first draft

My face forced hard against your unsheeted mattress,
hospital blue, stitched-diamonds-intertwining
and bright-lit beneath me.
I am swathed in bedclothes, suspended in-utero,
my fetal weakness held firm by adult weight. .
Antiseptic light, overhead glare,
window torn open and the January frigidity flows
in a soup around us.
Unspent word create themselves, full-grown,
and force their way through the canal of my constricted mouth
almost fully original, nearly disembodied,
full of intention.
The paralysis of sheets
of smooth muscle embracing, oh, darling, I am
bled of volition, fresh and wet and birthed.

love the broken thing

The final adjustment of wig on pale scalp
as she thrusts herself
into the dead-air of the school entrance.
She does not want your protection
just the promise of an unquestioned future.


Then painting another’s fingernails
carefully under hospital lighting.
She does not remember that ancient windowsill in
south Georgia, embroidered curtains above the kitchen sink.
She can no longer tell you the story of the dead
confederate soldier buried at the corner of her father’s plot.
You smooth her hair and she calls you Gail,
her dead sister’s name.

And him on the days when his soul’s
been swallowed down; his eyes are polished stones,
rejecting sight. You are the nervous creature,
coquettish and dumb-grinning, behaving just right.
oh, I’m not well again tonight, dear

He does not touch you, stranger.

Ars Poetica

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.
I know I cannot be stopped-up.
I am the girl clutching
loose quarts of blood.

I will not tell you rape stories

only stories of not-rape. The not-thing
that left me drawn out and back-carpet-burned
in basement beds and on littered floors,
dull with liquor and nowhere to go.
I will speak, today, only of my snapping thinness
laid out down beneath the not-lover scraping himself
upon me saying things like love me.

more history

I fight river fog in deeper Junes
retracing ancient footsteps to this place.
All my loves hang from bits of ribbon,
suspended in amber orbs:
a glow through the Georgia pines on cooler evenings.
It is always a relief to return,
to find you all here, waiting,
each flickering in the branches, eternal.

I touch them all,
light on my fingertips and against my cheeks,
rub them like a thing of luck and
peer inside to see the things I forgot
but could not leave.

This one glows darker
a tear in my lashes, blood at the corners,
a fly stickily waiting,
syringes in both our arms.
And that one I visit oftener,
though he never loved me.
I see numbness in duller rooms,
open mouths in sleep, him
wishing I was another woman.

Ah, and him. This one
ever brighter, always.
Snow globe of harvard square
swirling, old dormer
windows still twinkle merrily.
My hair was short that year and I was
truer. I spy on us in miniature
in the only scene that ever appears: snow flying,
hands clenched together, you and I,
eyes caught and netted into each other,
our souls fat with contentment,
an unfiltered cigarette stuck in each mouth.

history

every night I dream about you. you and twins others who match but only slightly. I dream of screaming at you, accusing you, telling you one by one all the things that gutted me, I dream of missing you, hating you, finding you on the street, you forgetting my face, I forgetting yours. I dream of regret, of searching for you, of panic, of the desire to un-do. I dream of freedom, of rejection, of spitting in your face, of your arms splayed out in dead-air, of couches containing other women.


I dream of turning my head, falling
down stairs, an empty party
that left the curtains in shambles.
I sew and sew, all I see are rags
on the walls wrecked to the core. I fit
the fabric together, bit by bit.
Now, at least, I don’t encounter your face,
only yards and yards of clawed-up muslin, endless
feathered fibers, the mending
of fabrics rotten with moths.

I set my teeth, clumsy with the needle,
and swoop in again.