The Delaware Guardian

I catalog battle wounds,
the language of imprecation.
I live in the river,
the old water splitting the city:
us/them.
They chug along,
lacerating my back,
breaking tides.
Lights out, I tidy their secrets,
the oxidate damage
fluid beneath the temperate air.
Murky flow,
conceal the dead.

My gratitude and apologies sprinkled like kisses over your palms,
like the ones I wish you'd steal from my lips.
My love is the poem you say I don't edit enough.
These aren't the good pages.

How sloppy my letters have become--premature ink botch.
I used to leave things out.
I used to invent history.

I'm becoming nocturnal. The unconscious gaps in my day. I spend hours recalling snapshots of a previous night, the shadows thrown against the white wall--curves in the veil, angles in the flesh. Symbiotic rhythm. I practice my technique and fantasize the execution.

Old love letters

They left us a paved lot as empty and flatlined as your hands are cold. "I thought I killed you." All the things I love. All the things I hate. All the things I wish I never knew. Pierrot--I thought I--what's the word I'm groping for--

The Corrosive Agent

When the pipes freeze we'll drink the cadence--clanking rusty heart. As I dig through waste to feed the gnarled life in my belly I'll remind you that I can't afford to be warmer. Maggots feast and turn to flies; they know nothing of gratitude.

There are parts of us that continue growing long after we've died,
the parts that stay warm as our skin petrifies over our bones.

We never mastered the timing.

The Hope Chest

Last night I roused restlessly, feeling a vexing tickle from the prospect of a son, awakening too soon and unable to return to my careless sleep state. I inched closer to my darling-dear and snaked my arms over his unconscious body, pressing my chest to his back, my sore breasts comforted by his warmth. Between my legs, my hands, and my shoulders I smell like him--not quite stable, but the musk of wanting temperate births and deaths to play house in our hope chest; blankets for our unnamed/ungendered baby, our parents' blessings.

"Something will happen and you'll write about it."

The constant droning hum of a fan. The pre-dawn stillness that blankets everywhere dawn reaches--even the stuffy apartment where the view is eye level with similar tenements. Light misty rain slickening the sidewalk. His sleep-breaths and his sand-colored body crooked like a drooping sunflower.

Absolutely nothing happened and I wrote about it.

Conversations with Ellie

This hickey ruined my life.

What's the term for a wife whose husband is in jail? I told my mom how much I missed you yesterday.

I live with this guy Louis. This guy Pete. I live in a twin. My days. I wish I had a weight contract. I'd be so fat. How to make bombs, your napalm--Styrofoam and gasoline.

Mow lawns. Edge ivy. Weed.

My summer/winter sentiments: sex on the reg. I'm very naturally a jealous person.

I'll tell you why I don't have much faith. You have to look mature. Sounds like something I'd hate.

At summer's end I count my new scars: mosquito-scabs and sticky-grass lashes, the wounds overlooked and improperly healed. Funny how hurts don't pain in the warmth. I paint sunshine on my toes and carry the midnight in my hands.

I no longer speak of bruises or the dresses that conceal them. I never understood how I got them, so I was never one to explain. I speak now of rain and the turning leaves, my marriage bed and complacency; cycle/recycle.

I don't speak of dead-mistakes. I pray for the wind to kick up and spread the names of the dead like rumors about the streets--the only act of levitation an ash can hope for.

My voice is changing.

The rain pelts the bleeding leaves like pebbles hitting wet leather. The leaves too will fall like rain and cover the ground with their last breaths. Our skin thickens, growing stoic against the cold. In the spring we'll awaken covered in mud and forget that a part of us had ever died.

No effort to the war(s); consumerism in tact, no rations or steel sacrifice or League of Their Own--no longer taking a village. The soldiers can play video games and we can watch reality television and talk shit about celebrity divorces and Michael Jackson died last week, Michael Jackson died three weeks ago, Michael Jackson died two months ago. Routine uninterrupted save for a seventeen second breaking news story: a local man killed in Iraq-istan, a neighbor says it's a shame, he was such a nice guy and a good father--cut to shot of a flag or a memorial wreath--and next, how to save fat while losing money. The magnetic ribbon on a Jeep Liberty or Patriot, a minivan or some such status quo: support support support never forgotten do not forget these colors don't run but they sure do fade. Face to face with a soldier in civilian clothes a mother drops to her knees thanking excessively, piously, self-satisfactorily, self-gratifying, self-help-yourself-sleep-at-night: a million thanks, a million better-you-than-mes, a million I-pray-never-my-child.

Syncope

We sit on the porch and watch the trees smolder into red yellow orange heatless flames, discharging the shriveled members collecting as brittle ash on the ground. The cessation of the nocturnal songs reverberating against our skin leaves behind a silence that makes our hearts beat slower, our glowing skin turns to pale marble.

We know it's our last goodbye and we get over it.

I dreamt that I was fucking myself rather unsuccessfully. A disgusting joke.