November December

Leaves like elephants
no longer white
nor red.
A crunchy fetus--
dry to the bone.

Rachael Ray Transcript

("Sara Ramirez"; Rachael prepares spinach artichoke hummus and wild catchatori.)

We were actually just in the O.R the other day.
The truth is you can screw up a thing.

Look, I'm a faithful wife.
I'm holding on to her and my key lime pie.
Sorry, we should probably let you guys in on it.
We have now officially been bonded.

I have to get a momentum.
It's just us. Nobody's watching.
Nobody's listening.

Who came out on top?
Me.
I'm not much of a fighter.
Anymore.
We'll talk it out.

Regis and Kelly Transcript

(Vince Vaughn; John Stamos)

I felt like the woman from The Sound of Music.
I was so drained from helping those kids.
If you drown,
you drown.
I can't help anymore.

I could be ill.
A world traveler.
Free as the breeze.

It's so unfortunate for everyone.
There are so many other people that get effected.
I pray to God that it ends soon.
And everyone gets what they want.

I don't want to get in the politics of it.

Tell me about your character:
They calmed me down a little bit this year.
I started dating the chaplain.
We'll pray for you.

I can't say.

Plaster swells under years of paint.

I wake to the mice in the walls of my bones shifting hard-wired veins,
scurry scratches--
to the wind telling me it's just the ghosts blowing through the Amber streets.

Bruised around the sore, my mouth is an open wound.

Afghanistan

I pressed needles into my feet for every second he died and a part of me failed. I threaded through the eyes to tie little yellow bows--a dozen silver splinters, glints of light.

[His] Dead-weight shall make me heavier than the ash/soot filled jars, trash bags. He'll come home in a shoe box to be buried in our backyard--like a hamster--next to his favorite dog.

My tongue is bruised, lash-licked.

The words I've been swallowing.

My needle broke while sewing the splits in my feet. The eye dangled by my thread.

I spotted bad blood between my legs; varicose trails leading from the source to pools between my toes.

It was the kind of conversation that killed time. It was the kind of conversation that killed itself and we forced resuscitating words. She said I'm a nice person to talk to, and it was good talking to me.

I never got her name.

10/10

The blackbird, the sparrow
perch beakless on sinking wires,
bobbing in the wind, in the wake.
Sparking steel dragging through the street
—not the best metal, like fingernails
flaking, chipping. Mine belong to the days
when tires froze to the streets
and the sky never caught fire—
this drum never caught—
and Lucy,
you end me.

9/10

This infant flesh
is not my flesh. Nor is this red ink—
soaked sack drying burlap. A red splotch blooms over;
incendiary match
peels fiber from porous fiber
in a drum sprayed with graffiti argot.
A neutral void now,
and perhaps I am sitting too close—
tiny toes crack and pop
in vacuous silence,
like my voice crumbling from my mouth.

8/10

A postcard,
desperate language smeared in haste,
scripts itself under the guise
of an expert marksman.
Adulterated by beaks, perhaps;
peck-holes infiltrate context,
and it is indiscernible, sir
—like scissors that snipped lamentable faces.
Scrawled from a shaky hand,
stiff and out of tune.
Slip it into the dusty voice box
with a post script—post haste.

7/10

Buzz clippers
resonate louder,
deeper than bombs,
and sharper than lonesome brick walls
jutting my knee caps.
Thank god, somebody did.
my pen broke; it stuttered
blots and blobs over thin greens,
continuous exhales under blue-black splatter.
There is just this one thing—
my sinkholes are eyes.
There is just
—invariably—
there is just this one thing,
just these few things
I never liked about you, Sparrow.
Luxembourg,
I need a couch, to avoid the raid.

6/10

He marked the fall of a slaughter
on his arm—tombstone flesh honoring
the pale eyes like moons
the gods didn’t want anymore.
Cross hatched egg tangled my dress
—a push, and my chest caved.
Wo hältst du deine Toten?
Put her in a produce sack
—burlap weave chafe;
we’ll carry her to town.

5/10

Sparrow, inconsistent, sees
large ribbons of ink veil empty lines,
a broken pulse of thought,
the tongue I’ve lost.
Sparrow laughs, Wer bist du?
Rivulets of veins;
her eyes like a moon tangled in trees,
and a sleep jaw.
She is the innocent thrust from my body,
like lungs deflating,
tumbling over the drain.
My birth is weak. My birth is rot.
Aber mich, Sparrow,
I am blank.

3/10

Arthritic hands
--laced and limbless—
perch the fog.
Blackbird mutters about the hollow
men plagued by syntax.
I ask the significance of hawks and tornadoes,
or of my belly pregnant with ideas too obligated
for my inadequacies.

The wind rattles with shells of brilliance
that cease to live--up to--
Blackbird follows me.

Ich kann ihn nicht vergessen.

He's the hollow, follows me,
shouting loss failure loss.
He drops cordials from enticing heights,
wishing to invite me
while yester-bodies scrape by at a crawl.
What's the significance of a pale face with moons for eyes?
And a demeanor level like Dresden.

Ich kenne ihn nicht.

Silence fails like the combative noise of trying.
I'm not a war criminal.
Blackbird mutters, moons are stones, too.

4/10

Sparrows swore they’d never gnaw
my shallow flesh—boneskin clutch in hollow suit.
Bud sprouts pirouette through flat-lined
pages wasted like days,
like trumpets marching rigadoon through iron ambits.
Freezing limbs and senses—
I can’t smell the mud of new birth.
Sparrow teases the device of forgetting
camel-lashes thick like fingers that
framed my face,
or legs treading indifferent plateaus.
Vater, unclench my fingers;
Ich kann nicht verlassen.

2/10

The shrapnel—
the was, the after—
the me-not-you,
splitting hairs like tattered shoes.
It’s something of an anachronism,
rerunning marathons over cratered faces
—dotted bygones of soft pucker-prick.
He fell deaf,
supine, spineless,
gutted ink bottle—
and I taciturn.
See that shadow?
Substratum of my legs
(It’s not yours).
Scheiss, Liebe,
I knifed my tongue for you.

1/10

The Blood-letters
--incarnadine pricks—
pass like a fever,
sticking a trail from nape
to crescent hips
eclipsed by lace.
Battle stole my brother.
Battle saved my marriage.
Luck stuck in blood letters
sealed and censored
between two shades
of incessant tries.
On like a dress--
mein Liebe,
wie schlaefst du nachts?
--unsupportive dress caught
between my legs
like dreams and thieves.
Mein Liebe,
I sleep like a ruin.

MRI + you and I

I hear your words overlapping,
Flashes of words, of lights, of eyes, of blank eyes,
Pages and pages of blank eyes,
everything never meant to be in a steel room,
I never knew overlapping and interjecting
Injecting flashes of noise through red ear plugs
As being conveyed through a tunnel, cold feet
Tunnel of noise vibrating my spine
Specifically my knee, penetrating flashes of noise
Like overlapping language, and I close my eyes
To flashes of noise and lives I won’t miss,
And think about the poems, the words,
The poem that makes me hate words
Because words repeat, life repeats,
Unreceptive tunnels that convey me through
cold isolation of steel rooms,
I think about what stood out in a steel room
While incendiaries stole fire, flashes of agitation
Those were her words, the words that make me hate poems,
‘I miss him and my mind is not upon the Pleaides,’
I, too, miss him and my mind aches for the Pleaides,
My favorite him of the sky, and him of the earth,
Who overlaps earth and underlaps sky, being conveyed
Through a noise tunnel with flashes of cold feet aching to move,
It was the cold that put me in the tunnel,
Blank tunnel of noise and flashes of eyes,
The ice, light, flashes of flesh,
The cold that made the ice capable of cracking
Parts that I need, parts of my knee,
Overlapping noise, mouth words, incessant noise
That pours and misses the tunnel of reception, red ear plugs,
It was his cold that sent me down the mountain
Overlapping ice with cold feet,
And cold feet because canvas is never thick enough
Skin is never thick enough, thick like steel rooms,
To overlap the languages, the flashes of language
That make me hate words.

5.

Never enough room for the inks mirror glass best friend soup cans ex movie stubs collaborator that etch from the same copper plate. Not the best metal, carve scratch acid bath. Perhaps fingernails, mine belong to the days when flat tires froze to the street. Rubber on asphalt. Your bed: maroon cotton cream cinder. I scramble to convert moods to charms. Sponge, scum, someone cleaned the showers. A three-figure army lays claim, and I not among a single one of them.

March 9, 2007

When I speak of unreliability I speak into the green that flips open,
connecting vibrations from my box of lungs to receptacles of sympathy.

I speak of bile lullabies that stirred my sleep as beetle bugs gripped my joints,
a rude disservice snapping shades, why not another week, another twenty-four hours
when a plague could swarm, weighing me to the bed on my back, on my stomach side, body contorting, ‘unable to turn over or away from this.’

I speak of a coast-long list of amputations, inconvenient cycles, unwelcome third parties that I’d gladly welcome in lieu of loose three-legged stools or vile sulfur yellow acid, feverish in nature, ruthlessly plundering resources I have not to give, leaving 100.4 reasons to tug the covers, burning effete.

And I speak of lighting not one, but twenty-two candles in my memory, in my honor,
marking my origin, and one for good measure.

He left early this morning by train. I slept through him, on top of wrinkled sheets now the closest thing to flesh--skin cells and scents left behind like loose change I found stuck to my thigh.

He watched the wind tease my dress over my pale legs and the bruises olive-like in shape and color--pockets of blood pooled under my shallow skin in urgent, anemic repair.

Follow-through

Repetitive noise--the dust that won't let me sleep, like bushy-tailed exhaustion, wide awake sleep-thrashes and the barrage of nameless voices, earnest in pay, telling me that I'm too fat, my skin too blotchy, my food dull.

I can never be anorexic enough.

Insomnia for the self-analytic that never works, for the teeth that grind and slide around a tongue that writhes--swollen and pasty from dehydration.

Earlier I stacked my chipped china for guests I never entertain. I have a list of things I never entertain, like __________ and the notion of reliability.

I've redeemed myself--packed guilt and skeletons in boxes taped and stored in the hall closet. The one in which you'd expect to find dismembered bodies and dead cats. Splintered floors that have never been intentionally stained, and a trap door eerie in its storage capacity. I dropped those boxes (labeled 'winter clothes') on the floor and buried them under extraneous cables/cords, a folding chair, then two, and fabric I never got around to stitching.

Fall of Rome

I'm surrounded by boxes--by pieces of myself packaged away, somehow too close to touch.

I can recall things we've said to each other--conversations in bits and pieces from years ago, and that's how I know you now. Bits and pieces.

I know you sleep out of necessity.

"Why do we have mustard?"

"It's Steven's."

"He comes over here?"

"Sometimes."

"Enough to keep mustard in our fridge?"

"He wanted a sandwich."

"Doesn't he have mustard at home?"

"He has a lot of things at home."

"Does she know?"

"No. Not that I know of."

"I hate mustard."

"Me, too."

A slow leak.

We drove roads that carved through fields of wheat grass. I mistook farmers' lights for Stars of David. Stars like Jesus.

He gripped my left hand over the gear shift.

"Think you can find first?"

The car coasted as he pressed the clutch. I shifted. "No, that's third." He held my hand tight, but I carried the weight. I pushed into first.

"Good job. Second." I pulled back. The fields to our right were black with midnight and grass. Fireflies like stars.

I rolled down my window as he pressed the clutch again.
"Third."

I shifted back to first and we stalled.

A herd of doe dotted the field to our left. They stared at us--half-frightened, half-perplexed.

No. Never. No. Never. No. Never.

He thinks very little of me, of little me. The worst catch--symbiotic drain. I think of hosts and parasites and wonder why there has to be a difference.

"Not tonight, dear."

The Caronlinas, the temperate climate. I wasn't expecting it to be this cold. I packed just one pair of jeans, a dress that I had dyed myself (because the original color washed me out), tattered canvas shoes. He grips the steering wheel and his protruding knuckles stretch his skin. Years of finger play. Minstrelsy.

Not. Tonight. Dear.

My unhappiness cries wolves from the woods; they peek from behind trunks and limbs, peering me with familiar eyes before returning to the hunt. I never expected to see gray in these parts. I never expect. He said my curse is that I'm underwhelmed by everything.

Not. Tonight.

My soles have been walked bald. Stripped of practicality, they slip along the fibers of the floor mat. Nothing is comfortable. I'm not pragmatic like he is. I can't color within the lines and he pointed that out once, years and years ago, when I stayed home sick and colored pages of thick black lines for him. Because I missed him. He pointed that out.

Dear. Not.

What's not? What not is there that takes the place of a

Tonight. Dear.

Of a foggy windshield: humid without; chilly within.

He presses his pen into my paper flesh--blotting ink, mocking my veins.

He, "Never mind."
I, "Never will."

A tall drink of water; I'm parched. The ink blotches sheets of paper, like stained cotton beneath a windowsill. His curtains tangle over our web of legs that lack motivation. A lazy arm drapes over my deflated chest, and I think of erasing whole alphabets.

The wind lends a drying hand to the creases behind my knees as I'm scooped by his arms--branded and too large for my grip.

I told him about taping my keys--duct, electrical, masking--because I have difficulties getting in. I can't match proper key to proper lock, and this is supposed to be home.