On fate

I asked someone who knows me very well if he believes in fate. He said no, and I immediately stopped all beliefs in fate. If I kissed your knuckles, that was me and not fate. Tickling your sides till you threw me off the bed and bruised my thigh yellow-green and gray--this was us relatively and not inextricably.

It's impossible to tell how exhausted a language is. I've spent years on a single letter. They have names and I sing them into the wind. Long gone and sing-songy. They're erosive elements that wear down my teeth, but that was me not knowing. You can say you're sorry, but the wind gathers the names.

Year of the ox

Every day the damp air knocks the wind out of me. We were a late winter bloom. Something magnetic in the air says yes, says I wanted to be kept, says you should've known. If I had a lime green taffy it would taste like the first time I wanted to kiss you, the first time I was sure of it. I took to talking to brown bottles of wheat ale, and they don't laugh at my jokes. They taste like you, metallic and chilled. They smell like the yawning blue dawn. If I had enough of them to clank together, they'd be the space heater warming my cheeks. If I had enough of them I would find this all very hilarious.

Last year my dad said, "this is your year." Year of running and lunatic cackles. I drew a line of dark purple pastel down the county; it separates the midnight from all the ground we stood on. It makes iridescent all the snow I brushed off my boots. I did silly things. I lived and died, but I did alright. I loved and left, but that's alright.

The Pleiades laughed at us uncontrollably. You said, "It's a cluster-fuck" and I smiled because I got it. I said, "In Japan they call it Subaru, like the car." But you were looking at me and not it, and I was already gone.

Some day I'll tell you everything. How the waters advanced through the trees and approached us in our sleep. How we drowned with our heads above water. Soot can seep in through your fingernails and toenails and other vulnerabilities. Your own blood carries it like stumbling stones and deposits it into your stomach. This is called fluvial transport. It's not enough to make you sink, but your stomach doesn't know that.

There's a lot a gut doesn't know.

We couldn't make waters recede or navigate currents. The dip-gushes bubbling terra-cotta and gray through tangled thickets of ugly nameless things that annually bloom unremarkably.

I could tell you a thing or several about poor circulation. This happens when your blood-grain is cobble-course. Another way of putting it: your feet think they're walking on gravel. The blood itself changes color depending on its depth. We could all be anemic depending on our depth. We could be dumb, deaf, or blind depending on how we cross paths. We walk dead in our mothers' shoes, damned to love too late and in absurd quantities.

A bad habit. People are asking.
They bring up your name.
I've always silently ushered you.
I felt guilty.
Christmas day, midnight,
wide awake in neighborhood bars.

You could list these things that never did you any good:
harsh chord analogies for loneliness or oneness,
yellow paint and purple shirts, bare mattress,
frost-bitten liquor,
ka cera, the sweetest sobriquets,
a month of summer rain
and the one or two color-ribbons it produced,
bottle caps and the Pleiades Cluster,
your shock at realizations long overdue.
You could sink to the bottom of the sea,
you're as heavy as stone.

The Blood Letters (my final portfolio)

1.

Arthritic hands, laced and limbless, perch the fog.
Blackbird mutters about the hollow men
plagued by syntax. The plagues come in waves.

The wind rattles with shells of brilliance
that cease to live up to mentioning.
Blackbird follows me, shouting loss, failure, loss.

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


2.

The regression of my voice is nothing new to say,
like the unsupportive dress caught between my legs.
The regret of my tongue is nothing new.
I sleep like a ruin.


3.

The shrapnel—the was, the after,
the me-not-you,
splitting hairs like tattered shoes.
It’s something of an anachronism,

running marathons over cratered faces.
He fell deaf, supine,
gutted ink bottle,
and I taciturn.

See that shadow?
substratum of my legs.
It’s not yours.
I knifed my tongue into a dull chord.


4.

He marked the fall of a slaughter on his arm,
tombstone flesh honoring the stone-gray eyes
like moons the gods didn’t want anymore.
Cross-hatched egg tangled my dress
—a push, and my chest caved.


5.

Sparrow teases the device of forgetting
camel-lashes thick like the fingers that framed my face,

or legs treading indifferent plateaus,
large ribbons of ink veiling 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.

The innocent thrust from my body,
like lungs deflating.
My birth is weak.

Aber mich, Sparrow,
I am blank.


6.

Buzz clippers resonate louder, deeper than bombs,
and sharper than lonesome brick walls
jutting my knee caps.

My pen broke; it stuttered blot-blobs over thin greens,
continuous exhales under blue-black splatter.
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.

7.

A blood splotch blooms over
incendiary match peeling 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.

The Blackbird, the Sparrow
sparking steel dragged through the street.
Not the best metal, like fingernails
flaking, chipping. Mine belong to the days
when the sky never caught fire—
this drum never caught—


9.

My lost blood survives in turning graves.
The mountain spindrift and restless frost-blue sighs
neutralizing the ash and cinder smoldering,
the ocher drum of a rusted city.

This is the winter flaking onto our faces in quiet mockery.
We survive as statues abused by the elements:
in the spring we’ll awaken covered in mud
and forget that a part of us had ever died.


10.

He never speaks of sunset—
the hourglass dripping grenadine and lavender,
or the Autumn blooming naked ladies
with blown-back heads,
deep purple lips. He never craves color.

I’m the well dug straight down into the mountain-bowels,
opaque water sun-speckled.
Organic and stagnant,
I’m all gold and black pearls.