A poem about my uterus

I carry an empty gourd
where inherent purpose should be.
It rattles dry seeds to my arrhythmic pace,
inside its thin shell, yellow-white, bubbly-brown.
I fill it with froth from the jealous sea,
my cave of stone where late blossoms sleep.

D'Anjou

I'm in bed with a pear,
freckled, green, and too cold for my teeth,
fragrant, sweet, and bottom heavy
just like me.

It sits like a gift,
contours concaving egg-crate foam.
Little pear holds its chill.
Sexy fruit blushes;

when it's warm I'll eat it,
regretting the canine tears into its skin,
juice-drip down my chin.
Little pear exists to be consumed.

I'm changing things.

The frail fringe is encased with ice,
chiming tinkles of glass.
Mill it over,
sifting out habit dust and nuisance particles,
tiny crystals of things you don't want to carry anymore.
They powder off like snow from a tugged branch.

He gravitated to me because he didn't believe in god. Because he could blaspheme in two languages. Because I am sacrilege.

Flooding in NJ

Lovely day for an ice-gray deluge,
for knee-deep pins and needles
and erosion.
Sand is the ugly dust--what difference does it make?
Stupid shit.

Hike over the war; the machines look like crumbs.

I should have said something.
Touching your thigh.
I did not handle that as well as I should have.
I could have gone further and said something sooner.
Sharing the blame.
I wanted to crumble.
Another title that doesn't belong to me.

You know I'm feeling so generous today.
I love to play games.

Maybe it’s not interesting to you to be part of history.

That’s the way I was.

Running and book in the evening.

You’re not that guy anymore.

You always think you’re that guy,

molded by age.

Now people know.

Outside in the courtyard, looking for the moon.

We all gave up because we couldn’t find her.

Stop hiding, it’s just a game.

In the garden with Martha

Do you want really wild looking things?

A beautiful photograph. I want them right by me.

The principle of a lollipop,

they'll come back and back,

the trumpets of lovely regalia.

Autumn blooming naked ladies,

no leaves,

no nothing,

blown-back heads,

deep purple lips.

Daffodil will do it best.
Nothing you do can stop this thing flowering.

Crocus, these easy things
Martha planted and planted.
All the lillies. Prepared the bed.

Anemones, sunny slopes.

Young gardener walked the property.

Casablanca, high fragrance, upward scales

stalking, bone-meal and roots.

My hands are heavy.

Autumnal Nadir

I know your vertebrae,
the character of your flesh and freckles.
I've watched you sleep
and saw your eyes as Venus traps,
beautiful lashes
that waited to consume
the part of me
that equated to nagging/useless insects.
If I tilted my head,
they smiled at me.

Pretending we both died,
my tongue will forget
about the curl and throat.
I could shed my years like winter coats,
taunting the frost.

Thanksgiving

Pouncing on it like a wild dog,
your mother’s hand with a fork.

Don’t be the host.
We want you to dress just like her.

Occasionally he just doesn’t pay attention; maybe he doesn’t get enough sleep.
My grandpa has pictures of me in diapers.
A lot of us have pictures of us in diapers.

What’s amazing about that guy is his ears—they’re like satellite dishes.
He doesn’t produce much odor.
I’m going to have to put plastic on my furniture.
Give him the bottle, Ellen. I have some Wild Turkey left.

Back

They share your cigarettes from block to block
around the city heart.
My conciliatory laughs, wishing I smoked
so I could subtly/casually make my claim
with spit and carcinogen.
Our amends leak slowly like bruises.

My frustration with snow is I can never keep it off my boots
when it's falling and I'm traipsing through,
and it's time to shut down for the night,
for the cold,
for all of hibernate life.
Snow's frustration with me is I'm never settled.

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.

You're a fox, goodnight.
You're a jay hawk, sleep tight.

Vector

Their twilight missions are campaigns against flesh.
One after another; two, then half a dozen
seeking my vulnerabilities.
Smoke, fire, chemical warfare resistant; they persist
in endless pricks blemishing my skin.
My arms and feet as nectar feeders,
I am their meal intoxicant.
I have the sweet blood.

There's something about pre-apocalyptic air and the stirrings of war that you'll never understand until the blood settles and dries.

Cause and effect.

The fading ebony and egg-creme ivory feel stiff like her arthritic fingers. The hammers and dull chords with notes sunk southward--vapid and unanswered, such are the words that never came. The boy with the almond eyes pleads with the old woman to play his favorite tune--an airy, innocent jingle. She sits in her chair, rocking and rhythmically rubbing her knees, back and forth creaking the floorboards. "The key players are dead."

My throat has become swollen and scratched- a sure sign that I've said the wrong things.

My hands smell like blood.

Leave it alone.

I wanted a yes/no answer, but settled for labeless bottles of impulse and restless sleep. My voice and sensibility left in a fruit bowl full of keys by the front door. A girl asked me where I lay my head at night, unaware she had proven a point about the difference between something and nothing; between temperate air and the moon rising; what I've done and who I'm becoming.

Come Sunday I'm tethered back home to begin something of a repair. My body, thirsting and bruised, shrinks and stands to be bonier. I pluck and tap my ribs like the tuneless piano I tickled then had sex on. I prayed the wind would gather my bones when I'm scattered about the streets.

My father announced at dinner that he had given up on me each night around the 4am hour.

I skipped a page in an effort to be a better friend/daughter/mother. I must have failed feigned happiness, lost my voice. My mother's price is beyond her means, and I wonder if material is in my blood. Her husband drinks poison, but never enough.

That's not me. I stitched my grandmother's aprons. Her thumbs carried too much water to fit in the thimbles.

Note to self: I thought you wanted to starve.

I am neither the doctor's wife nor the fiddler's play thing.

In ten years, I'll understand how the river carved me; how it moldered my bones into pebbles and passed me along aimlessly. My sedentary layers still in his bed, feeling only an undeniable, inevitable stirring.

Better.

It's my own fucking fault.

My life in 24 year increments, soon to be 48, then 72, and I'll stop after 96 because my heart breaks too much.

I'm torn in the same ways he is: half across and down the middle. The lines drawn are definitive and angular like the jaw against which I pressed my lips. The holes in my day are the deep eyes that watched me sleep.

I sleep through the sky flaking apart, coating the roads with diamond dust. Beneath blankets, my empty hands dream in the day and shoot in the dark.

November after Afghanistan

The days he's home are the quietest. My voice tucked in a box, slipped under my bed; I hear it dancing as I fall asleep at night. He sleeps through most days, stirring at 3am because he's not heroic enough, or maybe not the right kind. The deer hunters cap and pop buck shots in the field out back, sinking his stomach before he realizes he’s here and not there.

Autumn gusts leave him rattled, and during the day I gather sticks around the yard--weak arms snapped from their body.

Inevitably, they will be strategized into the stove.

I can no longer speak to him directly. I tend now to forget that words have two meanings: what I intend to show; what I wish to say. Instead, I craft comfort for voiceless necks. The crochet hook taps against my ring, a Morse Code clicking single stitch.

Hook/chain: your war wounds are showing.

Speaking solely of the restlessness I've found in blank bottles on a shelf in the basement; of emptying those bottles into the cold creek overflowing, and of the wind pushing me home.

A delicate wave of split skin, a scabbed gape over my thumb's knuckle; my littlest one drew my blood. She would no doubt shred my skin to lace before licking each wound--tenderly, but not so much apologetically. In the mornings, she displays something of graciousness and need. At night, she runs along the edge of the woods, chasing the sound of her own foot steps.

The day pales, my love and sorrow. My breaths are shallow. I hardly breathe at all.

The home that no longer speaks to me keeps his camel eyes shut, keeps me from sleeping. My key inside unforgiving locks and everything I need. I sit in the stiff grass, in the meager shadow of our stunted dogwood. The home that ignores me because I left hastily, damning me with his silence. I think about laying in bed, milky in the glow of the streetlamp, tracing the dance of light and shadow over my hips, over the trail of discolored skin leading from my navel; of being housed and held against a beating heat source; of unresponsive blinds gusting open, a sign of life and I'm okay.

Lars, I never cared for Japan.

I've been chewing on the corner of my lip for days, pondering the logistics of death/dying, on being raised by wolves and stoically ignoring the cold.

In the spring, I'll burn old words to trigger the thaw.