publish mc spluhblished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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)

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)

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

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

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.

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

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)

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

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

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.