beyond the dead you were thinking i’d cower like a child under mounds...
6 tags
i don’t want to cut my hair. it tangles, weaves, splits but i don’t want to cut my hair it blinds and stabs at my eyes but i don’t want to cut my hair if i pile it up like a braided ladder you could climb it to the moon bring back shining hot rocks covered in moon dust bring back your boots, drenched in moon mud i don’t want to cut my hair i don’t want to cut my hair
6 tags
Laughing Unaware.
She drank strawberry milk, liked the way the pink bubbles looked exploding at the end of her straw when she blew. And when her mother told her, ‘stop that, silly bear’, she blew harder and the milk would leap from the glass and splatter tiny pink freckles across her nose and her cheeks, catch like blushed dew drops on her lashes. Laughing with gold sunshine teeth,...
4 tags
let’s leave the waving to the atlantic and kiss goodbye instead
6 tags
Seven Years
for seven years watching you glide around on twig legs with grace stepping softly on clouds of pink taffeta, lace and pearl you drew a smile onto my lips pulling at their corners with cord drew laughter from my throat with syrup and honey for seven years
6 tags
white noise.
white noise is ticking clocks on ancient walls and buzzing traffic 6 miles north i drove the length of six slow-smoked cigarettes down a freeway that was one giant crater of tire marks and city garbage fly-aways ended up parked crooked on a road on the outskirts of tragedy in front of tattoo parlor, next to a pub where on tuesday nights “girls drink 4 free” and the walls...
5 tags
3 tags
Fingers.
My fingers are stained with trace amounts of habit.
Yellowed with nicotine, reddened with chewed cuticles, bloody. Ice blue with raised addicts veins, sea-coast grey with scar tissue.
Thick with mildew from clinging to the old floral shower curtain. Slick with semen webbed between each digit. Green halos at their bases from fake silver, faker gold.
Purple with fingernail-dug...
3 tags
The only way I ever knew my grandmother was perched in a wheelchair, smiling and smelling of sweets. Sugar and raspberry perfume. Her delicate white skin, pink cheeks that she pinched to keep the blood there.
She sang and hummed. Always singing, always humming.
Always popping in and out of cafes, buying flowery dresses and silk threads. Woolen yarn and knitting needles.
Stealing my...
3 tags
If You Think They’re Laughing At You.
I think myself constantly sad. Trapped helplessly between the boring, trendy prose on my shelves and the people who write it. I think myself free as I’ll ever be, and therefore, sad. But then there is the cigarette between my teeth when the sun is out for the first time in days. Humidity resting on top of bird-shit puddles and sidewalk...
5 tags
The Mad Scientist.
Our eyes have never locked, my own and this mad scientist I know, but I’ve created a whole world for him. Three grown children, two boys, a girl, and a long-dead wife who had pearl teeth and silver curls around her ears. A titanium hip plate, sunken eyes and memories of war.
I pass him every morning while I smoke my first cigarette and he’s on his third. Him,...
3 tags
ornaments.
i keep a whole drawer next to my bed filled with trinkets that glow in the dark planets and stars and condoms rosary beads a guitar pick and a plastic ring and when the midnight blackness keeps me wide-eyed and humming culling songs i pull the drawer open, pick my pale-yellow poison and charge my ability to rest
5 tags
if life were as simple as one-line poetry black coffee pressing flowers between the pages i might find it easier to breathe
5 tags
Forget It, Just Go Back To Bed.
“Good morning to you Boston, Massachusetts! Flash flood warnings are in effect for the northern portion of your state of mind! We hope you’ll find the right tools to stay afloat until tomorrow! From News Center 5, this is your wake-up call.”
And ready or not it’s a Sunday afternoon and I’ve got myself a deadline or two that I can’t be sure if I’ve missed, a date with...
3 tags
i want to compliment the whole world on being so feverishly handsome, and beautiful, and stunningly strong i like your glasses, your beard the way your eyes are just a little bit crooked and your tummy juts out on the sides i like the fake gold you hang from your ears and your tattoos, too you’re so perfectly skewed and it never stops turning me on
3 tags
this is when my insides begin to settle around you like an old foundation comfortably relaxing into your dust your bones and ashes you shape, like a fragment of rock up against me, up inside of me this is when you say ‘go’ and i go, like the waves are breaking on my skin and forcing me to collapse on your shores covered in moss, lily-pads, broken bottle sands this is when i forgive you...
4 tags
I dated a girl who didn’t know what love was. She thought it lived on her tongue and so when I asked for it, she’d kiss me hard. Hard enough to stop my breath, pause my heart, crack orange seeds, if she tried.
I found her one night, drunk and humming sleepy songs in our bathtub. I watched her through the space between the arch and the rusted door hinge. She played with her hair. ...
4 tags
nevada.
I. she has a bad habit of mixing stripes and flower patterns, of driving drunk on melted sugar and whiskey, of ignoring the busted lips and headlights
II. he has good intentions to reduce his intake of sweet breads, to sleep naked in the summertime, windows open, to kiss the pretty girls before it’s too late
III. they share a one-bedroom apartment overlooking las vegas, a...
3 tags
amaze you
do i amaze you in these patent leather shoes, this cotton dress, the smooth part in my hair, the freckles paint-splattered across my back? these scars, this hangnail that i chew at? i have a tomato tongue from the bloody mary’s, so if you want a taste tell me, that i amaze you in this light, under this sky, on this night tell me i amaze you and show me that i amaze you by writing me into...
2 tags
to think,
to think, that thin glass protects the fragile filament
to think, that my spider veins wrap around my blood
to think, that i may be singing my favorite song just before i die
2 tags
when he died we took a taxi to clean his kitchen cupboards.
a fruit fly, paper lanterns and throwing stars.
a centipede and milk, room temperature.
a cockroach, six cans of baked beans, and the tarnished keys to the ice box padlock.
5 tags
some mid-western modern art museum with its echo floors, echo drop-ceilings and you, stuck up there on the wall of an otherwise empty room with plaster dust in your hair, pins with decorative heads puncturing the glowing outline of your edges
so i stop and i look, hands on my hips taking you in, in a very different way than i used to take you in examining the curves in your jawline and deeming it...
7 tags
underneath of a bright grey sky the foxgloves try to bloom but wilt instead and so, in turn do we.
5 tags
our fingers aren’t fingers they’re bones we can break and our children aren’t children they’re the demons we make so forget what they tell you forget what you know this life isn’t real it’s the devil’s grand show
5 tags
Ellie
i remember you the way i would remember a photograph stagnant with an off-color tint and that empty, useless craving for what was happening just off camera
6 tags
wished the wind away and washed away all the salt to give you calm seas
6 tags
with tiny toy taxis i keep new york city tucked inside mirrored trinket boxes and when i’m warm i run their wheels over the pale road map veins of my thighs and let the cool metal drive my temperature down
6 tags
Bedside
I have jars of beads, tangerine hand lotion, chandelier earrings. I keep a little ball of violet candle wax, missing the wick, floral chiffon in tattered bunches. Squares of dark chocolate, lavender bars of soap in the shape of stars, moons, tulip buds. I have postcards from Sweden, letters from my grandmother in her tortured script, cocktail napkins with drunkenly scrawled poems and...
6 tags
the love is lava.
Let’s never fully give into love. Let’s tip-toe ballerina dance around its edges. Let’s never fully give into love. Let’s bite lips and taste each other’s salt right out there on the cliff of it. Let’s fuck at the end of the flat world but never dive out into the unknown atmosphere.
6 tags
my fingers crave constant little bits of you your paperdoll papercuts and your porcelain doll skin embedded with its porcelain splinters until i am scar tissue all over until i am healed but still so sore to the touch
9 tags
Burn
if i find myself, ever in a dark room with only you and a lit cigarette between my fingers i would warn you, now to follow that glow with your eyes and move quickly from its heat
6 tags
Photogenic
photogenic is the ghost and the fox and photogenic are we all when hidden behind a veil of curtain lace never caring if our eyes are proportionately aligned with the jut of our hips
3 tags
This man I know, he has this terrible habit of popping his shoulders until they crack, skipping lunch, tugging at the bottom of his button down shirt with that smirk on his face. There’s nothing he cares too much about, unless you count the things he cares about too much. Waist-lines and how his fashion falls on them. Reflections and how blurry they appear in his hunger haze.
This man I know,...
4 tags
Straight & Out
He left his wife and his daughter standing on a sun porch in moonlight and drove dusty roads straight toward midnight, straight out of Oklahoma. Straight and out. He didn’t kiss his daughter’s forehead or check his wife’s eyes for tears. He kicked his boots on the stairs and sucked on a Marlboro, left a cloud of smoke behind to watch over them. Straight and out.
He found...
