Fruitful
A body that bleeds unprovoked is expected to do other things. The expectation that some bodies produce fruit. Or a different kind of production: the body like a city. The body at the center of the city, red lights ripe as seeds after the flesh falls away. At the center …
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Dead long
Stiff and cold fingers mourn The keratin rupture For a loot of half-moons On the husband’s charpai frame Crescent marks & lunulae Sit sanguine, the proud Spoils of his night’s labor And an empty glass of Turmeric milk stands on A chinioti night-stand My dowry’s rosewood organ–– The vestal white …
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Argument
One could argue that the chief contributor to the violence in your country is your silence. One could argue that the silence in your mouth means you are eating without chewing. Walking on the street late in the evening, carrying your bag of groceries, your wallet weighing down your loose …
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You cannot sing yourself to sleep
With hands of starlings Or count sheep when legs are dogs Pulling you down the street Sing the child in bed if you can As water rises over the bland Map of this sad Ohio town A reckless river of borrowed Thought, an inkpot of birds Dancing through your inability …
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Associative Sequence A #3
a bird call is a trap. a fox hound is a tool. and if the goose speaks: turn the lights off and get to bed. the elephant in san diego paints all the oceans blue. the preacher on tv lets the widow know that her dead husband wants her to …
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Driving to LA from Temecula to Have Sex with a Minor Actor Who Made a Single Appearance in My Former Best Friend’s Favorite TV Show,
I keep the radio off thinking I might notice things like the names of streets, or the way trees call light into their upstretched arms, instead of worrying about this actor who’s going to feed me scallops and fuck me and never call me again, because I’m nervous, it’s my …
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Since becoming my son’s only friend, I’ve had to become Baba Yaga.
He wants to get boiled alive in my cauldron. To be eaten whole. Don’t spit out my bones, he says. He wants to burrow his mane of curls back into my belly and beat me with sticks and pull out my hair and sleep his face earthward into my face. …
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song of a bird in a box
seagulls tumble—clothes in a dryer— (through the glass a mocking sky) floating apostrophes to signify dominion over flight, fall. he’s euthymic today, cradles an arm. a bird perched in the corner converses with echos. shakes, approaches the nurse with gray feathers under eyes. (hope, fear, pleading) “sleep, my son had …
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Story of Grandmother
Call this art of witchcraft an art like the poem, paid for in blood, milk, bread. Through the mouth all desires known and willed into being, doing as she was instructed, which means speaking the body of an old wives’ tale, the one where the witch spun is a girl, …
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A Poetry of Absence
The men who waltz into my chest smile as my father would before he walked out one morning and crashed into a swollen thigh. What we truly know—dying is somewhere between ejaculation and a sigh. If he ever returned, we’d fill the empty china still on the dinner table with …
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