sparta, georgia (second draft)

Sparta, Georgia



I have spent up my days,

slow-tongued and
sleep-stumbling through
wet air heavy with old cotton smells,

ponderous wandering darkened rooms,
plaster wetly cracking.
Smooth the never-touched beds with
their yellowed lace coverlets, damply molding,
dumbly set straight

the porcelain washbasins, blue-flower patterned,
split through by Sherman and seams now showing,
all empty and perspiring.


Here, the wood aches with age.

An emptiness clings to ancient space
saying
too many have come through here you are nothing.



I have come up aching,

slow sleeping through thick summers.

Time works itself swamplike here
we all sleep together and chew corn ground into sand.


They say there is fresh earth 

around you. They say there is much

to be loved, hot smell of wet earth,

Spanish moss, regal, overhanging.
Love the last mistake that you made,

slow-mouthed, sucking.

I will swoon at the sight of you with your cock in another woman. I will go through all these motions: I will grab the doorframe slightly, I will stagger and exhale, see black, and spit blood. I will remind myself that the judgment of god falls unequally on men and women; the forgiveness of the lord falls heavy on the side of brute man. my prescribed and biblical fulfillment is in the tempting towards sin and the forgiveness of the needs of a hard cock. I will remember to bite into my tongue til all the blood lets out and I can be cooled of feminine folly.

oh sisters,

how we all weep together, how we all fall into a scene such as this in eternal return, each woman tempter or betrayed.

oh god let us be like you and your total
summation of love. infinite and directionless
as a fist full of arrows arcing and pinning.
god let me be a lover like you are
a lover of men.

i will move like a glossy machine through
the trees, demolishing and unscathed.
i will shuck you off, like a god, i will
strip your branches clean suck
out your bones. i am a god who will love
you all equally and despairingly:
negation

sparta, georgia

I have spent up my days
slow tongued
straight from the old cotton smells,
the yellowed lace coverlets,
the porcelain washbasins, blue-flowered,
the wood aching with age.
an emptiness clings to ancient space
saying too many have come through here you are nothing.

I have come up aching
slow sleeping through thick summers
time is at work swamplike here we
all sleep and chew corn ground into sand.

they say there is fresh earth
around you. they say there is much
to be loved, hot smell of wet earth,
spanish moss, regal, overhanging, the
last mistake of my womb
slow mouthed, sucking.

ending

sweetness I know comes in forms
unpleasant into decadence and love
I know comes brittle though unshakable.
but, sweetness, I shake uncontrollable
and I heat the room with a coursing regret.

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.