d. behrens poetry

new poems for a new decade.

2010-01-13T15:08:00.000-08:00

Notes on Hibernation

There are certain cells

that are quiet as cats, laying down

their small curvatures of course dark decrescendos

arcing across the landscapes of my body.

Transformation!

Let us lift up our hands

(which are merely the delicate evolution of leaves)

and laud the great silence. Let us spread our toes

and ease our roots, craggling into the frostbitten concrete,

seeking heat, that steam that once lay so heavy on our shoulders.

(how soon we forget,

the thick ropes of summer).

Once or twice,

When I waited for death to notice me,

I made brief acquaintance with the frozen lake.

I saw it in a series of mirrors, obscured

by the dashboard and wisps of smoke

from my grandfather’s brand of cigarette.

My reflection did not surface

and no answer awaited me ashore.

(such a luxury

to expect the fleecy sheets of sympathy.

such indulgence

to think that those chemicals squatting in my blood

were to make a home of me.)

You are not what you were,

little sister,

little self.

The Moon and the Sailor’s Wife

How natural, it seems,

in our youth, to bear our throats

to the splendid jaws of love.

How logical

to lay our hands on the thorn of a stem

so that we might retrieve it’s bloom.

How practical,

to call the names of old gods into our mirrors

and watch for wisps of vengeful shades,

whispering prayers, blundering through

bygone incantations.

I have been charting

the slow exhibitions and censorships of the moon.

She choose orange for her debut.

(What was she thinking?

What was I expecting?)

I would not compare you to a sailor, Stewart,

but you wander like one.

You curse like one.

You have been known to taste of salt and clove oranges.

Your hands, your stocky fingers,

Ten suspects of indulgence,

align themselves across keys

which fluoresce for you, just

for you.

I want to yearn for you

like an old sea hag.

I want to twist my stomach into nautical knots and bows

until your return, frayed satin

on the attic floor.

the fleet

each month, another poem:

the envelope sealed and sent through

this tube

or that.

they are a litter of sea turtles, stumbling toward

the rabid maw of the tide.

they are moon worshippers, the bald ascetics,

a crop of virgins led to sacrifice,

a thousand others wait in the harbors

to unfurl their sails.

my womb must be

the edge of the world,

that little sailor,

that lonely Magellan

topples off the edge

into such a coppery sea.

What a swamp of tangled roots.

It is loosed,

deposited,

set adrift

it must seem to some

a graveyard, an ocean

of ghosts that were never living long enough

for a fleet of mourners.

(this is what aches.)

write me in--11/24/09

2009-11-24T14:23:00.000-08:00

i always wanted to be a figment of imagination,
a doll in the attic, mint at first glance,
but lined with saliva and falling apart
at each disjointed seam.

the poet is a whore, no better
than the freudian voodoo doll that you keep
under your pillow, no grander
than the magazine squeezed under your box spring.

so write me in, stewart. i have been dying
to be in a class rage fairy tale.
fitzgerald's glamour in salinger's squalor.
i'm a costume jewelry diamond necklace,
the grand dame's folly.

and so, for the gods of comedy,
you'll sacrifice me on the altar of belly laughs
and alligator tears. imagine it!
the college dropout in connecticut,
the librarian in LA.
the lemon in your eye
(spit take)rousing applause. the camera loves you,
baby doll.

ghosts (9/3)

2009-09-08T14:05:00.000-07:00

ghosts

Stewart and I made love, and the fog climbed into bed with us
casting white shadows on pale figures.

I can read your thoughts, Stewart:
too many times have you put me in daisy gardens,
too many times have I seen a blur of myself
trumpeting through the woods.
Too many times have you pictured me as I was.

In my mind, though,
I am always near the frozen lake
under a yellow light
and in that stillness, I search for you beneath the ice.

I am always birthing something.

martha in europe

2009-09-08T13:42:00.000-07:00

Martha in Europe

I.
That summer, I travelled alone,
like we all must do when we grow old.
I cut a perfect diagonal line across Europe
for once, all things were exact.
I left my home without any promise of return.
I made ghosts of my furniature, of photographs,
of the moose head mounted on the wall.
Of course, I asked nothing of the mirror anymore
I already knew it's answer.

II.
In Germany, I wandered with a pocket of coins
(out of all of these countries, it was most like home.)
I passed by his old apartment, wherein I once came apart
stripped and shaved.
I shed enough blood to keep his heart alive for twenty minutes,
drunk on his roommate's stolen beer.

Maybe I wanted to be captured. I was in a dark womb, so
maybe I craved the adreniline rush in that moment before death.
When you taste the wet paper of cabbages and bruised sausages
and you see the shadows over the faces of everyone you've known.
I did not enter that room, charm the new tenant,
some leggy fraulein to see it one more time
I was looking for something more unexpected.

III.
England should have stoned me for my sins
but I lay alone in the heath, thinking of the hill where
I had once made love constantly for an entire month in autumn
with a boy who gave me nothing but sweetness and black tea
which I, of course, clouded with milk.

In a red birdcage of a phone booth, I dialed
he answered and his glasses lay on the coffee table.
We did not undress. We did not wish to see what we had become.
"Martha, my dear. What happened to us?"
was what the phantom whispered.
I did not reply, I just tasted his withered lips
and watched the rabbits dance in his garden
and listened to his record player skip.
In the state I was in, I couldn't say:
"Oh, my gentleman, I could have you
but I do not want you."

IV.
I put on my black dress and headed south
for Greece, maybe Sicily
if time would allow. I never felt
in those days when I wore the red bathing cap
that I ever had enough time.
My skin, still too pale for that region
made them stare, that, at least,
had not changed.

What I was looking for was unattainable. I knew that.
Through new moon sunglasses, I watched
drunk on torsos and stomachs, I sunk
into the Mediterranean, careful not to let them study
my legs, think as olive trees with purple rivers
surfacing like cuneiform.

At sunset, when they had gone to kiss their sweethearts,
the village girls (dumb as kittens)
or play soccer in the foothills
I pressed my feet into their footprints
following their path at a slow pace.
I got a busboy drunk on the patio of my hotel room,
but I didn't dare to touch his face
(not even when he lolled his curly head onto my shoulder
and called me something that I knew had to mean "grandmother".)
I just looked to the stars and wept.

V.
Last of all, the Paris cemetery.
I'd gotten lost, but I had an old map and sturdy leather shoes.

I'd purchased nothing in that city to remember it by:
just train tickets
and a citron presse to stir
as if I needed to pass the time.

A transvestite in Montmartre read my palm
smacking her lips, she told me in broken English
that I had many more years to live.
I paid her and thanked her
but I did not believe her.

Another hotel, my last night on earth.
I could not sleep with the lights clamoring outside my window
like gawking angels waiting to watch me die.
The phone did not ring. God did not call to warn me
or offer me some last chance.
I crushed my cigarette,
and said good-night.

random poetry from the last couple of weeks....

2009-07-26T12:34:00.000-07:00

Listening to the Oldies Station at Work, July 2009

Baby, let’s dance
let’s make it, let’s make it last.
I peered out through the weeds
(as Eve must have done with Adam)
and our eyes danced and shimmied like peacocks.
I walked past, and you got a bad case of vertigo
looking up my skirt.

Baby, let’s dance
let’s make it, let’s make it last.
I’m glad I didn’t listen to my well-meaning Catholic mother
when she said “Nothing good happens after midnight.”
I’ll compulsively eat tic tacs and hope to god’s empty throne
that you don’t notice my tobacco-stained fingers.
Oh, for fuck’s sake
just kiss me
I’m ready!

Baby, let’s dance
let’s make it
let’s make it last.
Let’s sleep in our clothes.
Let’s smoke two bowls.
Let’s make frozen pizza.
Let’s talk about Nietszche.
Let’s break in
end before we begin.

Baby, let’s dance
because it won’t last.
Ashing into an Empty Heineken Bottle, April 2009

Oh my god! You’re so punk rock!
Just try to squeeze that beer belly
into Joey Ramone’s skinny jeans.
It would be justice (she’s a sweetheart
but not too bright. Just your type.)

Oh my god!
The train is crashing through the toll booth
but it only made the sound of paper plates against linoleum
and a few shattered 40s.
So no one looked up from their magazines.

Oh my god!
You’ve got a pile of my discarded clothes in a plastic sack,
but you can keep them as personal relics of your failures.
Write a song about it, you son of a bitch,
make some of that food bank mac and cheese
and remember, the world is my ash tray
and my most convenient spot, your sock drawer.
El Dorado

I thought the cup was overflowing
but the wine had run dry.
We walked home from the party
as if we were tearing down Parisian alleyways.
I whirled like a kaleidoscope
and you popped like a cork.

In this orgy of mirrors,
everyone is beautiful.
and we emerge with red ears
and bitten bottom lips.
It is the carnival of eternal youth
but I have a secret…

I watched our fuse burn
and it was short
disintegrating into ash.
Virus

Once a satyr put a curse on me,
one autumn night in his sticky grove.
There were no magical apples to cure me,
no handsome prince could lift it,
no fairy godmother to baptize me
and make me pure again.

Morning in the leper colony:
a dog waits at the gate
dreaming of mangling a man like a chicken.
I crawl from my cave
begging for scraps of food from your table.
I clutch the brim of your hat:
“Please, sir! Make me pure again!”
but you ran shrieking down the hot black streets,
“Unclean,
unclean,
unclean!”

Last winter, they stretched me out
setting matches to the roots of the tree inside me,
and burned it to white ash.
Like hydras, the branches resurfaced,
and they could not make me pure again.
Tattoo Parlor

Your pen is not like mine.
the ink can’t be washed away
in a basement flood or a madwoman’s campfire.
It is eternal as math
and you paint π on someone’s neck
in Einstein’s black spit.

In this savage planet,
all the men are sailors and soldiers
and the women, trapeze freaks and burlesque dancers.
There are no puritans,
no fluttering aristocracy.
Anchors are buried deep in flesh
and our lovers occupy only two dimensions.

The wound oozes and flakes off,
the amniotic fluid wiped from the baby’s skin.
It reveals this:
I am fragile, tiny as the three bones
hiding in the inner-ear.
My children are false gods
not muddy lotuses or butterflies caught in thorn,
simply bruises and woodcuts.

I wake to the sound of bees.
Something is being born.

Letter to My Mother

Dear Mother,
I wish I could have been you in 1975.
Nineteen years old, your round wire glasses
taking in the cold rush of Minneapolis
sneaking around the Walker’s sharp white angles
to glimpse Warhol’s soup cans behind a closed door.

Standing before it, did you have a moment
where you saw the future?
Did you see that you’d forsake art for god
(anything to get that man back on your side)
and that you’d tell your little blonde girl the horrors of Greek proportion,
the piss-christ sacrilege of photography
the eye-rape of a life drawing model
so that she’d never fall into their oily hands.

And when you knew I chose the pen instead
did you weep when I did not write prayers?
O bleeding saint,
save your bats in your Japanese silks.
I no longer fear them.
House Party

Picture yourself here:
a small town house party in the mid ‘70s.
My father, who never claimed to be a rock star or cowboy
who had always dreamed of that blonde California girl,
that freckled, Protestant Cheryl Tiegs
smiling as she emerged from his can of Busch Light.

Imagine my father
the alphabet not yet hanging from his nose,
the Buddha not yet sitting on his weak right knee
pulled from the orange velour couch
by a friend, some shotgun buddy or other:
“I want you to meet this girl.”

Imagine my mother
two years younger than he, her shy brown eyes swimming and diving
through that little pond of acquaintances
to see my father turned inside out.
Through the curtain of ironed hair, maybe she smiled
and turned away to light her cigarette
and thought of that night years ago
when her own mother met her father
in that post-war dance hall
eight babies swinging over their heads.

Picture yourself here:
my father, craving sobriety.
Three Dog Night record skipping, people passing joints
my mother, shutting the screen door behind her.

The President’s Au Pair

Thank you, Mr. President
that was a great sandwich.
I wouldn’t be surprised
if you adopted me
a white, working class Catholic poet (nothing like
a Kennedy, but just as cursed.)
who could live in the White House basement
and make your daughters s’mores
and sew buttons on your jackets.

Would you be my benefactor?
Would your wife give me interview fashion tips
(smart suits and black patent pumps)
and I’d rise like a red balloon
out of a den of tobacco and ashy knees.

seven deadly sins: class exercises

2009-07-10T16:03:00.000-07:00

Sunshine (Yellow Persona poem)
When the princess spun in her buttery skirts,
I was there.
When you were three and painted that maniacal grinning sun,
I was there.
When you sat on the park bench after getting high and fed fleecy ducklings,
I was there.
When you sang incantations into daffodils and durges for maple leaves,
I was there.
When your summer tan faded in that first month of college,
I was there.
When you puked up Easy Mac after one too many shots,
I was there.
When you painted the nursery a gender-neutral color,
I was there.
When the baby god jaundice,
I was there.
When you poured honey into your chamomile tea,
I was there.
When you gummed bananas,
I was there.
When you bought your sullen granddaughter a butterscotch sundae and realized you'd grown old,
I was there.

***

Special Sauce (prose poem)

I am a compliment and nothing else, a culinary color wheel that spins like a Happy Meal kaleidiscope
and ends up smashed onto a red plastic tray. I am a secret known only to toothless meth-heads
and soft-spoken immigrants. They are my gatekeepers, they are like magicians who will never reveal
their tricks. They are like prisoners who are always innocent of their crimes, be it of murder of selling
marijuana to nurses or fucking seventeen year olds. The answer is obvious: it is right between your lips,
but like my counterparts we will be lounging on your hips like the yellow foothills on the coasts of America.

***

George Washington Carver's Dream

There are some things that are eternal,
interchangeable, blatant as god.

I wanted to create something that could shift-shape
that could feed millions, that could sit as I sat
in dusty shelves, waiting like a fat, sweet-toothed guardian angel.

I wanted to create something that could bring peace to nations,
that was the united colors of us.
A compliment to the darkest fruit or the whitest bread.

I wanted something to mend the tears in these feeble fabrics
blot out the negative space. "How did we ever live without it?" they'd ask,
and I'd shrug humbly.

I wanted something that couldn't be ignored,
but ketchup was already taken, and sugar was a cop-out
nothing more than salt's ditzy cousin.
So I crushed 'em,
crushed 'em
crushed 'em.

And so I will be remembered, praised, repackaged and sold
cast in bronze, but only a tiny figure in some pastoral corner
of a Midwestern state university.
Peanut butter.
Big. Deal.

rouge--7/10

2009-07-10T15:58:00.000-07:00

Rouge

I will never be pure again.
I was a melancholy princess
but I had yet to bleed.

I have a confession to make:
I am a monster, Prince Charming.
Watch as my delicate hand trembles
in it's red satin glove.

I am transforming...

and you will gasp and faint as disgust
floods in and drowns the lust.
Lover, excuse me,
I am giving birth to my teenage journal.
The pages seemed endless
and some words clotted together.

I am Mademoiselle Werewolf,
and the moon drives me insane.
I am not a modern woman made of sterile linoleum.
I am a witch, an effigy made of apple skins,
an oracle prostrating herself to the virgin goddess:
Mother, my third eye is bleeding.
In the maple grove, I hear her answer...
repent, repent
she says through the red curtain.
you have weeping to do.

the attic--7/9/09

2009-07-09T06:33:00.001-07:00

This is a prose poem I wrote last night. As they say in the Wall Street biz, I'm "diversifying my portfolio". Let's power lunch.
-d
***

The Attic

Step inside. We are two mushrooms exhaling our green smoke. Here, things come in pairs
Two arms that will twist into you like vines over bicycle handlebars. Two empty bowls that
once held the meager cuisine of bohemians. Two sets of eyes that stare out of the hollows
of shadows. The macabre mother whose feet we kiss in the psychedelic armpit of mid-summer.
Step inside, but mind the broken glass and rusty nails jutting from the floorboards. Mind the
fleecy darkness and cold light. Mind our cat (she is a madwoman) Mind the dust on our stolen
board games. Mind the ghosts that hover in the soft jutting of our hips and the gaps in our teeth.
One day, maybe two, a swarm of bees had a wild family reunion in our skylight. They lost
themselves in the outlandish sunlight and fell to their death. The Icarus family Thanksgiving,
a ritual to the jealous sun god. I swept those foolish boys into the dustpan and went to work.

seven deadly sins

2009-07-09T06:16:00.000-07:00

http://www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/iswfest/
I'm taking a "Seven Deadly Sins" poetry class at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival this week, and I'm pretty much a gigantic poetry burrito at this point. I'm amazed at the things I'm learning, one of which is that I really don't fit in at wine and cheese receptions. I ate my brie and finger sandwiches and bailed.
This is my instructor's work. She is rad.

You know you're a huge nerd when...
You attempt to write a cento and sort of feel like you're being buried alive.
Verb tense pisses you off.
You're excited by phrases like "and the stars in the sky are still boss" (that's Corso. I want it tattooed on my body).
You brainstorm about poetry series while drinking Dr. HyVee in the wee hours of morning.
You get maniacally excited about all these contemporary poets you didn't previously know about, then you attempt to get all your non-writer friends to become as obsessed as you.
A prose poem about disembodied ears is the class favorite.

boys--7/6

2009-07-06T07:56:00.000-07:00

Boys

My ribcage fails to hold in my absurd heart
for it and the nerves in my skin
fail to reach symbiosis.
Once again, it must throw itself overboard.

I.
I laid with you in a red room
with a red curtain and red cheeks
red hands and red sheets
red hairs patchy as red stains
and we were young again.

II.
His sweat made my bed smell like a tomb
and I tried to tell him that the man on the couch
would rape up both if he could.
Hungry as a panther for our empty stomachs
and dirty hair.
So I clamped my jaw shut
and waited.

III.
Somewhere, your face is painted, my bedouin.
I write you letters, piecing together
remnants of my life that seem as innocent as we were.
I sneak in dried lilies, butterfly wings,
and let them sleep with ink and drunken night kisses.
Taste the gin on the sealed paper
and someday I will leave my gold sandals at your door.

Swamp Thing--5/30

2009-05-30T07:39:00.003-07:00

Swamp Thing

How many times will you go belly-up in your toxic tank
just so you can try to reach the ocean?
You have worn out your welcome
and passed out naked on the couch.
Shut yourself in your shantytown
and let your failures become urban legends.

Your eyes have a second skin
a primordial glaze of a reptilian lush.
I have slept next to the river.
Voodoo embers fell upon my knuckles
and by morning I smelled of singed lashes
and burnt toast.

You can glide through the sewers
growing fat with the flotsam and jetsam.
You slither up through the drains of unsuspecting bubble baths.
Eel-like, you slither through the silt floor
trying to smother the brightness
of coral-haired gazelles
but I was always too quick for you.

Attics and Turrets--4/23

2009-05-02T07:01:00.001-07:00

Attics and Turrets

There is more truth than you think
in those fairytales about those aloof princesses
kept in attics and turrets by spinster aunts
or hungry dragons.

Why, might you ask, did they not throw themselves
shrieking and kicking into the boiling moat?
Why didn't they dance off the windowsill
to meet the soft black earth cradled in thorns?

There must have been one cell of love in the dragon's tongue,
She must have felt some security in those leather wings.
There must have been good intentions
in the aunt's withered lips.

They must have known
that they would be no less trapped
in the arms of a prince.

Santa Annas--4/23

2009-05-02T07:00:00.001-07:00

Santa Annas

You're an east coast baby
but the Santa Annas always keep you awake at night
this time of year.
Your black lungs cringe against the gusts
and your heart bleats like a windchime.

The ocean holds its breath with me
and you board up your eyes in vain;
the hurricane will always rip out the boards.
This weather, it drives you crazy.
Like the sky, I make my rotations:
each year, Cancer shuts me in it's shell as I scrape along the reef. Each year,
Leo steals the sunlight and give it to everyone but me.
The moon pushes and pulls
and I am thirsty for her again.

You're a landlocked sailor
and your weathered hands clutch women's limbs
like stalks of corn in autumn
but they will always bend for you.

caution--3/11

2009-03-15T08:45:00.000-07:00

Caution

I would be very careful
if I were you.
You should be very careful
if you were me.
But if you were me, you’d learn to reign in
Apollo’s smoldering ponies
and pray the sun doesn’t rise on Medusa’s mascara-stained face.

Get out while you still can
because after me, you will see the world through bloody Oedipal eyes.
I will scar you worse than your mother’s back and wrists
but unlike the cripple she is, I will chase you like a vengeful Fury
or leave you like Homer’s wayward Muse
only to return at the most inconvenient hour
mid-fuck or in the middle of a hypnotic state
while you are trying purposely to forget me.

Proceed with caution, wandering bard
for you are in grave danger of a potentially pining Calypso.
I am madder than Cassandra,
drunk dialing in her tower.
Play on your burning piano
you have struck a chord.

trash

2009-03-10T08:16:00.002-07:00

Trash

Really, what’s the difference
between Eurotrash and white trash?
Those bastards have just been around longer
and English food is just as shitty as Southern gruel.
I don’t see much of a difference
just hot noise, street pissing, and a few ruins
and exposed tits to gawk at.

Ça va, mon amor? (Je ne sais pas.)
Whatever the hell that means. Çe’st la vie.
The best way to lie is to say I love you in French.
I don’t measure my madness in metric.
I don’t see why anyone ever would.

I am the ugliest American, and I can admit it now.
I will not transplant myself, though many have.
I will not come bouncing off the plane with Chlamydia,
a Prada scarf, and a brand new worldview.
Oh, your semester abroad when you ruined your expensive jeans
and had too many rendezvous
with pretty boys in their Ikea-strewn flats to call yourself innocent
as if you were the first.

Man of Leisure, Man of Peace

2009-03-10T08:16:00.001-07:00

Man of Leisure, Man of Peace

End it, go ahead!
Kick me out, you grab-ass landlord.
You are no lizard king.
You are a reptile of the most common fare.
The Buddha hides knives behind his serene smile
and all his followers are just greasy-haired whores
who look good in orange.

I am tired of your clanging finger cymbals at 4 am.
I am tired of your deaf and dumb psychedelia.
I am tired of your Mayan roulette.
I am tired of your cat-hair covered boxers
hanging around my floor like passed out partygoers
but the only one attending was you
and maybe a couple hits of blotter acid.

I am checking out of this haunted hotel
I am a lady of taste
and your lukewarm pasta dinners are squirming in my gut.
I got burned out like your opaque chemicals
and there is no safe place to scream.

psycho bitch

2009-03-10T08:16:00.000-07:00

Psycho Bitch

but I prefer the term “train wreck”
see also: “hot mess”.
Virginia Woolf should have warned you in a dream
(hair full of seaweed and sand up her nose)
that you should not have gone home alone with a poet.
AA never worked for sex addiction
bitches like me always tuck and roll off the wagon
and board the blue bus with a wink
as they hike up their skirts.

You’ve got mail! And it’s from your worst enemy!
Apologies are like popping valium for a fine young lady like myself.
My hips are full of the awkwardness of a post orgasm sob fest.
It’s going to get ugly, my friend.
Stick with bi-curious rendezvous and self-pity.
It’s safer.

I am as short lived as nitrous oxide,
light as whipped cream and just as forgettable.
A stranger’s bed is my crack pipe, my dirty needle.
I clean up nicely,
but I’m bad news, baby.

valentine 2/13/08

2009-03-10T08:15:00.000-07:00

Valentine

The blueberries you ate were bitter.
Each helpless blister burst beneath your perfect teeth
and the red dust stained your gray sweaters.
So when you said you couldn’t taste anything,
I made you a cake entirely of sugar
and it caved in the middle, in spite of it’s sweetness.

“What is the point?” you asked, “When I’m not going to eat it anyway?”

You wanted a poet.
You wanted a piece of history.
You were willing to make a wager.
It seemed easy to see my name in print.
In the between Cartier and downtown loft ads in some magazine
or on the marriage certificate as you reached for the next available ship
to whose oars you would cling.
This was not my maiden voyage,
you preferred a scuffed schooner.

“What’s the point?” you asked, “We were heading straight for the rocks anyway.”

In that gray cotton darkness of your bedroom,
Me, in a familiar haze,
a story of gunfire and scorned women staying remarkably afloat in my mind,
I tried to reach into you
but our spines, like those twin pisces,
lay in desperate parallel.
You apologized, the night after
drunk and screaming affection into the receiver
and promised me dinner.
I’d make you buy me wine,
I was becoming accustomed to bitter reds.

dangerous lover

2009-01-22T12:38:00.000-08:00

Dangerous Lover

The oracle has nothing to say, so Apollo is homeless
and the whole sea is an icy mosaic of queens and sultans
with smoke in their eyes.
It’s a collective writer’s block, a great depression
whose wheels squeal, thirsty for the oil burned by foolish lovers
with tattoos of names that will be revised with black boxes.

Miss Golightly was buried today
and instead of roses, costume jewelry littered her grave.
There were lines out the door at junk shops and pawn-and-loans.
The glamorous mourners went to pay their homage.
I paid my respects, and I’ve got no money left.

I married Shakespeare’s humorless clown in a shotgun wedding
and we plunged into deep water with a thousand other desperate people
and tongue tied rebels covered in kitchen grease.
Like most poet’s unfortunate lovers, he was doomed to forget me.

I am no philosopher,
I am just a chain smoker, and my friends grow old
as they release their balloons into the threadbare sky.
There is nothing left for us but an empty pack of cigarettes
and beer cans littering the floor.
The party is over, and it will be awhile
before we get paid,
get laid,
get our say.

I need a glass of wine to call a friend, I need a string of lights
to compare to a string of failures.
Call me a dreamer,
call me a hurricane,
call me a slut, because I am not subdued and pale blonde.
I am not a reassuring bible verse.
I am a red, red stain.
I am a dangerous lover.

kissing ashtrays--1/7

2009-01-08T15:36:00.000-08:00

Kissing Ashtrays

Would the moon have risen in the same way
in that perfection of dusk
with the winter trees regarding the sky with a philosopher’s third eye
if I had been with you as the bomb dropped
and spilled confetti in our beer?
Would we have laughed at the stars settling on our tongues?

I assumed you’d tire of kissing ashtrays,
and I knew that my bloody fits would be difficult to swallow.
You would slip on your headphones
as I kicked in the teeth of pan flutes.
I am that same hysteric, again.

I am the debutante of an impoverished society,
the handmaiden of the bohemian underground.
I spin in those cotillions that artists always throw.
I will be auctioned off to the highest penniless bidder:
She eats peanut butter sandwiches
and her lungs are collapsing along with her heart.
Who wants this slut?
Who wants to hold down her wrists and
roll her screams under your tongue?

They say the captain never abandons their ship
and I was no exception.
I watched many a vessel crack in half,
and more than enough times I crashed into icebergs in gin-fueled spasms.
More than enough times I sunk into all seven seas
not bothering to search for treasure or touch the bellies of whales.
More than enough times I wrote letters to god in dots and dashes
before the water flooded ballrooms and boiler rooms.

I am the bitch slave of tragedy.
He bought me a pitcher of beer and asked my name
and if I owned a pair of heels.
He had the upper hand, as most of my lovers do.
He made no promises, only proposals
and I still wear his rings heavy on my hands.
He has ripped apart every seam on my black dresses,
and I fall asleep with him filling me up just below the brim.
“I’m drowning,”
“Would you like some water?”
“My glass is half-full, asshole.”

The Divers

2008-12-31T09:54:00.000-08:00

The Divers

The bubbles seemed feeble
intrusive and insignificant as flies.
Indeed, we are insect-like in comparison
crawling under this endless rug
more ancient than the trees huddled with birds
and termites.

The first end of the ocean erupted in color
a blush of red-lipped coral
yellow fish darted like taxies on the boundless blue highways.
We lost ourselves in green kelp forests,
playing Marco Polo when the tide came in.
We put anemones on our extremities
and wore shells in our hair
we drank wine from mermaid’s cups
and made lovers of ourselves in the tidepools.

Then we, the precious fools we are,
could not help but follow the riptide
to find out if sailor’s tales were true.
So we were strangled by squid
led astray by the lamps of murderous fish
our fingers clamped by angry red oysters.
They would not give us their pearls
not for the price we could afford to pay.

You occupy your own hillside now
taking up permanent residence in your crumbling lighthouse
where you blow dandelion seeds so they taste land
and grow rampant like we said we would.
I am still lying in the waves,
a drowning woman waiting to be rescued.
Ships have come, even kind canoes
other shipwrecked men have offered me their hand
but I cough in their faces.

The Potter and the Whale

2008-11-30T21:31:00.001-08:00

I am all suggestion
and I’ve never seen snow this white,
so white it drowns out what would have been tears
to fill the barrels that by some rogue miracle
would have turned into wine.
It’s not a miracle
it’s just an alcoholic’s biology.

My face contorts,
and I cry out like a homeless prophet in flannel sheets,
my skin aching for clay,
for mud, for some desert tonic to fill me
with bubbles of light, the kind that make me spin in circles
flawless as a compass.

Teach me your language.
Let me wander your continent until I am weary enough
to rest in the oil twilight of your hair.

I am a patient stretched out far as the concrete girdles
that bind our country like a faceless consort
being burned like a witch or frozen like a god.
Maybe if I changed my voice,
changed my hair,
changed the color of my eyes so they don’t notice
the purple smoke that climbs up behind them.

I wanted your planes crashing into me until I felt everything,
until I felt nothing, until I felt something as expansive as grief
but something of an opposite.
I wanted the blacklight, the white light, some light to fill my vision
so that I couldn’t see you anymore, so you wouldn’t reflect
as you always do.

Teach me your language.
Let me wander your continent until I am weary enough
to rest in the oil twilight of your hair.

My mouth is tired, a cavern where no flashlights come to visit.
It is wet with love, but not yours.
It is the same fleshy extraterrestrials
that so often come to the same conclusion:
this planet is vague
this planet is yearning deeper than each and every widow
whose tongues are made of black lace,
whose palettes filled with white paint.
It aches, it moans, it waits,
but they only fix their eyes at the back of my throat
to see a transfiguration,
some mystery explored in ancient cloth.

You made your way out of my ocean
with mermaids licking salt from your sand-colored skin
brushing me from your hair.
You have shaken off
the wonders of deep water.
Like a beached whale, you can’t ignore it
you just want it picked apart
and I will be laid bare.
I will be laid bare for you.

The Potter--11/3

2008-11-04T17:04:00.002-08:00

The Potter

There’s a crescent moon and one stray star in the sky,
but I don’t bother to squint at it anymore
unless it’s full to the brim
and beating on my window.

Today I fantasized about your hands covered in clay,
but I won’t come unless I see it in real life
making bodies into vases.
I want you to smear it across my thighs and tell me
I belong to you like I belong to the earth.
My roots are planted in you
the white fibers woven throughout you.
The story in the soil is a love song
that whispers through highways and the blue light
of apartments with white curtains
I hear your thoughts in the snow on the fire escapes.

Our pages are yellowed with smoke
and my cursive script is undetectable
but you have a bright lamp and I have the time
let’s decode the necessity of absence
when we could have been kissing our eyelids
and watering our houseplants.
Love cannot be kept a secret
it begs to reveal itself in the most garish purple.

Dirt Floors--11/3

2008-11-04T17:04:00.001-08:00

Dirt Floors

You cleared your rain gutters
and told me my face was too white.
There’s not enough contrast
and I am not your complimentary color.

The way I saw it,
we were a pair of 3D glasses peering onto a screen
allowing images to converge.
I am water and I wore you down like earth,
but you receded before I could erode you enough to reveal
the soil beneath.

So wear your flannel
build houses out of sticks or stones
find a woman to keep you warmer than I,
a threadbare quilt.
I am worn thinner than paper
a few stray threads
and made up of so many scraps of pioneer dresses.

You swept up the crumbs from your kitchen floor
and rinsed out old bottles of wine for recycling.
Here is the one I made you try
and you spit out the window.
You said it tastes to much like oak trees
and the tongues of irises.
I hear you shuffle barefoot on your dirt floor cabin.
Listening, I am the glass in the dustpan.

untitled so far

2008-10-28T00:50:00.000-07:00

Black dress metaphors + WASP imagery=I watch too much Gossip Girl and I'm madly...smitten.

-d

****

You are the seam I don’t want to rip out.
I’ve re-sewn this black dress again and again;
the style has changed with me.
It started as a moon-shaped collar,
but it became a neckline as low as a drowned man
and the black satin lay strewn on the cutting room floor.
It was a dirty movie I never wanted to see again.

I’ve made some cuts
taken it in and stretched it out
crazy stitched a red heart
that looked more like the burning end of an expensive cigarette.

I wore it to Gatsby’s summer parties
a black hole in white-hot August
the sweat and wine blotting out the fabric
like an exploding feather pen.
The sun burned my shoulders
and all of old money New York saw me plunge into the pool.
I made a spectacle of myself
just as I planned it.

I met you on a yacht in the racing red heart of Indian summer.
All their couture eyelids opened to watch the idiot
throw herself off the edge in a deafening splash
but you pulled at my sweater
and I fell back on deck.

What started as yet another cheap performance,
yet another manic fit
soon became what some call love
(but I’m not sure.)

Carl Sandburg’s cat cleans himself in my apartment
as we create chills for ourselves, a magnificent fever.
You made me a perfect tailor
on a dark dance floor.

tova

2008-09-06T10:30:00.001-07:00

I read a short interview in Time magazine about a woman named Tova who was a flawless matchmaker, but only for Orthodox Jews. She claimed that the first time she made a match, God spoke to her.

-d

******

Tova

Five pointed stars swing over my head
a silent wind chime
that only I can hear.

People are like icebergs
but age and violent sunlight
make everything that is underwater
seem less significant.

I must be some sort of reparation
for the ash we lived in all those years.
The only thing god could send
was flowers and chocolates.
Diamonds are the new manna.

I send them all to live in white houses
with fresh cut flowers brought in by some Gentile woman
every Wednesday.
Bathrooms with monogrammed towels
and portraits in the paper.

And I sit on my digital cloud
waiting for names and faces to magnetize.

satisfaction

2008-09-06T10:29:00.001-07:00

Satisfaction

I was, as always, a spectacle.
My eyes, when they were shut,
were like two eraser marks
and when I opened them, you could see all the mistakes.

Such a strange bird I must have been.
The female flaunting her few bright feathers
that ridiculous yellow against brown.

You left when most people are waking up
and offered me no promise of finding an end to the maze
or a solution to the puzzle.
Only the theories spinning in my head
knocking against the skeletal wall.

Was I a whore or a nurse?
A trapeze artist or a crumbling statue?
An addict or a kind apothecary?

Another wedding dress is burning
in the little closet in my brain.
Only this time, I use the sleeve
to light my cigarette.

white rabbit

2008-09-06T10:28:00.000-07:00

White Rabbit

So smoke your cigars and drink your wine.
There’s enough matches to go around
and there is always someone to clean your lipstick off the glass.

I never thought I’d miss the collegiate life.
That slot machine everyone kept feeding
on the off chance we’d get lucky.
Still I can’t say bohemia isn’t any kind of insurance
I can rely on.

Now I sit up in the attic drinking bottled Pabst
and eating blueberries for breakfast
too afraid to know love as anyone more than an acquaintance
he wasn’t that great of a friend anyway.

So I am left as nervous as a white rabbit,
waiting to see if I’ll appear
out of nowhere.

8/21--Cassandra

2008-08-26T20:28:00.000-07:00

Cassandra

Cassandra is a chemical
colliding with herself,
the green blue light of reactions
a lunatic’s moonlight laboratory, where she
practices that same alchemy all rejected lovers know.

“I, more than anyone
should believe in phantoms.”
she says between bites of juniper berries
and olive pits clicking against her teeth.
Wine and smoke slosh and curl down her throat.
The imagined one imagines Cassandra’s marble legs
descending her wooden stairs
her ghost close behind.
His tears
hot rivers running down her legs.
Her exorcism: “My mind might be a nice place to visit
but I doubt you’d want to live there.”

“He tells me, ‘Write it down, Cassandra.’
as if I haven’t already,
but it is all fantasy, a story told to an ugly child.”
she explains, her brain a burning mattress
or a lukewarm tub.
Inside her body, guitar strings strangle her organs.
That same ghost, of course.

7/14--Aftertaste

2008-07-14T21:05:00.000-07:00

Aftertaste

A broken heart can make anyone a sponge.
Faceless and asexual,
the guru of the coral reef.
A patient samana
(if only to be
such a beautiful word).

So I kissed a stranger last night
(the only thing I remember was that his hair was nice
it was blonde like a surfer’s swell
but it couldn’t be in this Midwest bar.)
We kissed behind a blue plywood door
if only to get the aftertaste of you
off my tongue
maybe this one would lift the curse you put on me.

Mine was a fate much like a rape victim
or a stray dog.
You are the only story I can tell
repetitive as a romance novel formula
(girl meets boy
girl goes against her coy feminine instincts
and falls in love.
best friend seduces boy.
boy gives girl shards of hope
best friend finally claims boy with a lease
boy rejects girl
girl resents boy)
and so on.

Like this I open the same wound like a Christmas gift
quickly, I tear away the paper to find the same gag:
the same rotting apple cores
the same damage
the same look of disappointment as the neighbor boy
laughs in his folding chair.

Lately I entertain ideas of new characters to replace you
a guitarist with no arms
a bored housewife turned cross-dresser
a hip lesbian with a parrot on her shoulder
some girl named Catastrophe
but you always creep in with your key of D (slightly out of tune)
and blue work shirt (slightly unflattering)
and your glasses on my dressing table
and your Dutch master nose.
It all shows up in the doorway
as I drop the bleach rag on the tile
or spill a bowl of olives
I cross out paragraph after paragraph
strophe after strophe
but you reappear again.

(sometimes when someone asks my name
I can’t reply with anything but
‘I’ll never tell…’)

7/14--Hôtel Mathieu

2008-07-14T20:55:00.000-07:00

Once again, I'm giving the finger to expectations and gender roles and writing a non-romantically themed poem about a guy.
Here's to you, Matthew. Thanks for existing.

-db.

***

Hôtel Mathieu

You would sit on the sofa, awaiting the tragedy
of the day
like the dog-eared page
in the bathroom Reader’s Digest.
I’d tell you the tale directly from the tarot cards
that I thought spelled out my fate
as I flipped them over and over in my brain.

My psycho-astrology was fucked.
I’m a red beret lunatic born on a cursed day: November 3
when death has lost it’s novelty
there are no daisies in my eye sockets
and my candy skull dissolved in the rain.
There are no saints on my playing cards
I no longer fish for Saint Anthony
when I lose my keys.

You nod at my metaphors as you stir the macaroni,
the gypsy punk at the antique stove.
I’ve been comfortable staying in your film noir hotel
where it is all black curtains and red scarves
over white paper lamps.
Photographs of inky women with skin like paper
beauty is all chemical
all grayscale.

Lately you don’t mind my lack of scandal.
Everyone needs the neutral poet who only makes love
to her green desk lamp.

Hold the umbrella, amigo.
It’s been raining all morning.

matchmaker--7/2

2008-07-04T17:44:00.001-07:00

Matchmaker

Why don't you walk in at about 1 a.m?
Make me be patient
as if you had just fucked your malnourished girlfriend
and decided to stop in for whatever is on tap.

I'll sip my wine, noticing you
wishing I hadn't,
covering up my one night stands like nip slips
or bruises.

You won't notice me, of course
and I'll pretend you're not there
as some Ringo Starr lookalike gropes my thigh.

Our first date
will make me wish I hadn't been one of those girls
who grew up equating Disney princesses
to my future self
(I was Belle: bookish brunette with green eyes)
but I'd never work a tiara
and I always end up passing out on my shawl
two hours before the ball ends.
That teapot should have never suggested an open bar.

You'll laugh at that
and I'll wish I hadn't noticed your smile
or that there is no malnourished girlfriend.
"anorexics never have nice tits anyway" you'll say
and I'll pretend I'm not completely swelling
like the hot air balloon in the guidance counselor's office.

vintage--7/2

2008-07-04T17:39:00.000-07:00

Vintage

Darling, you've got infatuation
written all over you.
Why don't you play the innocent yuppie
and I'll be the creepy neighbor.
You play the brooding artist
and I'll play the nerdy underclassman.

Darling, you are too cool for school.
You scream vintage t-shirts and bands I've never heard of.
Like every other modern boy
you'll make me do all the work.
Times are changing,
so girls like me get laid
once in awhile.

Darling, isn't it funny
that you lasted as long as a pack of cigarettes?
You stamped out the law of attraction
when I burned it right down the label.
Lucky Strike
doesn't live up to it's name.
You can't find that shit around here.

fidget--7/2

2008-07-02T23:11:00.000-07:00

Fidget

I went out on a limb (as it is
always dangerous to do)
and nearly broke my neck.
There were no birds on the canopy
of that same oak I've climbed over and over again
no promises from the robin of springtime
and certainly no bluebird of happiness
(the birds had flown)
so I just fell
with no idea
how I'd catch myself.

No one hears of thsoe near-death experiences
where there is no light at the end
no wedding gowns or quiet bedside lamps
just a darkness black as licorice
and just as bitter.
An eternity of damp basements full of sweating bodies
dancing under a shit-ton of asbestos,
and you're the only one standing by yourself
They'll hold out their tongues to catch the snow
and you're the only one who knows
this is no acid trip,
no French absinthe.

Try living your life being sure of nothing
except the fact that you'll grow old
and accessorize as you always have:
with a bottle of pills and a sloppy notebook.
Try being the only one to know
that love is just a hologram carrot
and you're still one of the stupid mules chasing after it.
Try waking up in the kind of sweat
that you haven't felt since you were forced to attend church
each Wednesday night in Indian summer
that exact brand
of discomfort.

So you fidget.
Sit up straight in your bed
nothing green or pale or golden
will get you to sleep and wait until 4 a.m.
when the last thing you want to hear
is birds and how they call to morning
as if she's a centerfold.

Prospect Street--6/23

2008-06-24T09:13:00.000-07:00

I always wanted to be a Tenenbaum.
-db

***
Prospect Street

It was a summer of olive pits
like those temporary lovers,
they would snap against my teeth until I spit them out.
I'm a modern child
I want things to come easily.

It was the summer he fell in love with a stray cat.
He carried his body to bed in the house
that made me believe I was my own character
in a story too lazy and beautiful to be true.

(If I was your daughter
maybe I wouldn't crave dairy so much
when I'm lonely.) I always pour a glass of milk
and wait for the phone to ring.

It was the summer when June smelled like burning kitchens,
marijuana, and blueberry pancakes.
The necessary things it took to mend my heart.
No doctors could help me find the pieces.
I just had to wait for them to scuttle back into place,
to wash in with the tide.
Thank god they never got woven too tightly
in the bluebird's nest.

I wanted to be their spinster sister
clutching her cameo, approving and disapproving
as she runs neon and naked through her own brain.
But I was just homeless, hopelessly lost
in borrowed and pinot noir
in mascara on the pillowcase.

It was the summer where days overlapped
like sand under the waves,
like glasses of tea being filled and refilled.
I would rise out of the water again and again
like a seal. My freckled nose
like the translucent fin of a bluegill.

The summer would pass in millions of colors,
but I couldn't choose one.
So I am just whitespace,
still it is undeniable:
I exist.

Madame X--5/22

2008-05-25T18:43:00.000-07:00

By John Singer Sargent
I think I understand how she feels.

Madame X

I can be a femme fatale for you
and abort my greens and blues for darker shades
if you can give up Cinderella for a few moments
for stranger companies in the linen closet.

Go ahead and tell me stories of your former lovers.
I've lost my taste for jealousy
and I've forgotten how to make dolls
of other girls.

I can make my eyelids film noir umbrellas
and you can climb underneath if you want
but I can't promise you won't feel the rain
now and then.

I can be a sexpot in a victorian city
as minimal as math, my skin full of forumlas
and under my veil you can see
the bobcat still slinking around inside me
appearing and reappearing
eating songbirds to survive
dont' bother to trap him
he's there for good.

Overexposure won't make me less of a woman
but don't be surprised
if it makes you less of a man.

Assia--5/17

2008-05-18T21:00:00.001-07:00

A homage to Sylvia Plath regarding the woman who tore her and Ted Hughes apart. Greatly inspired by "The Rival". Don't know if it's publishable, but feedback is appreciated.

-db

******

Assia

You can blame my ghost all you want,
you moon-faced wretch.
You with pierced craters grated in with glassy stars.
You can dance in your veil and stroll around a prize or two
someday, a daughter
might be a decent consolation prize
confirmation, a wailing gold trophy.

In the sinister hour of 3 a.m. you’ll think of a past life
when you wore red wool coats
and spoke with an accent
and you’ll sweep it away in a weak little tide.

Nature moves in cycles
and you’re just the washing machine
he sits upon
waiting for the opportune moment
to reveal his transparencies
in a series of little papercuts
that he calls songs
that he calls poems
that we’re supposed to call art.

You can pretend your face isn’t changing
You can pollute the air with enough fake roses
and a perfume that calls you 'princess',
but my ink will stain everything you own.

Bitch--5/17

2008-05-18T20:59:00.000-07:00

Bitch

I want to pull you out of me like tape
from a cassette
and all your music will lie crumpled at my feet.
(There is too much
I have yet to erase.)

The town you live in
has all the flavor of cigarette paper
but instead of watching it burn
I chewed it up like bubblegum
(how many times
will I have to break my jaw over you?)

Spring never really came for you
unless you count that day you noticed the rings
in that glass case you call security
and sang Patsy Cline as you undid her bra.
(I can narrate the whole scene and yawn at the end
but I can’t be your suicide doll anymore.)

I can’t be the dog that lies her head on your knee
some bitch waiting to play fetch all day
in the sun-swallowed wheat fields
(oh, I can’t wait
to show you how much I don’t care.)

I have a secret that makes me claustrophobic
the ceiling is too low
and I feel like a deranged parakeet
gnawing at the bars of the cage.

Gold---5/6

2008-05-07T04:54:00.000-07:00

Gold

The camera flicked off
and I saw only my reflection
in the infra-red lens.
You had disappeared from behind me;
your resonance
laid like dead orange butterflies
on the asphalt
until a hot wind took it into the
enormous white silence of the sky.
The parade was over.

The ribbons hung in the trees
and the balloons floated across the lake
to meet at the island in the middle.
The bluebirds turned back into children
as if some curse had been lifted
and I saw things
not through the eyes of some hysterical muse
but through my own.

You said in some unfinished melody:
“There’s a hole in my heart where there will
always be a place for you.”
Now I’m sure I don’t want to live in a hole.
I’m looking for a whole heart to live in
and I promise to whomever is willing to let me rent the space
that I’ll paint the walls gold
and hang paper stars from the windows.
I’ll look out at the perfect rhythm of their organs
and feel safe as the wind chimes
sing along with their blood.

So while you claim a few highways as yours
and try to fill the hole I left open
with purple paint and cigarette ash;
while you throw pennies into goldfish ponds
wishing for a girl to write your songs for you,
while you stand in your glass box
whoring out gold rings and broken TVs,
while you’re swallowing the weather like cough syrup,
I’ll be busy letting birds out of cages and
calling love whatever I want to call it.

holla at me.

2008-04-17T08:47:00.001-07:00

I'm gonna be reading "Pills", "Filmstrip", and "Pinup" tonight at the open mic/poetry night at the Ames Progressive office. Come holla at ya girl (and other sweet local poets) if you happen to be in Ames at 'bout 8 with nothing to do and you happen to be wandering near 118 Hayward in the same building as the Scallion.
I promise you I'll shower and take my meds beforehand. I'll maybe even cover the giant zit that's forming on the side of my face.
Poets are just slightly above mimes on the list of most hated artists.
We're full of shit, but come anyway.

-d

possible book idea in its infancy.

2008-04-04T22:29:00.000-07:00

I'm going to start thinking seriously about self-publishing a bona-fide poetry book. Complete with images, if the person I want to help me with that is willing to comply...

Thinking of going through a self-publishing site, Lulu.com...I'm going to do some serious editing, designing the layout myself, and maybe setting up reading(s)/book signing(s).

The title: Dress Up Naked

Poems will include (not necessarily in this order or how they're appearing on the blog):
Pawn Shop Boy
Groceries
Addictee
Birth
Bluebird
Crocus (la petite mort)
Filmstrip
Pinup
Sunday Seance
Hexapus
Pills

Possibly including...
Hijack
Winter Room
Man in the Well

Pills--4/2

2008-04-03T08:25:00.000-07:00

pill--noun
3. Slang. a tiresomely disagreeable person.

example: "Quit being such a pill, Jordan."
-me, a cold Sunday in late February, 2008.

db.
****************************************

Pills

I was your housewife shuffling through a Vicodin binge
yawning as she sauteed the mushrooms and peppers
and stirred the sighing pile of noodles.

(pop this pill, Mrs. Lonely, and your life will be
just like a movie.)
(I want my life to be
just like a movie.)

You were as white as asprin, unassuming.
You made my blood thin as a first communion veil
and I became transparent, every detail of my pulse revealed.
So when I came near you
a prick of a brooch pin could have made me bloom
a shocking, clumsy stain
enough to make the locker room girls blush.

You were a cornfield raver.
and she raced through your brain on a purple bicycle.
I tried to cut holes in her tires, but she had already
made enough neon paths to spell our her name:
Just as certain you would remember
as quickly as a hit of her blue and pink and green
catalyzed your brain into
yards of burning photographs
it was easy
it seemed so easy.

I tried to be your penicillin
your cure-all girl with yellow bruises on her wrists
but you shot up like a shell-shocked 'Nam vet.
The green in my eyes reminded you too much of the jungle
and how you wanted to lie buried as the forest floor
yielded to your body
punctured by organic poison.

Ever the homemaker, I lay twitching on the cold bathroom tiles
as the teapot screams in the kitchen.

Smear--3/31

2008-03-31T17:14:00.000-07:00

Smear

I have been reduced
to a red smear.
Someone
clean me up.
I have to be something more
than a dirty word written on the bathroom wall.
I have to be something more
than a constantly spinning rumor mill
cutting through the continuous flow.

I tried to kill my doppelganger
but she ran wild through the woods
with a dead woman's words written across her breasts
and I ran headlong into a tree
trying to find out where the ghost had flown.
I have to be something more
than a brunette shadow.
I have to be something more
than a caricature with a Marilyn Monroe waist
and a heart I can't cough out of my throat.

Reduce me all you need to
because I am content being shrunk.
Yes, girls, I am made of plastic wrap
but I only have one face
and the jar I’ve kept it in has been empty for years.
Take a scan of my brain
but it will look nothing like my heart.

Dear Abby--3/25

2008-03-25T17:28:00.000-07:00

A response to a poem my friend Dave wrote about his ex girlfriend. This is what I thought might have been going through her mind. I'm projecting, maybe?

-d.

************************************

Dear Abby

Your brain hums as her moans
are buffering.
I can hear it at 3:12 in the morning
and I crack and sizzle like a fried egg.
This time, though,
I'm not making your breakfast in bed.

You're a romantic comedy from the 80's
and our banter pricks me like shots of glucose.
You're Woody fucking Allen
but I'll never have Scarlett Johansson's tits
so I don't expect much from you.

I chose to talk to you on a day
when I felt like drowning in my own air.
You haven't helped revive me since
not with cheap beer
or chocolate cake
or stupid sex games you thought would make me laugh.

(if I fall in love with anyone
it's not going to be you)

You spit charisma like used toothpaste
and make your teeth white as MTV.
I hated them like a glare on the television.
When I told you this, you looked at me the same way
as you did when I made you apologize for being in shape.

So I hid under your pillow
like your dad's old Playboy
and when I climbed out
your didn't mind being revealed.

I just wanted you to tuck me back in
but you just continued to hum.
Then when I saw your eyes were full of static
I pushed the elevator button
and watch the concrete rush up to meet me.

Man in the Well--3/20

2008-03-22T13:29:00.000-07:00

Man in the Well

I must have mistook you for a wishing well
but it turns out you were only a speakerbox
hidden in a clearing of the winter trees.
I must have stumbled on your stones
as I walked madly around the square
trying to conjure tulips.

I spoke into you, but you only replied
"What's your name?"

When I would not tell you,
you clicked on some switch or other
and a woman's sigh oozed out of you
and onto me.
I tried to clean it out from under my nails
but the humiliating pink still sticks in the crooks of my hands.

(I had no choice but to fall in completely.)

My sisters came to pull me from the well
tying stylish scarves and belts together
and I emerged wailing
plucking minnows off my skin.

They bathed me in a hot blue aquarium
and filled my heartspace with yellow fishes
but it was too late
I was already belly up.

They spoke into you
to find out where I had been
and man in the box only replied,
"What's your name?"

I haven't been the same since
with my propaganda cartoon nose
and my Venus di Milo torso.
Some call me a miracle
but I miss my arms sometimes.

They are writing my biography and making a film
based on the questions they couldn't answer
still I must continue to introduce myself
to the man in the box.

(what's your name, girl?
what's your name?)

random prose...don't know what this will turn into

2008-03-21T14:22:00.000-07:00

My name is Eleanor, but you won’t remember me.
I’ve come to realize this long ago, back in the small town that wore the paper mask of a city, situated neatly between the yawning green cornfields and the lonely city of Des Moines (da-Moyn…let’s not be stupid), plump and black in the middle of the country. I can’t imagine what it would have been like when Kerouac rambled through, and how he happened upon the very spot where his Benzedrine-addled brain must have thought that here, in this imitation city, are the most beautiful girls in the world.
Though a few men and women swept back my bangs and told me I was one of them, I never believed her or anyone else. Even while in therapy when I made my false declarations of self-esteem, everyone knew: I was nothing special.
I realized early on that I was incapable of being loved. I attributed it to being a writer. Of all artists, writers are the least likely to be loved. Artists can draw or paint you a picture. Musicians can write you a song. Writers can tear their heart out and throw it red and gasping at your feet and you won’t understand why.
You’ve forgotten it already. That’s okay.
It’s Eleanor.
Eleanor.
Eleanor.
Come see me tonight.

Hexapus--3/4

2008-03-09T10:19:00.001-07:00

A six-legged octopus was discovered in a lobster box. I wrote a poem about it.
--db.

Hexapus

She said I was lovely
and they took black and white photos
as if I were microscopic.
They watched my limbs curl
as I clung to you as if you were glass.
But there were some things
I was missing.

When they found me
my glossy pink body was squirming in the lobster box
grasping for your shifting surface.
I am not at home here.

I am a scientific marvel; a transparent cloud of mania.
The scientests gather, shoving each other
harpooning me with compliments.
Still, I'm sure there's something
I am missing.

Blue blood and black ink
shifts through my veins.
Four hearts still intact after my fifth dissolved
leaving only a chalk outline
where my body used to lie.
You let me know, despite my luminescence
that there is something I am missing.

Make me a bicycle with six golden pedals
and I will make trails across the floor of the sea.

Sunday Seance--2/26

2008-03-09T10:14:00.000-07:00

Loving you
is like living in a house full of ghosts.
I've met at least three
at one time or another.

The first was a familiar one.
I'd met her before, even
offered her metaphysical tea.

The second was nonthreatening.
She was as round-faced as a birthday cake.
I laughed at her; you scolded me
for mocking the dead.

The third tugged at my hair
because she must have thought it was hers.
Her invisible hands clench around my throat
even after the fact.
She danced an icy waltz up my spine.

The jewelry box opened and shut
and the ballerina climbed out.
She spun on your knee and you kissed her painted lips.
I closed my eyes, ready
to vanish.

Pinup (don't remember the date...sometime in february)

2008-03-09T10:11:00.000-07:00

I never found much merit in being secretive about my personal life. I don't think any good writers are.
This one is interesting because it was written out of frustration that I couldn't help someone and ended being written out of frustration with being betrayed.
One of the most painful pieces I've written.
-db

***

Pinup

Dear Inner Child,
If you want, in this poem,
I can call you an acid-tongued faerie
or a pinup girl for the damned.
(I knew you’d like that)
I am the yellow lenses in your sunshine glasses.
I am the seashell ashtray that rests on your chest
always knocked underneath your bed.
My lips will turn to ash
and you’ll kiss the carpet with dry heaves.

If you want,
I’ll help you eat those brownies we made.
I am the sprinkles
that you brush off the skinny jeans you bought
because you thought they made your ankles look thin.
So proud
you tally every intervention
laughing with the screeching chalk.

If you want,
I’ll watch the cyborg boy eat you
with his metal lips clutching you like prey
with eight spider-fingers and industrial teeth.
I’ll watch him devour you quickly,
like a praying mantis.
I will be silent
because I am just a picture you’ve taken
and shoved behind a pane of glass.

I will wrap my face in duct tape
if you’d have it that way
because I can’t spend another night
watching you drink from Wonderland bottles
waiting for the poisonous taste
of your kind of love.

So, I gave it to you.
He covered you in bluebird feathers
and his music filled your mouth.
In the end, though,
even after you lay on my side of the bed
even after you tore up the days of winter
on which I scribbled furiously,
the next month will come
with a new cover girl crawling out of the mailbox.
And you, suicide girl, you will find yourself
where you gave birth
among the discarded.

2/25---Hijack

2008-02-25T18:24:00.000-08:00

Hijack

The bluebird springs out of the black forest clock
singing and ode to 4 a.m.
I make myself dry toast and topple out of his apartment
like a door off its hinges.
all before my early flight.

I wait for your announcement
and I realize
I am too real to be a ghost.
So I don’t fasten my safety belt.
I won’t be needing it.
I have no envelopes full of death-powder.
No digital bombs.
There are no mug shots of girls with icy eyes
they all have eyes like mine:
red: the negative.

Pilot, from beyond the silk curtain,
I watch you switch buttons on and off,
pull chords and plug others in with a sigh.
Soaring with all the calmness
of a doctor before a tumor of mourners.
You gave me a complimentary pin,
your aviator for a day.
I stuck my thumb
and I gasped at my own clumsiness,
my own swamp-child hair
and once you realized who I was
I took hold.

We crashed, of course
and from under the wing, I watched
the survivors slide down onto the glittery Vegas strip
and you, mon capitan,
shook your head and rolled over.

Hey Karl---2/13

2008-02-13T13:21:00.000-08:00

Today, I am an angry socialist bitch.
--db.

***************************************
Hey Karl

Karl Marx, I'm beginning to feel
the metaphorical sickle and hammer
get tattooed on my forehead
as I stand in line at the finiancial aid office.
I chose to be a scavenger,
keying Hummers and fucking lawyer's kids.
WATCH OUT!
I'm coming for your sons
and for days, all you'll see is me outside your bay windows
waving a red flag,
wearing your wife's discarded Lacoste polo.
You can't miss me if you tried.

It's after work, I count my tips
as the radio puts it's tongue in my ear.
No one can escape the weasels
that sneak in through the television set
attacking our faces,
leaving numbers bleeding from our eyes and mouths.

Sister Capitalist is a high-class whore
she gives us another set of eyes, cheap
cellophane 3D glasses
to humiliate the proletariat.
She tucks us in
and sings us a lullaby of 800 numbers.
Everything is
as it is meant to be.

Chipmunks--1/22, edited 2/12

2008-02-12T07:52:00.001-08:00

Another excerise from CW poetry about a childhood experience.
-db

*********************************

Chipmunks

I woke with a purpose in the room with the slanted floor
in that house where my tiny body would stir
6 years old
6 a.m.
(early bird) my father’s daughter.
Like a canary I would hop downstairs
hopping over sleeping cousins
and across the cold tiles of the kitchen
taking a handful of peanuts from the green glass antique jar
like alms to feed those whom I loved.

scratchscratchscratch
against the concrete (like mother said)
and they would run to me like devotees to the child-god.
They were bold, climbing my church clothing room slipper.
Little bandits, Russian spies
complete with masks and fur coats.
The rain would cling to the spiderwebs
as the springs would plan their next attack
on which foundation they would choose to crumble.

Of course, nature quietly came to claim it
My mother cried with grandma’s peonies
drooping their heavy bouffants
like southern belles in mourning.
My two aunts and five uncles paraded through,
taking bits and pieces; relics.
The glass bottles dusty on the windwsill, sweatshirts with bottle rocket holes,
the afghans and paintings my mother had done in high school.
The gauzy pink curtains floating in the bedroom
where my grandparents must have kissed.

At eighteen, I returned to the porch
And scratched a peanut against the concrete
The grass had choked all but a few peonies
and my cousins had swallowed pills and swelled with pregnancies
the youngest tipping back tequila at age sixteen.
The chipmunks hid, settling for acorns.

Birth---2/7

2008-02-09T09:14:00.000-08:00

Birth

I used to think I was some sort of heroine.
My footsoles stealing down the alleyways, my red hat
fixed like a dreamcatcher.
I thought I was some extension of god
like a bud from a spiritual sponge.

That was before I sat in your bathroom at 3 am.
an oracle folded up on her knees
and met the ghost in your bathtub
the woman you tried to drown over and over
whose blue eyes your fingers tried to close
but they snapped up again and again.
Now toothbrushes fly
and lights flicker
I leave when she asks.

I know her name, but I'm not stupid enough to call it into the mirror.
She sleeps in each lobe of your brain.
A new one every night
twenty identical bedroom sets
twenty identical shadeless lamps
twenty identical portraits
one dancing ballerina in the jewelry box.

I thought I was some sort of exorcist
but the only thing I set free
was a premature i-love-you.
Dead on arrival, I let it squirm
and you stared at it's oddity
as it lay in the incubation box.
Full of tubes and sacks of blood.

But I am not it's mother.
You are.

bullshit atcha.

2008-02-05T09:24:00.000-08:00

There comes a time in every writer's life when they realize that poetry is bullshit. It will never be widely read, and they're never going to reach people.
What's more devastating is that, if we're true poets, we can't help but continue anyway.

filmstrip--1/30

2008-02-04T19:35:00.000-08:00

Filmstrip

Come on in, you may as well
take off your shoes
your shirt
your watch.
You may as well stand naked with me
and we will sing songs into ourselves
you set the tone low with your tongue.
And plunge me down when I try it uptempo.

You remember.
You found me rolled up in a dusty trunk.
You held me up to the light and I held you up
so that my skin could strip you.
Through cellophane eyes
I watched you decode yourself.

Today I was vaccuming in my silk skeleton clothes
fixing my hair as I dusted the furniature
set the roast in the oven
applied morning glory mascara
and waited.

But you had them made,
each a completely different card in the same deck.
Collect them all.
You love it when I sleep alone
because you can line them up outside your closet.
That way,
you can show me how much you don't care.

Crocus (la petite mort)--2/2

2008-02-04T19:24:00.001-08:00

I thought
"Fuck winter"
and chewed my way through the soil.
With soft green fingers I clawed myself through the frost.
You must have been shocked
seeing me, a purple bell
that tolls for everyone
everything
that flashes through you, a shock that pulled you to the floor
in a manic fit of god.

We could have been a couple of marble-faced saints
getting shit on by pidgeons.
Your childhood blanket over our faces.
Religion meant to choke us
castrate you
make a blank page of me.
But when the Holy Ghost couldn't make me come,
you did.

You're the sort of man
who will crush windows with his fist in the name of another woman
and come to me to pull out the shards.
You live for a little death:
that warehouse roof teeter.
that ex lover's scarf in a knot.
the vibrations on the surface of your tongue
when you know you've tasted something you can't explain.

another assignment from 406: Chateau Ghetto---1/31

2008-02-04T19:22:00.000-08:00

Chateau Ghetto

Low rent halo of celestial desperation
spins kalediscopic
around the Aqua-Net heads of the whores
in their moldy furs and bubblegum machine bodies.
The ducks that float in the clear heels
as she shakes back tears
barrel o’ monkeys.

A baby is hungry and everyone, even
the silver spoon fetuses
hear it wail and twist like an ant
under a magnifying glass
and curl up like snaky fireworks.
It’s parent’s inject orgasms
because religion and summer camp rape
stole all the real ones.

In Juarez
an old woman’s eyes grow white.
Her head is a balloon in a dusty corner.
Jesus peppers haunt her card table.
The banker’s kids are speaking a language
that’s supposed to sound like heaven.
There are baby shoes on wires and buzzards
picking at a dog’s body.

And me, with my wings made of headlines
in my shoes made of payday loan forms.
Every time I speak, god’s word is
BUY BUY BUY!
SELL SELL SELL!

1/29--Bluebird

2008-01-29T08:56:00.000-08:00

Bluebird

In spring I will take a polaroid of you in your t-shirt
and the bluebird will fly out from under your sleeve.
It came to you
before you had those restless nights
eyes wide was a cartoon cat,
thinking of the dampness of that tent
where she tore you apart like a bear
knocking over thermoses of hot chocolate
and cracking your camera lens.

Since then all the girls came in their blue veils
to plant land mines in your bruised body.
You had to etch it on to remember
when it flew in to meet you
at the farmhouse in muddy spring
while you rummaged through your father's records in the attic.

You said that you like the cold wind at your back,
that snowflakes were softer than babies' fingers
if you can stand facing the sky for awhile.
You can't get the sound of the violin out of your head
or the way she dresses like light catches the bottoms of CDs.

Spring has to come someday
after the sun fades the valentines on your windowsill
and the Christmas candy has gone stale.
I will arrive with it
bumming a ride on the thaw.
Unannounced,
subtle as a note in your pocket
a girl in a purple dress
a bird that does not sing.
It flies.

very uncharacteristic song lyrics---1/27

2008-01-27T20:09:00.000-08:00

Song lyrics I can't put to music because the only thing I can play is the tambourine.
And I need a boy vocalist.
Anyone?

db.

*******************************************************************************
Wednesday

(girl)
It was Wednesday and I was riding my bike to school
I thought awhile and realized
I only wanted you.

(boy)
Girl, I don’t want to break your heart, you shouldn’t be a fool.
So many boys must be falling for you
falling for you.

(girl)
I don’t care, just take my hand
(boy)
I’ll let you lead me up the stairs
(girl)
I’ll hide my love well enough
(boy)
you won’t have to
(both)
if you kiss me like you do.

(boy)
I’m glad to have you in my bed.
(girl)
I’m glad your songs are in my head.
(boy)
You're healing all this hurt
Let’s stay up all night
(girl)
I’m wearing your sweatshirt
and I feel alright.
(both)
I feel alright.

To A Tree Outside Ross Hall--1/24 (Ven's CW Poetry)

2008-01-24T18:45:00.000-08:00

I wrote this for a poetry exercise today in Ven's poetry workshop. I sat on some cold concrete and stared at a tree for five minutes.
I think I like this class already. I like assignments like this, bizarre as they are.
I'll be posting some of my favorite exercises from the class, as much as Ven doesn't like prematurely published things. I made a couple random changes since I first jotted it down.
Enjoy the fruits of my frozen ass and open mind.

-d
*************************************
To A Tree Outside Ross Hall

O tree
Your sort of modesty frightens me;
The way you cling to your hair like Venus
quaking in her shell.
You are some sort of Godiva with your brown skeleton
holding on to your babies as they curl up.

O tree
in your concrete cape
where I sit discovering that maybe
you are more a woman than I.
In our sparse fall coats,
holding letters to a season we can't remember.

O tree
there is some sort of elegance
in your fingers, the way they hold your leaves
like the pages of a bible.
I want to lie a trash can next to you
and burn burn burn
until you start to glow.

Addictee--1/22/08

2008-01-23T08:51:00.000-08:00

Make no mistake. I chose you
because you seemed weak.
You were convinced you were old.
"There's a point," you said,
"when you can't go back."
When the rollercoaster takes it's fatal dive.
You've experimented,
you had been in these same gutters before.

Make no mistake. I chose you
because you were an artist.
(All of those assholes are the same.
So in love with themselves
that they must destroy their bodies
with women like me.)

Make no mistake. I chose you
because you seemed so fragile.
I knew that I could make you spin so fast that
your eyes would plunge forward
until you were forced to shut them.

Goodbye to the houses
where you'd kill the cockroaches
and inhale me.
Not sleeping for days, my perfume mingling
with the greasy wax paper.

Goodbye, my addict.
I would have made you gray
and brought out the color you were born to be.
You exhale the years I still had
and the sidewalk and the forest girls
and the lights which we made pregnant
each one trembling as I waited
in the alley behind the pawn shop.

In spring you will eat vegetables
and ride your bike everywhere
healthy.
So healthy.

Winter Room---1/16/08

2008-01-17T08:32:00.000-08:00

Winter Room

You make me into gingerbread,
partaking of me when I'm raw
and I always take the same shape.
(You don't even bother to notice
the red icing.)

You're pouting into your beer as if it will respond
anything like I do.
To you I am concave
you think it's some miracle or other
when you know it's only science,
(evolutionary pity.)

I am making you my song on repeat
you swing violently back to the beginning
a backhand in the key of D
(slightly out of tune.)

If only I could reduce you
by taking your photograph
to blot you out
and reinterpret.
If only I could sanatize everything you've touched;
sew it up.
Still I wait for the change of seasons
for a thaw...
but you are winter
(cold son of a bitch)

Spiders--1/7

2008-01-08T07:39:00.000-08:00

Spiders

I've seen houses infested with spiders so small
that they hide underneath our eyelids
revealing themselves when we blink.
We can blame them for the numbers that tick through our dreams.
the scrolling stocks under our tv screens.

It's true that I love the enemy,
or a semblance of who you thought killed your husband,
ripped the stuffing from your son's teddy bear,
who left your gift wrapped in the junk drawer.
He is not a mirror image
not an altar made of shopping bags
and empty fry containers.

I want to take him to your churches,
down every corridor of cubicles
through every Alabama drive-through.
I would be called a whore
a traitor
an unbeliever
because I give you this.

Because I am choosing contrast over symmetry.
Because I have shed the spider's legs, I have
shaken off their skeletons.
Because I refuse to butter my bread in this house anymore.
Because I want to dream the same dream every night.

publish mc spluhblished.

2007-12-29T12:37:00.000-08:00

I got published in the Ames Progressive, a paper I will most likely be writing for next semester, due mostly to my feminine wiles.

http://amesprogressive.org/2007/12/22/communist-in-red-lipstick/#more-95

12/29---Scholarship

2007-12-29T12:17:00.000-08:00

Solicit me, I will wear a miniskirt in winter.
I was raised to comply
to cooperate
to smile when told to scrape a plate
to lie on a bed of nails
to look into your eyes when you told me
"This is not what I asked for.
No, not this."

I was raised to accept things
offer it up to a god made of plaster
(it sounds pagan, right?
but I think they just wanted to give a face to the name.)
I was raised to swallow, to avoid a mess
and destroy the evidence.

Like everyone before me, I was chosen to get fucked by America.
But I saw no amber waves
no purple mountains
no america! america! fuckme.
It didn't need to be told twice.
I was filmed and changed my name
into something more comfortable.

12/29---Like Dreaming of Cape Cod in a Red Lobster

2007-12-29T12:03:00.000-08:00

You pried me open
in order to eat my heart in it's crustacean form.
Where it stared at you from the glass
piled on top of all your other casualties.
In the pseudo clambake anchor-sweater rich grandfather decor
you spotted me.
Too poor to afford the choicest, you saw me perform
my little jig across the death-arena
and under my smokescreen you slid.
a little shelter
some hot soup and a soft bed
(lean down on me)
Garnish the plate with a bottle of Xanax
maybe that blue fairy will turn you into a real boy.
Remove all that negative space
so you dont' notice the portrait at the center
it is you
it is her
it is her
it is not me.
The only god I knew was the promise
that you'd be gone when I woke
fork lodged into my chest
and you in the shower, dreaming of the sea.

burglary on hayward--12/7

2007-12-13T14:27:00.000-08:00

Burglary on Hayward

So you've made me the ashy divorcee.
Cleopatra applying snakes like lip liner
in the gold hand mirror.
You brought with you ten years
and chisled them in as I slept with your pick axe tongue.
Ever the vampire, you sucked out the ink from my fingertips.
Ever the marauder, you took every bag of gold
that I'd hidden underneath the floorboards
and in safes beneath portraits of my ancestors.

You bit every coin and turned them to moonshine
that you would tip down the throat of every girl thereafter.
Cassanova in your lion mask
crunching on candy hearts
in the drive thru, flirting with the waitress
knowing better than God that you'll fuck her the next day.

So you've made me a chain smoker, have you?
(Is that the reason why my throat burns when I think of you?)
You've m ade me a wriggling fish
flip-flopping and gasping in the sunlight.
Now I crunch ice in my teeth and pass out feet first
but only because I've been persuaded
then left hitchhiking my way back.

Dolls---12/7

2007-12-13T14:23:00.001-08:00

Dolls

After some chemical mischief
some acid alchemy conjured by the fairies of our addled minds
("hmm" he says "let's make this interesting
shall we?")
So in top hats and togas they performed surgery under the influence.
They removed us, the trees that had grown around their legs
and twined all eight arms together
we thought we had them bound for sure
but they sawed us off
with the intent that we'd whittle ourselves to nothing
but a few wood shavings spelling out the crude nicknames
they made for us when our backs were turned.
In the end, there was no rabbit-footed man
to bring us back to life.
No fairy king laughing to himself
no comical, smeary-eyed queen.
Just two girls lost in the muddy forest
where bears and wolves watch for the opportune moment
when we would turn into dolls
(eventually, girls always do
one way or another.)

groceries---12/10

2007-12-10T12:20:00.000-08:00

I wrote this on the back of a test outline right after I was through with my women's lit final. I then had to hand it in to my professor, unbeknownst to me.
Oh snap.
Let me try to recreate it. Instead of studying for my french final, which I will inevitably fail.
-db.
***********************************************************

Groceries

Let's get green tea, babe.
I've been wanting your tongue to taste like lemon
even though it's cold outside.
Besides, it will help your throat, raw as blurry photographs.
I swear I saw old films flicker on your tonsils
(don't pretend I don't know
I saw it clear as 3 a.m.)

Let's get some hot chocolate, babe.
And for that I'd dress up naked as the mountain on the box
if I can wear your sheets like snow.
I'm all kitsch this time of year
sentimental and necessary as marshmallows.
(don't pretend you don't like it
I saw you smile even though you were told not to.)

And will you find my hair the next morning
trailing aimlessly on your pillow
whispering to you "I will not tell,
I will not tell."
Will you find an eyelash and blow it into the crevaces
where the cold creeps in like white mice?

Let's get you some vitamins, dear.
for I cannot bear the bitterness the pills leave in your mouth.
I'd like to wash it out with soap
I'd like to scold you, " never take those things again
never say those vulgar medicinal letters, the R, the X."
Let me fill you with C and E.

Let me pretend to be your wife, dear.
Just for today, let me sweep up the mess the dog left
when he scratched his way through your door.
Let me wear the apron today and cook the peppers we bought
those parrot-colored waxy skinned bells
which will curl up like November.
Let that month and it's shrivled days
like the Chinese restaurant and it's malformed chiles
like the Chinese restaurant and it's polyurathane Buddha
never be ours.

Leave me to sleep in the basement inside of you
where I will read the directions to old board games
and let what heat my body can produce
rise up into you.

pawn shop boy--12/10

2007-12-10T12:10:00.000-08:00

People shouldn't fall in love this way.
But then again, everyone does.

-db.
********************************************************************************

Pawn Shop Boy.

I should have left you at the corner
of one night stand and friend.
I should have let you sink into your vaccum
of broken CD's and flashing numbers
(the credit card companies are calling.
I should be very afraid.)
and cold blankets that reached up
to meet the curtains of our eyes
smeared black from last night
and all it didn't mean.

I find you strange as bread mold.
I want to put you under a microscope
as easily as you slide onto me.
I want to adjust the lens and see your white fibers
tremble under my green eye.
The little black pods, considering me
considering how my organs must resemble brass valves
and my throat a plastic reed
from your third grade recorder
full of spit and knocked-out syllables.

I want to freeze onto you
like a tongue on a flagpole.
I want to sniff out the sunshine in your hair.
I want to feel the magnificence of your piano hands
with which you rocket me skyward, running into birds
like a flying windowpane.
I want to cradle you like snow around the dead crow
that I know lies where your heart should be
(but it is beating.
it is still beating.)

unfinished...written morning of 11/30

2007-11-30T09:17:00.000-08:00

This one’s for the corduroy dress
And how it didn’t tear when I hit the ground
a poet and her 2 a.m. faceplant outside the bar.
Not so glamorous. Not so metaphorical as you might think.
Something they don’t tell you in anthologies
Did Shakespeare ever run into walls during rehearsals?
Did Jane Austen make a Freudian slip
or two?

This one’s for the one who swallowed raw honey
and spit it back at me in a chorus of folk songs
some inappropriate gestures
that might have made me love you
had they been intended for me.
But you skittered across the road like dead leaves
And I couldn’t press you between my pages.

excerpt from a short story/novella I never finished

2007-11-21T13:22:00.000-08:00

from The Wonder of Wonders.

Elias had risen that previous morning with a strange impulse to see his gun, exactly fourteen hours before Andrew would hold the gun against his head,. He almost never looked at it. The heirloom held little value to Elias, and none of the performers knew about its existence, or so he thought.
“Iowa is goddamn humid,” Elias thought as he stretched his legs across the mattress. His undershirt, stained a pale yellow, stuck hard to his chest. Elias peeled it off and threw it into a woven basket where several identical undershirts lay. Above the basket hung a dusty black tuxedo with curling tails.
Elias fumbled under his mattress for the key that opened the strongbox inside his trunk. Inside the strongbox was yet another box, and inside that box lay the gun, quiet and deliberate as an Egyptian mummy. Elias looked behind himself and clicked open the trunk, the strongbox, and finally opened the cedar box where he kept it.
The gun glinted boldly in the blue velvet lining. Elias had no idea how old the gun was, or even what kind of bullets it took, or even if he could find the type of bullets anymore. All he knew is that the gun was the only thing given to him by his grandfather when he died. Every one of Elias’ cousins were stunned to know that the gun, kept safe in a severely dented strongbox, was given to their quiet, stoic cousin who barely said a word to anyone in the family.
Elias’ cousin Victor, oldest of the grandchildren and father of seven boys, vowed never to speak to Elias or anyone in his family ever again. On the day the Nadir patriarch died, he stormed out of the camp with his children and tiny wife in tow, never seen by anyone again. His sister claimed he told her that he went to Norway, but no one knew for certain.
People had told Elias what sort of gun it was, but he could never remember what they said. It was highly embellished with the etched silver monogram PBN. The handle was inlaid in mother of pearl and the barrel was slender but powerful. It looked like it could have belonged to a Spanish conquistador, an Italian nobleman, or a run of the mill American cowboy. Either way, there was something much more intriguing about the gun than it’s unique appearance. Elias’ grandmother, (a senile, hunchbacked woman with patches of thick black curls; with one cataract-stained eye; an ancient woman who carried a gnarled cane with an old scowling face carved in it) had said the spirits of every male ancestor of the Nadir family resided within the gun. She said if one ever tried to kill themselves with the gun, the male ancestors of the Nadir family would tell you the secrets of every person you know.
Elias knew this wasn’t true.
The only reason Elias kept the gun was that he knew there was one bullet inside of it. He knew that if he ever had to use it, it would be waiting, a little genie waiting to answer any request.
Elias closed the box as soon as the feeling began to creep up his back. He began to dress for the day, pulling on the same uniform of a navy blue button-down shirt and threadbare olive drab pants. The tuxedo stared at him from the corner, reminding him of his nightly routine.
Elias began to button his shirt, the silver gun still on his mind.

There had been three times that Elias came close to using it. Once was when his first child was dead at birth. When he saw his little daughter in that jar, stillborn and brainless, serene in clear yellow fluid, Elias spent an entire day holed up in a hotel room staring blankly at the gun and taking shots of cheap rum until the entire world became insignificant.
Elias rolled up the sleeves of his shirt until they were tucked neatly into the crevices behind his elbows. The hair on his arms was beginning to gray, as well as the ghostly white hairs spreading like phantoms at his forehead. Elias did not comb it during the day. It was always slicked back almost painfully at night when he wore the tuxedo…
The second time was when his sister, Rachael, was found drowned in a frozen creek among the black acorns and suspicious raccoons. Polite people said it was an accident, but honest people said it was suicide. Elias was not surprised, due to the fact that Rachael’s husband had a thirteen-year old mistress whom he photographed in secret and wrote poems to when he thought Rachael was asleep.
Suspenders and his stubbornly existing work boots seemed almost silly now, but Elias put them on anyway, carrying the strange accessories heavy as his heart. Elias leaned over his water basin and saw his face. He had never seen a man so tired, the only expression he could muster…
The final time was when his wife, the woman with paper roses in her hair and cracked gold leather sandals on her feet, the woman who told the most crude jokes and who always smelled of espresso and orange blossoms, the woman whose name he could no longer speak, the woman who read English poetry in Italian, the woman whom Elias held when their little daughter was buried and when Rachael was buried, the woman who played the flamenco guitar, when this woman whom Elias loved was eaten away by a cancer that attacked her womb and later her entire body, which had finally sunk into the illness and into obscurity, Elias held the gun so tightly against his throat that the metal circle was forever burning there. He collected all the roses that the people of their small California town laid on her grave and hung them from the ceiling of his car with embroidery floss.
At last, Elias clipped on his gold watch, the picture taped inside bearing a coyly smirking woman with her hair slicked back into a forced 20s wave and exploding into curls behind her shoulders. A paper rose winked over her shoulder. Her name was scrawled across bottom of the little round photograph in ink, in her own archaic cursive: Ava Maria Ramoni-Nadir…
Ten years had passed since he began the show, since he traveled the world to collect his cast of characters. Ten years had passed since he left that little cottage on the California coast, near the little town where he and Ava were to raise their family. Ten years had passed since he bought tangerines and lemons from the deaf, old Mexican woman named Pilar. Ten years had passed since he smelled that strange scent of espresso and orange blossoms when he woke in the morning, hearing flamenco guitar floating in from the bathroom.
“Why are you playing guitar in the bathroom?” Elias asked her as he kissed her wild brown curls. She turned her head towards him and her paper roses rustled against the tile.
“Because of the acoustics. It’s better here than anywhere in the house.”
“Why don’t you go outside?”
She gave him an exasperated look. “It’s raining, mi amore.”
Indeed, it was raining that day, despite the sun shining fiercely through the clouds.
“Why aren’t we in bed then?” He kissed her neck.
She looked at him blatantly and teased the strings a bit. “Because I prefer my guitar to men.”
They ended up in bed anyway, laughing and laughing at the absurdity that was their bodies.

Elias was thirty-one, but he could easily pass for forty. Eight years of holding in the memory of the woman with the paper flowers had severely aged him. Wrinkles like deep cuts were the Rosetta stone to his past, but no one could read the language. Not one of his cast of characters knew about his wife’s photograph, or Rachael’s face gray in the water of the frozen river, the white lace cuffs of her thin green dress clinging to her bleeding wrists. Not one knew of the baby in the jar.
Elias had come close to telling Priya once. Everyone told Priya everything. Normally when Padma had gone to sleep, one person from the show would sneak into the car and whisper their secrets to Priya. She would just nod and record them in her mind. Priya kept a collection of their secrets, all of which she drew with an old fountain pen on thin loose leaf and hid them a hatbox underneath clothes and old books in her trunk. Elias watched her write them, he watched her draw pictures of naked women and men, pictures of an old man’s face, pictures of dogs, pictures of birds in cages…he had glimpsed them once or twice. She had everyone’s secrets all to herself, but he decided she wouldn’t have his. He wanted to keep Ava to himself, a secret too wonderful to be translated…

It had been just after he had received the gun, after his grandfather had been buried and the family dispersed. Elias was alone with nothing but Victor’s bitter resentment and the weight of the gun in its cedar case locked within the suitcase.
All Elias knew was that he needed a drink.
In those days, you couldn’t get a drink just anywhere. If a man wanted a whiskey, he couldn’t waltz down to the bar and get it. There had to be some extra hoops to jump through, some extra steps to complete before you could forget.
So, with his thumb out and his mind only on a hotel room and a bottle of whatever he could obtain, Elias made his way to the nearest town, and after a few odd jobs and selling a couple of his father’s silk shirts, Elias bought himself a ticket to Seattle. He wasn’t sure why he chose that city. Yes, it was far and he was tired of traveling, but something about that city meant something to him, or it would in time.
When Elias arrived, it wasn’t raining, as he might have expected. It was actually one of the brightest days he’d seen in a long while. He still hadn’t gotten that drink he needed so badly, but down the street the smell of coffee wafted out of the windows of a little shop with dark green awnings. People sat outside in rusty metal chairs, mostly old folks talking over a cup of dark roast, a couple or two drinking out of small white ceramic espresso cups.
Elias reached into his pocket: twelve cents could get him a cup of joe, then maybe he could find a job for a few hours in order to get a room for the night.
Sleep deprived, he ambled through the door, only to hear a long stream of Italian from a rotund woman occupying a stool near the end of the coffee bar. Her younger son took orders at the ancient brass cash register and her daughter poured and mixed the milk and espresso slowly, momentarily twitching at the sound of her mother’s voice.
He caught her eye and there was an immediate reaction, quick and scientific. Neither had to think of whether or not they liked the other, what to say next or what time of day it was. It was as easy as a first breath of air after nearly drowning, a shower after a long day of work. Their love clicked into motion instantly, without any sort of human hesitation. An expansive spirit moved through them, and it began.
“Hello, what can I do for you, sir?” The son broke their gaze.
“Oh, I’ll just have a drip coffee. Something dark.”
“Get him a cup of Sumatran, Ava.” The mother said, wiping sweat from her upper lip with the back of her hand.
Ava.
He repeated it. A name spelled the same backward and forward. A strong, feminine name, nothing musical or flowery or classical. Just Ava.
Ava poured the dark coffee into a thick green ceramic mug and handed it to him, her hand brushing his. He noticed her chewed nails at the end of long, graceful fingers. A contradiction.
“Thanks” He smiled and sat down at the opposite end of the bar.
Ava smiled back at him. “I don’t think I’ve seen you around this side of town. Are you new here?”
“Yeah, for awhile at least. Just got off the train.”
Ava laughed. “I see. You look a little tired.”
Out of some secret, spontaneous corner of his tired subconscious, Elias smiled and asked, “Do you know where I can get a bicycle in this town?”
And just like that, he forgot the whiskey and couldn’t wait to part puddles with the tires on his way to that shop with the green awnings. He wanted to know something for certain, and he wanted to be in that same chair every day, talking to the same girl until she mopped the floor and had to shoo him out.

Clearing his throat, Elias creaked open the door to the car and stepped out into the eddies of dust.

11-15: The Bearded Woman, or Lunch with Cleopatra

2007-11-15T11:26:00.000-08:00

Uncastrated, she wanders through the parlor
with heels ticking like grandfather clocks.
Her pen made a blood-pool on each fingertips
but never again beneath her.
The false beard she wore rustling, making a corn-ear of her face
yellow-eyed, her knee highs worn like witch's familiars.
I found her reading Shakespeare in a Chinese restaurant one Tuesday night
and we sat down and Buddha's toes to eat General Tso's tofu.

"I think" she said, "I've moved on from beards to moustaches."
and I watched her lips move like barges across the Nile.
So she gave me a caterpillar in a jar
which is supposed to give me hope, I guess.
I'm not sure if it will survive in this city of hungry sparrows.

She knew the lion-headed god as well as I
the vampire that made me a hysteric,
the nightmare-man putting out cigarettes on my chest.
The sun that blistered the marble tombs within me.
She said: "You will find your moon, little sister
though now you are a wrinkled burn victim,
you will be the earth-water and I will be the basket that delivers you."

plastic surgery at the pearly gates-- 11/11

2007-11-11T11:32:00.001-08:00

Plastic Surgery at the Pearly Gates

You were the picturebook bible devil
with your red beard and a smile that tugged at the feet of all the girls.
I watched your eyes roll as you looked up my guardian angel’s skirt
you told her she was tighter than me, so much better.
You almost tasted heaven
had she not rolled over.

But I’m going under Jezebel’s knife.
(god have mercy, christ have mercy)
She’ll slice my forehead open and, she’ll pull shut my eyes.
She’ll tattoo her name underneath permanent eyeliner.
She’ll make a centerfold of me
And I’ll wear her feather and glue wings.
But just like Lady Icarus I’ll fly too near the sweaty-headed sun
in his museum of phallic clouds
where he pushed into me like an elevator button.
(i went up
then down again.)

And I will tumble, eaten by crazed koi
into an emporer’s pond
Chinese water torture, a chorus of beautifuls to the peasant girl.
This must be what heroin feels like.
This must be some sort of hell they didn’t tell me about
in the basements or the attic of my skeletal aunt’s house.
Here there are no bloody statues
No miracles in your morning toast.
Just a discarded arab strap and a starry-eyed love drug.

Clockwork--10/31

2007-10-31T08:53:00.000-07:00

Hellooooo high school.
I think I need to get out more.

**********************************
Clockwork
Because I couldn’t be your muse
I will descend
And ascend these stairs forever
Like a manic-depressive phantom,
I will turn on my heels at the exact exchange of the minutes
You could set your watch by me.
Like an iron-pressed soldier,
I am just as flat.

Because I am nothing extraordinary,
I will watch my face as it slips into change
like I slipped into that blood-stained kimono robe.
Turbaned and smoking cigarettes, 1-800 numbers
making what was once aching sting.
I cannot speak of abortion anymore,
I am not fortunate enough to be purged.
Someday I will be put in the chokehold of routine.
You might see me sitting at the bar in my coffee-stained polo
already a barfly and not yet 21.
Eluding photographs and stumbling away come 2:00.
Like clockwork.

Firestorm--10/26

2007-10-26T08:59:00.000-07:00

Again with the Shakespeare project. This one is about the airy spirit Ariel from The Tempest.

Firestorm

In the end, I am only air.
You swallow me without thinking about it.
You letme deliver myself to your blood.
I am your grandmother's letter opener.
I am your grandfather's toothpick.
I am the desert you let strech through your fingertips.

I had nothing to do wtih you family tree.
I didn't draw the lines or paint their portraits.
(Some speculate
if I have hands at all.)
But I made you.
You can call me "god" if you want, you can call me
you ship-wrecking guardian angel. You can put me on a chain
if you want.
You can tell me to tear off entire ships
like pages from a notebook made to be burned.
You can tell me to rip your name into their sails.
Leaving it clean at the end like a surgeon performing on your addled organs.
Your yellow pancreas, resting on your stomach like your sleeping daughter.
The shipwreck of lymph nodes lodged in your neck and groin.
Your red, red heart.

Before the fire goes out, I have heard them whisper, I have heard them wonder
if they even existed at all.
Be it in the duke's fireplace with the pearl-eating duchess out-cold on the fainting couch.
Be it the forest fire painting the sycamores black.
Be in the end of a sailor's cigarette between bleeding gums.

stormchaser (shakespeare project)

2007-10-09T11:52:00.000-07:00

This one is for Katharina from The Taming of the Shrew.

Stormchaser

Woman is a hurricane.
Tearing boards off windows and shattering glass.
Flinging picture frames across the room
ruining your sister's pillbox hat
the one she thought mader her look like Jackie O.
The one she thought made her look glamorous.
O senator's wife.
O daddy's favorite.
O linear Minerva.

Woman is a tornado.
batten the hatches, wait for the eye that never comes.
I don't blink
as I make ghosts of them.
I try not to notice
as you chase me in your Jeep
laughing into the wind and flying cows.

Woman is a flurry.
Even though she was predicted to become the blizzard of the century.
The children still have to go to school
and the weatherman smiles as the camera flicks
back to the anchorwoman.
She files her nails under the table, but she will be home by eight
to make hot cereal for Peter.

the imp (shakespeare project)

2007-10-09T11:49:00.000-07:00

This one's about Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The Imp

I am an elf that has climbed into your ear.
I've stolen your honey and your peanut butter.
I've found you in your father's grove
whispering Freudian poems.
I'm not your hundred dollar tape recorder.
I'm not your Austrian maiden aunt.
I am not taking notes.
I am the chaise you lie on. I sit atop your head
eating pancakes in your hair
and swimming in your beer.

I am your computer generated portrait.
I am the glint in the pig's eye.
I am the robot ghost your boyfriend fucked.
I know you are the blue caverns in his acid trip.
I am the tree you climbed.

I bring back what was gone
the blinking, olive-eyed tumor
crawling out of the lake from which you were born.
I am every invasion, even the ones that weren't at all
aliens.

mr. venice (for shakespeare project)

2007-10-09T11:44:00.001-07:00

The next few poems are what I'm going to be using for my Shakespeare project. Basically, we get to do any creative project and write a paper/do a presentation at the end of the course. I'm doing a combination poetry/photography for a few characters. This one's about Shylock from the Merchant of Venice:

Mr. Venice

In the ovens, the gold coins melt,
melting Venice and it's petty coke wars.
If you want to remember
do not keep our organs locked up in cabinets
along with yellow photographs and our mother's aprons
and thermometers and kitchen knives.
With swastikas for eyes, you cannot see:
(i am you)

We will tear out the baby-shoes
like we will tear out your hearts.
Christian soldiers in paper armor
swallowing barbed wire like communion grape juice.
With swastikas for eyes, you cannot see:
(i am you)

You stole my bread.
You stole my caskets.
You rearranged the letters in my name.
You stole my pillboxes.
You stole my half moon spectacles.
You squeezed my wife's ring on the sausage-finger of your whore.
You stole my daughter and made her your tinsel angel in your Christmas pageant.
You stole my daughter
bastards.

bitter oranges: 9/15

2007-09-24T13:47:00.001-07:00

Bitter Oranges

The tree was a mirror
and in it you saw only a door.
So with cats mewing at my feet, I picked three bitter oranges.
When I bit into them they tasted of dust.
I may have been inhaling a spirit-spore or two
to drag out the golden subconscious in a wheelbarrow.

But my ideas were thwarted and mute.
Fat with raccoon arms flailing dumbly on the forest floor.
My ideas had babies and they lay mewling around me
rolling their tongues and flashing their teeth.
Calling me mama.
Calling me papa.

I had forgotten what it had been like to sleep with a wolf
to lie motionless as he eats all the sugar cookies I made
and mutter, “you’re next”
dragging a claw across my thigh.
I had forgotten it until the numb juice ran down my throat
and I felt the mirror break
and the door swing off it’s hinges
and the terrible crash of the lover rolling over.
Curiosity wouldn’t have killed me
but it will possess you like a gambler
addicted more to light than anything else.

lazy mirror- started 9/10, finished 9/11

2007-09-12T14:31:00.000-07:00

Lazy Mirror

I always pictured Snow White as a quiet-footed Asian girl
a red-eyed Cadburry bunny sniffing through the clover
looking for some pretty new pill.
Some geisha ditz, a thing to dress up
a thing to fling into the air and watch her light up.
A girl born small enough to fit in your pocket
a sexy preemie pretty as a lemon drop.
A ginseng tablet to help you remember
when you’ve grown old.

I always pictured the nameless evil queen
white and white and white.
A bastard child of assimilation
raped of her Persian jars and Mexican blankets.
A ball-squeezing power suit fixing her face at the bus stop
some rich bitch, cunningly smiling during her dagger heel commute.
A real contender
in a corporate beauty contest.
Oh you were born to be a stepmother,
you were born to be Freud’s voodoo doll.

Mirror, you saw me
drawing on myself that cold day in May
from your glass box you watched the Venus flytraps grow out of my ears.
and you said:
“yes
yes
yes
the fairest witch that ever walked the earth
but the princess will always get the job.
You’re no bouncing blonde secretary.
Though your awareness is ravishing,
you’re no blow up doll.”

I should have poisoned you, I guess.
I should have found you another prince that would keep your belly tight.
I know just the one, in fact.
But I’m a lazy dame.
My idea of revenge is dozing in a green tower biting black licorice.
Your beauty doesn’t concern me.

winner winner, pita dinner.

2007-09-05T08:39:00.000-07:00

I won 3rd place at the Ames Slam last night at the Boheme!
I think it was the red striped dress.
http://www.boheme-iowa.com
There's my shameless plug for the day. Not only does the Boheme host slams the first Tuesday of every month, they have super fun dance parties every Thursday night and Open Mic on Sundays. Plus there's always good people, alcohol, and paintings of naked ladies. Don't you love it already? I think you do.

9/2-the fox's bride

2007-09-02T19:16:00.000-07:00

I'm not one of those people who can read great poetry and sit back and appriciate it. No, great poetry makes me want to pick up my pen and write something of my own. I've had to read Anne Sexton's Transformations for a women's lit class and I'm considering making a shrine to her next to my shrine of Sylvia Plath. Since Transformations is pretty much recreations of classic fairy tales, I decided to do one on that vein, only mine is based loosely on the nursery tale "the Gingerbread Man"
It doesn't even compare to Anne's work, but here it is:

The Fox's Bride

As soon as my feet announced their arrival
in the quiet fanfare of a dog whistle,
you heard me.

A year ago I'd been in your corner of the woods,
flinching my way through life.
You saw me and instantly wanted to gobble me up
as neatly as a boiled egg.

Though you saw my invisible escort
his kisses glowing purple under the blacklight
smears I couldn't wash off.

So you waited
eating beetles and spitting dirty words
flicking your tail like blue stove flames.

You gathered your blueprints and with your tiny eyes
clicked them into your brain like Morse code
even I couldn't hear my own body being telegraphed.

So I ran, picking off only the tiniest pieces.
I even gave a woodsman one of my currant eyes
because of how he looked in flannel.

But I kept running until I met a stream
and I knew I couldn't cross.
I knew I was flat enough to soften like cold cereal
and laugh as minnows nibbled at my feet.

Then your arrived like a red submarine
and let me sit on the tip of your tail
high enough to see the buzzing neon and girls in white.

Once you let me cross the whole way, just as an experiment.
You let me pilgrimage to see my parent-gods
and the oven where my belly swelled brown.
To see the gun which drew on my smile.

There no one touched me.
No one fed my addiction.
So I replaced my gumdrop buttons with extra strength Tylonol
and out of the hemisphere of the window the woodsman stood
with a waxy rose floating over his head.

So I climbed on your back
because I didn't like getting my hair wet
and you can guess what that led to.
I climbed into your mouth and danced with your velvet tongue.

Just like every Thursday night thereafter
where you would come gather me in my red dress
you'd buy me a gin and tonic and lick the nutmeg off my skin.
You'd watch me dance with the seven dwarves
an estranged princess, some stray tattooed fairies
but you'd get your paws tangled in my hair
and drag me backward.
By then I knew better: gingerbread girls are meant to be eaten
after all.

8/26/07-Pogo Stick (song lyrics, let's say)

2007-08-29T13:30:00.000-07:00

Pogo Stick

Would you encourage me to bring my toothbrush to your house?
Would I keep it in the bathroom near the sink
where it could fall into the toilet at any given time?

Oh gravity, your laws are giving me the blues
because I’ve been thrown up so far into the air
I can taste the clouds.
I’ll wait for the moment when I come down
I’ll learn some patience one of these days.

Would you pitch your mattress and find another big enough for two?
That way, we can sleep all day
or at least until we get hungry for tomato soup.
I’d make you a grilled cheese, babe, if you wanted me to.

Oh gravity your laws are waking me up
the alarm is ringing until I come out of another dream
where you and I are astronauts
on the moon no one can hear you scream
because you never need to.

Would you rescue me from a day of watching posters fall off walls?
of trying on clothes and eating too much.
Would you pull me out of the well
once I’ve chosen that as my landing.

Oh gravity I wonder what it would be like if I kept falling up
if I changed my legs to pogo sticks
and kept refilling my glass until I was drunk on positive thinking.
I wonder if I rearranged the letters of our names
so it was spelled the same
so it was spelled the same
both up and down.

communist in red lipstick-started 8/15, edited 8/22

2007-08-22T09:29:00.000-07:00

Communist in Red Lipstick

Bolshevik tart
You smudged your revolution across the face of that boy.
You sent him stumbling out of the bar
Like a child scattering his sweat out of the ruined village.
Years after, he’d feel phantom pain in the center of his chest
when it rained or snowed
or broke out a few splinters of sunshine.
He’d feel your words like shrapnel.

You rushed across the barrier
Red and red and red, a fucking spectacle
Trashy as a dirty word in a foreign language,
you ran around Berlin your freedom songs
clamoring behind you, clinking like tin cans on a marriage car.

The flies buzzed around your tearducts in that unbearable Russian summer.
A single afternoon when you dreamed up that sugarplum acid dream
A big diamond and a home with a white picket fence
Painted an extra coat to hide the membrane of sweat from the worker’s backs.
Wearing paint thick as fur to conceal your naked phrase:
“I’ll make you see
Someday.
I’ll hold open your eyelids, made heavy by the imitation designer handbag
Slung over the weary shoulders of your waitress daughter, pregnant
with numbers, full of the blue cotton candy fibers
left over from the carnival of American dreams
which will someday fatten her for the kill.”

They shut you off in September, sedated with the balm of college amnesia.
life gave you more lemonade than you could possibly want
and there you sat, fat with their acceptance
mouth bare as a clean newborn
sterile in the arms of it’s new mother.

electric shoes-8/22/07

2007-08-22T09:08:00.001-07:00

Here's something I wrote while bumming around in the library before my 2:10 Women's Lit class. This is the first real poem I've written for awhile.
And no, I'm currently not on acid.

Electric Shoes

I’ve got pair electric shoes
I walk up in the sky most every night, sometimes it breaks the heat
in a powdery shatter.
I give it to the swaying monks of 3 am
walking the streets unarmed, the peace girls
giving out their alms.

I’ve got a room with a few stray cats
that smoke cigarettes and stay up
to wag their tongues out the window
so they can sing their song to the wolves that pass outside
it sounds like laughter, and I become their sound.

I’ve got a dress that’s a certain shade of red
I wear it because an old man told me
I looked like a commie flag
only a bit more glamorous
a little less frightening
but no less willing to burst through containment
like a Chinese river.
I wear it most every night, holding hands with Bolsheviks
and drinking cheap beer with Japanese fashionistas.

I’ve got a swarm of bees in my brain
That make honey that drips out of my tongue, slow as melting wax
whenever I open my mouth.
They are quiet, though, or at least their rhythm
matches up with the way silence punctuates an accent.

I’ve got a pair of electric shoes
And when I make that clockwork stroll up in the sky
August sings me liberty
And I try to remember the word but it rushes to the back of my brain
And graffiti’s itself as if I’ll remember.