for rachel

my sister

who I snatched out of the gilt jaws
of some groaning beast, plucked
from the temple of God’s fortune, stole
from the mouth of His grinning
statue, all wet and chewed-up.
hurried down the marble steps,
threw a dark cloak around her.
she, leaned up against me, I, frantic, stuttering
sew her up wake her up.

I’ve stowed her in my attic
where I patched up the worst of it
then pushed in a set of new teeth
see? you’re good as almost
new, but just quiet now, keep quiet, please.

I swear all these years I am
nervous as a woman with
a lantern in my window or
as if it’s 1944 and there are Jews
in the annex . always chewing
my own lip, waiting for the knock

sometimes I think I might stand up and walk to the kitchen. pick up each glass and watch them smash to the floor. break your plates, break your bowls, break all the vases. walk to the bathroom and drop all the porcelain. listen to the crash as our toothbrushes scatter. Stand there barefoot and say I had no idea what to do.

just to watch you say I can’t and then show me the door. watch you put me out, my mouth full of glass.

but maybe you would say I understand perfectly and we’ll sweep it tomorrow and put your hand to my mouth, like my mother, say it’s ok dear, come on, spit it out.

interesting. I am a wooden garment. I am a clumsy registered nurse. I wear clodding shoes, once white, old leather cracking and soiled at the heels. my athleticism has long transformed into stockiness. my hair has lost its impact, growing over the years from chestnut brown to drain-water and is sensibly cut. I wake each morning and comb it after brushing my teeth. I floss and spit out a small thread of blood. I make friends with the staff in the foodish break room. I smile and laugh but my stomach refuses to unclench.

you are somehow living without me. leaving me suspended in fluid and brushing and flossing my teeth

just started

My former self arrives at my door, unannounced.
I cringe and nervously push back my unwashed hair,
self-conscious in an untied bathrobe,
while guiltily smoking another cigarette.

She wastes no time.
Is condescending. Says
I hardly recognized you, then,
fine, you want to just sit here?
Takes up a lead pipe and
breaks both my legs.

My future self is kinder.
She braids my hair and kisses my temples,
brings me soup in a stained paper bag, says
no excuses. one more bite.
winks at me and then whispers, confidential,
injuries aren’t always what they seem, my dear.
walking away was the easy part.

a few lines

is the getting still good, she asked,
my life is a glass tube around me.
I'm running out of breathing time

college graduation. 5.12.08

I think of all the things I’ve not understood;
you liquor-sick and mourning. So still
in my bed and weeping while whispering
truth in my ear and you only
wishing you loved me. But saying
truth to me over and I only (always)
half-comprehending what that word—
along with its layers of meaning—
could have meant to you then.

from the archives

My mother is my child

The motherless mother who tore out her throat
for her children--I cannot, even, understand her love for me.
She recognizes only my face.
In her childish simplicity, she remains slick and uncatchable
as plate glass.

I love her only as if she were my child,
confused, wandering through that big house immersed in
her chatter and flashing television programmes.
Yes, mother, you
are an enigma, proudly holding out your
high-school yearbook for my approval.
Homecoming queen.
Your eyes, eager for my praise,
look so young. was life what you wanted?

Though I cannot, truly, forget your age with
all these cancers that threaten
to eat you, as your mother was eaten. They strike panic
down into my protective heart at night.
I wake, wet with sweat, here in my city,
apart from you and dumb with terror
please don’t take my baby, don’t take my baby.

K

There is comfort here. You and I
lazy in bed, stretching and preening like evil-eyed cats.
Not quite human, but baser and more graceful
like the cynics and the disillusioned who don’t
confuse the other with what it is they’re after.
We are a selfish union, each demanding caresses
and sweetly smiling at ourselves in
the neat iris of the other.
Still, I forget how it was we met
and where I’ve heard your name before.



So flick all your ashes on me, darling,
and I’ll spit in your face and claw through your canvases
as we’ll clamor for the right to be the one
turning their back upon the other in
our tenuous love affair.
Two solitary creatures refusing
to be anyone’s pet.

septicemia

You arrived and I found this rusted wire twisted and jammed up just under my fingertip. Days later I felt the coming soreness of its pink infection. Now, slowly, my sickened hand grows to be a burden. Often I must carry it in the other. This seems, I think, to suggest an offering of some over-ripe fruit. This amuses me; I sometimes laugh excessively. I’ve lost my balance, I fear, I’m losing my senses.

Nights, my mind is impish in its desire—I cannot rid it of this desire—to inspect the pain and tongue it over. To practice, hour by hour, attention paid to each
revolting nerve. In time, the pain itself grows metallic and splinters outwards and I never sleep but feverishly and always with your name at the sharp point dug into my flesh.

I’m losing, no I can’t lower my voice, I’ve lost my senses again, you see, it won’t let me sleep. My ears are always filled with the pulse of the rush of the blood up against it. I have no more silence. no I cannot just remove it, idiot,
or else we all would, wouldn’t we?

leaving

I am the woman who does not yet know her middle is torn out.

I am the awestruck woman who
moves her fingers into a well of pulped flesh,
who touches the pearly new-cut fat of red organs, disbelieving.
I cannot recognize
these severed pink tubes spilled out like
wiring on some disemboweled machine.

Today, I am like some injured woman
that instant she recognizes
the pulped and short-circuiting thing as herself.
Neck snapping upwards,
I am the shrieking against the irrevocable.
I am the tongue-scraping, bone-against-bone feeling
of rage; I am the unsexed tightness across the
chest; the glass grit dug up into the palms.

Then comes the blankness,
the seeping out of outcries and
the calming of revolt.
Now I know I cannot be
stopped-up. I am the girl
clutching loose quarts of blood.

Love Abortion

All my loves, you were like my unborn children.

Each time I regret somewhat
the onslaught of your absence. Wondering
what fledgling love
lays smashed and decaying moments after conception,
and why I glow each time with new-found pregnant sweetness
and why I hold my belly and laugh
before I’m even showing?
Each time still eyeing the penciled-in appointment
urging the days to leak out from under me.

But, still I do not waver; I have guarded against my own ambivalence.
And each time I have no choice but
to tear you from myself and sit alone,
eating nothing and clutching my empty belly,
and curse that I allowed our fetal love to expand so violently.

You, my quiescent offspring, denied gestation,
for whom I endure the empty gestures
of appointments and loss
in exchange for a few moments respite
from my barren nighttimes,
I am always sorry now. Always wondering what
your name would have been what
kind of creature you could have become.

So, sweet boys, my sympathies
go out to you for I will remove you all before you take
too strongly. Not without regret, mind you,
but I quarantine my mourning.

speak to yourself

Each time I catch myself sprawling out, languid, sure of warm weather and wantedness, it is there that the reciprocation ceases. Your voice is rock edged and a slick sheet covers your face.

The wanting me retracts and blazes and each day’s forecast escapes me. You are a stranger who can speak the words that I swear all seem true. Say I miss you, miss you, dear; I am weeping. Who lends me affection and the comfort of heat and then retracts the seasons in his own time? I am the earth falling prey to your ambivalence. I am the stones all unsure of god’s love for me. I am the creature and animal that questions its endowment of existence. You are a petulant, a fickle, a bottled up source of light. There are only flashes of color and then that sickness again which keeps me vomiting pages and pages and letters and leavings and confusion. But I bury the excrement of obsession deep. Like a cat, nervous, paranoid, shuffling and on the verge of panic. Some animal fretting and feeling this torture for the flimsiest of all substitutes for a real love. Hemmed in, unmovable, unmoved, and stricken with seriousness.

I wait here like someday you will wake up and the weather vane will cease in its unpredictability. like I will wake up in a bed that has collected moss. wake in a stationary seat with a mild, wet climate. Here, now, how could any species evolve in this space with the plummeting and soaring of expectations and desert dry spells?

You keep yourself here with your grasping and denying. You are here due to a series of ridiculous accidents, all of which you could have ignored. You are here because you don’t want to get better. not really. you are here because it is easier. This is the new chemical that keeps you sealed up in your room with that mediocrity. Lord help us if you will allow yourself to be satisfied by this. Help us if you will take—and gratefully—the few small signs, if you will hold on to the least of all those things that you have come across, if you cannot hold yourself up, woman. Hold yourself up, stand up, get off that bed.