now the poem is a woman

reach inside the incision
up the stomach from the asshole
ribcage gristle light brown mound of heather memory

spill oddities, like miraculous whole red berries
feel for the heart with two

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
~ W.B Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’

One day, your borders shall speak;

Indignant birds will shit on your

Under the cruel glow of inquiry, I want to tell her that the party is over.

Hurry, tomorrow’s ashen face is at your door.
Hold out your hands, two tiny suns,
you’re more golden than they ever told you.

You’re from the cornfields, I tease, but not really. Your parents, professors at U of Illinois, both versed in the theories of music, both of them concert pianists. They play hushed, reverent duets

I grew up in grass but here / everything is bladeless, // hair thinned past feathers, / sheets slick enough to grease a boar.

We walk to the edge of the continent / and there in the sand I turn to her and say, / look,
this is where I buried myself 

 Most nights we stayed behind, Tweety Bird / pajama shirts stretched over our knees, waist-length hair soaking / our backs as we sat on the floor and thumbed glossy 10mm prints.

I’m going out
to snag a man. 

my parents taught me to say ‘surrender’
in a dozen foreign languages.

the night of the attack

mother did you hear them
they had tongues like lightning
and forked through the forest
shooting the heads off sparrows.

mother did you see their
bonfires

Subtraction, division,

rabbit bones, rabbit lives

sometimes i wake up in empty fields, waiting for the aliens to take me. they haven’t yet,  but any day now, i’m sure.

And somehow I’m supposed to get dressed in the morning / when most days arrive like a gold chain tangled in black chest hair.

 Please, I need those thick markers from the craft store, you know, the ones that color far away from each other; you turn the corner into golden golden golden any night

You will etch your name in the most lunar dust. This world / may be large enough for none of us, saddest darling.

 It’s simple, really. / You, like the other yous / are gone,            returned to the God of metals.

After being hospitalized in 1968 / for an aortic aneurysm, Rothko’s doctor / prescribed that he only paint and draw / on mediums less than three feet tall.

And what is essential for me to believe is that / the plants themselves were changed by Joan, / that bathing with her in the light and fragrance

spirits in the trees / hush love hush love / go’on fly home

 how you came with shadows, / but not darkness, like the other person I love, / the type of darkness that lays like a quilt.

It’s bronzy August and I need this to be all over. / Most of my poems are shaped like crows, / so what’s eating you?

A man spills a red solo cup down my shirt like hands. Hands bury in my skin. The speakers bury in my skin. I have never felt farther from the sky, or from my own spit.

The pinwheels of my mourning, having moved to a windless town.

Rarely do I think of death while gnawing the bottom of a vanilla cone.