Poetry
(animal) * a heart is entirely something that stops, a dog dies every day the lithic forgiving you back home just come back home * the dead lunge of intonation, and you get your knuckles dusted everyone gets nuzzled down, dirt cozy, disarticulations from your once-living body you’re an animal, you give your atoms back
The doctor asks me which cheek. I point left, lowering my jeans. Sorry, it’s thick, he says, and I don’t have time to make the obvious joke. Hot flashes, he warns. Insomnia. Chronic exhaustion. No libido. No erections. You have about an hour, he says as he leaves. To masturbate, he adds. One last time, […]
I. Original Work (Please do not touch.) Throughout the gallery, ghosts, of all senses: ordinary invisible ghosts that no one can see except the blind, ghosts in the audio room that only the deaf can hear, ghosts in the thresholds felt only by phantom limbs, ghosts hanging around like paintings suspended too high to be experienced as intended by […]
& in the beginning, God said Get your money up nigga You don’t know. If He really said this. You have begun blurring. Your knowledge. Of Holy Word with the knowledge. Of Self. You are Adam. No. Eve. You don’t even use. The word ‘nig- ga.’ Poor-spirit. That’s what God calls you. Ma said marijuana’s a drug. Just like the white ones. […]
* The stain on the ceiling reminds me of an old boyfriend. I menstruated through his bed sheet. I hope he never got it out. * I am ready to accept I’ll never be beautiful. No matter how I line my eyes, they can see. * Looking back, I should have prayed less. My sins failed to thrive. They died like lame animals. * My mother left me a wing-back chair […]
I would walk out past the tobacco barn and squint to find the three crosses on the mountaintop, and— I knew from hiking there—the stone outline of an unfinished church, but in winter the crosses just become all the leafless trees, black and bristly like the hairs on a hog’s back. My dad’s standard for […]
It’s been raining in California for three days This morning I left a bowl of cherry seeds on the counter as a confession of my hunger Winter seems to come later every year I invent new withdrawal symptoms to mark the days:the roof of my mouth, cold as a razor. A bruise just below my […]
After Jimi Hendrix For Joe I met him when my lungs were clean, typically after dusk, escaping unsupervised into our own night club, where a dark bird beckoned through a haze, electric in its longing, leading the way to my future amplified by smoky ruin. I’d like to say I don’t do things only when sad chimes tell […]