ø

New blog

2012-02-16T11:02:00.001-05:00

catsandpoetry.wordpress.org

2010-08-10T12:05:00.002-04:00

You're waiting for me to speak to old facts.

2010-08-10T01:21:00.001-04:00

I have 2 teenagers myself.
I try to disregard them as much as possible.
Text me when you’re 30.

When I was 9 years old, I was a creative kid.
Burning Hot Wheels in the backyard with my friend.
I was lucky to have a mother who believed in The Plan.

The moral and ethical implications of Larry's character

2010-07-23T12:10:00.004-04:00

1.

They don't need the pills; they don't need the stuff.
You get 4 hour erections? I don't.
A ridiculous thing.
So awful to everybody.
I must've taken a nap during your part.

Something more important than the money--
really hurting somebody--
shows they really loved each other.
How could he not know she got implants?

2.

I grew up in the Bible Belt.
I don't even know a good cuss word.
Well, now that I'm married I know a few.
I once performed in a Synagogue,
and I died a death.

3.

We're in the anti-chamber.
My mother is in the next room,
laid out,
very gorgeous
like they always are after they die.
You have a career, you have a boyfriend,
and now you have a dead mother.
Hates his mother.
That would be considered the don't
except I laughed.
Don't try to out-do the family's grief.

4.

We don't just believe in God,
we believe in everything.
Vampires. Leprechauns. Big Foot.
The Exorcist is a documentary.
That happened to your auntie.

5.

We look like the last two minutes of It's a Small World.

2010-07-21T11:42:00.009-04:00

I could tell you something to make this ok, to take away the oh-fuck-what-have-I-done. There are little worlds, like bubbles in honey, sweet and nostalgic amber. You can never reach those. They'll crystallize and lose their urgency, like photos of people I just had to take, just had to document their souls somehow tangibly. They crystallize; now I can't remember their names.

Chasing after a firetruck during the first torrential downpour of the season I thought,

this isn't my life wake up wake up wake up.

I can never reach that.

I know a guy who likes firetrucks; he's far away, like things I've never finished. Little worlds like honey. He told me you can cut anything apart. There's nothing in me to cut, but

when I sleep I feel I could wake up in a thousand pieces.

He's somewhere in the woods, and I'm in the city not wanting to be in the city anymore. Someday our paths will diverge, and I'll be left with all his old beer caps. We'll be stuck in thick amber no longer breathing.

2010-07-16T22:54:00.001-04:00

I said my bones are splintering driftwood,

you said, no stop that's not true.

2010-07-11T23:59:00.001-04:00

where were you where were you where was i

2010-07-04T13:40:00.002-04:00

We can't live like this, but we can't seem to die either.

Car talk

2010-06-28T11:45:00.005-04:00

1.

People have been drowning in those rivers lately. I don't know why you would swim somewhere you could drown, and I've never known anyone who drowned, at least not in a river.

2.

Haven't I paid my dues? Bleeding all over the place,
what do people say?
like a stuck pig.
That's gruesome. That's why I don't eat meat.
That and hazard pay.

3.

I spent all morning reading the myspace profile of a dead guy,
"last thoughts." Not knowing he was friends with his murderer and he fucked her. Maybe crimes of passion. His status still says, "is stitious."

4.

I could've saved more. If I don't write things down I'll forget. I forget I've been to Virginia and that I slept there for days. I forget what it looked like to lose my virginity, but I remember leaving my shirt behind when I hurried out at 3am.

5.

I wish I lived underwater. I'm a what-can-I-do-really kind of girl.

6.

weird that parents sleep naked

7.

[Inaudible]
citing irreconcilable differences,
but I always thought of it as a domestic plague.

2010-06-18T14:45:00.007-04:00

We fall in ---- at the most inappropriate times.

You jump on planes, over oceans.

This feels something like having my veins tugged.

Stretched out, snapping back.

Tangling varicose.

Rivers splitting your country.

My body is nonsense.

2010-06-15T13:02:00.001-04:00

We don't ask questions.

2010-06-12T12:05:00.003-04:00

Dear Desert,

You've coarsely eroded

my fingers and lips,

my heavy skin,

pitting my bones--

I drowned

somewhere near Iskandariyya--

for the sake of making a point:

I am not your dusty child,

and this tawny trophy

you pulled from your dirt

and gave to me,

well, you're taking it back.

Egypt

2010-06-11T00:28:00.005-04:00

We've gotten by with less.

That is to say,

we've drifted continentally.

Somehow we're united by air.

I said, isn't it funny how 'united' and 'untied' are just a mistake apart,

and you said, let's not make this emotional.

The ocean is a nauseating swell. Something between us.

The biggest part of you, like the Semitic cursive I compared to

tangling seaweed.

A language stuck between my toes.

You'll speak it to me if I beg,

and I beg,

so you curse me

with curled tongue,

saying I only want what I can't have,

and I find it incredibly romantic.

2010-04-22T13:05:00.004-04:00

He kept me sour on his skin, like a dog

in heat, like a ravaged girl.

I got him with knives,

needles; he got me with sulfur and fire.

2010-04-03T10:56:00.003-04:00

Just to be safe, we separated into a thousand pieces and never called home.

2010-03-25T17:39:00.002-04:00

1. I've burned many tongues.

2. I wander the house in the dark.

3. I laugh and laugh and laugh.

2010-03-22T23:40:00.001-04:00

I'm losing my touch.

2010-03-22T23:32:00.007-04:00

Flood waters churned chocolate milk; the trees drank up, over drank, drowned; the telephone poles toppled, but didn't drown, and the wires snapped from the poles, wind-whipped and furious. Electricity surging through the streets made us feel kinetic until morning when the firemen put everything back in proper order. Sporadically in his bed are wet spots that could be from one of four places. He changed the clocks, placed buckets to catch drips, dropped quarters into jars.

2010-03-16T00:42:00.010-04:00

The dream you had about running your tongue across your teeth and one-by-one they fell out--it wasn't real, but when you were patrolling quiet streets and found teeth mixed with gravel like common rocks you had the fleeting thought that they might be yours, and you began counting your teeth with your tongue.

In New Mexico I found a tooth in a ditch near where a man cut another man's head off with a meat cleaver.

[Cut is probably the wrong word. Reports say the cleaver was dull, and his accomplices say he struggled to get the damn thing off, and that they were scared shitless, and that the guy wasn't beheaded all the way, but beheaded enough, so "hacked" is probably a better word.]

I kicked the tooth toward a spot where it looked like he might've died, if it was his tooth at all. A friend told me that in Albuquerque you can get meth, blood, and semen by the bucket-full.

2010-03-01T23:13:00.004-05:00

The great ironies of war are like digging through vapor. I can't explain how, but there's this: baby's breath is slow to die, and when it dies it still looks alive.

The citadel will crumble into tiny yellow flowers. The hero-worshipers will dissipate like blue smoke, and the half-helmets, bits and stone will erode vaguely in sandstorms and become old teeth. This is much like saying, "I'm fine". This is how ruins are made. This is, it's hard to say where home is, and when he runs his legs feel like giving out but he doesn't necessarily feel a thing.

His sleep is an empty cigarette carton--stale and flimsy. He shifts tectonically, grinds his teeth and dreams of desert gravel. There was something about body bombs, blood jams spit, spit on blood?

but they're crumbs of a language I never spoke.

2010-02-04T23:59:00.005-05:00

There are these things called alluvial fans. They occur when a river gets stumbling drunk and deposits/blows/ralphs its insides at the feet of its unrequited love--the delta. In this regard, the delta expects it. The delta exists for it. There aren't many things for which they exist mutually. You say they can't be what they've always been, but symbiosis is all they know. In this regard I'm wrong because alluvial fans occur when the river abruptly decreases in velocity, or even stops, causing silt and sediment to pile up in said love's mouth which is a ravine, you say, and not a delta. The difference gouges deep. For the sake of argument, I'm the river and you're the ravine, and I've been dammed, but this isn't funny to you.

On fate

2010-01-26T22:40:00.009-05:00

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

2010-01-26T12:43:00.007-05:00

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.

2010-01-26T12:20:00.003-05:00

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.

2010-01-24T22:21:00.011-05:00

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.

2010-01-18T00:01:00.002-05:00

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.

2010-01-14T20:07:00.008-05:00

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)

2010-01-08T19:50:00.003-05:00

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.

A poem about my uterus

2009-12-15T22:59:00.003-05:00

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

2009-12-11T00:59:00.006-05:00

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.

2009-12-10T12:05:00.000-05:00

I'm changing things.

2009-12-07T15:34:00.002-05:00

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.

2009-12-06T19:10:00.005-05:00

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

2009-11-21T21:51:00.002-05:00

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.

2009-11-13T17:52:00.002-05:00

Hike over the war; the machines look like crumbs.

2009-11-13T16:50:00.007-05:00

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.

2009-11-13T16:39:00.007-05:00

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

2009-11-13T15:35:00.009-05:00

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.

2009-11-11T18:28:00.003-05:00

My hands are heavy.

Autumnal Nadir

2009-10-18T11:35:00.018-04:00

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

2009-10-12T23:09:00.004-04:00

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

2009-10-11T19:54:00.007-04:00

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.

2009-10-02T15:19:00.002-04:00

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

2009-09-28T20:57:00.012-04:00

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.

2009-09-27T16:10:00.003-04:00

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.

2009-09-27T16:09:00.007-04:00

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

2009-09-24T17:10:00.003-04:00

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

2009-09-24T00:15:00.006-04:00

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

2009-09-24T00:01:00.004-04:00

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.

2009-09-16T20:20:00.004-04:00

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

2009-09-16T20:02:00.006-04:00

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

2009-09-14T16:19:00.009-04:00

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.

2009-09-14T16:17:00.001-04:00

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.

2009-09-11T18:31:00.002-04:00

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.

2009-09-10T22:14:00.002-04:00

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.

2009-09-09T10:52:00.003-04:00

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

2009-09-09T10:31:00.009-04:00

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.

2009-09-08T19:30:00.000-04:00

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

2009-08-29T21:12:00.000-04:00

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

Vector

2009-07-05T22:58:00.007-04:00

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.

2009-06-22T21:15:00.003-04:00

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.

2009-05-29T21:24:00.005-04:00

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."

2009-05-05T21:17:00.002-04:00

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

2009-04-14T22:50:00.001-04:00

My hands smell like blood.

2009-04-14T00:08:00.000-04:00

Leave it alone.

2009-04-13T22:49:00.004-04:00

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.

2009-04-07T09:09:00.002-04:00

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.

2009-04-03T23:05:00.000-04:00

Note to self: I thought you wanted to starve.

2009-03-30T21:44:00.001-04:00

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

2009-03-23T21:10:00.007-04:00

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.

2009-03-22T23:22:00.001-04:00

Better.

2009-03-17T22:51:00.001-04:00

It's my own fucking fault.

2009-03-08T22:37:00.004-04:00

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

2009-03-02T22:31:00.006-05:00

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

2009-03-02T22:25:00.002-05:00

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.

2009-03-02T20:09:00.003-05:00

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.

2009-03-02T20:03:00.006-05:00

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.

2009-02-24T21:58:00.001-05:00

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

2009-02-24T21:21:00.004-05:00

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.

2009-02-13T21:29:00.001-05:00

Lars, I never cared for Japan.

2009-01-17T23:28:00.003-05:00

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.

2008-12-13T00:02:00.002-05:00

The boy from sand and dry wind - a crab or camel - saturates and dissolves; the corrosive agent, the mark slithering in water. I'm not convinced one must do as the snake does.

2008-12-13T00:00:00.003-05:00

I bled out
jaw tight, locked
the glory holes - tied up/out of commission
with apparent purpose--an inherent disservice.

My ink dries while waiting for things to happen.
I no longer name names. Use'less Is.

2008-09-16T08:38:00.002-04:00

The time that has passed between languages,
the correlation to lovers.

I've burned entire alphabets.

Al Iskandariyah

2008-09-16T08:34:00.002-04:00

He bled my chest dry;
every drop a mile--6 thousand--
pooling at my feet,
running into tributaries of denile.
I crackle like drip dry creek beds;
these wasted intricacies.

2008-05-12T20:20:00.002-04:00

Maybe I search through old photographs to see where everyone was looking. I found one of my mother in her (vegetable) garden, shielding her eyes from the sun, soil smudged on her brow. She left before the plants came to bear.

Her senior portrait inscribed to my dad:

Remember. Remember. Remember.

Don't forget me.

2008-05-08T00:17:00.001-04:00

I can't remember what I wanted to say.

Censorship?

No, this is all wrong.

2008-04-11T00:33:00.004-04:00

His chest panels open/close. I withhold his breath, his voice dangling over my throat, teasing sound.

I pluck my chords--out of tune, my voice cracks, fails.

2008-04-10T21:17:00.000-04:00

My restlessness chases the warmth.

2008-04-10T20:54:00.005-04:00

I tie my tongue into knots--the wrong words. On the couch, I curl into myself, her knitting needles click to heartbeat time; she tells me it's just my nerves. We blamed the thaw and all of its agitated inconstancies--fickle breeze tangled in my hair. The difference between the air and my skin. I tapped my finger in rhythm with her needles.

2008-03-31T23:57:00.009-04:00

We walked through midnight soaked fields, through wheat grass teasing the backs of our knees to feel the cricket songs reverberate against our skin. I showed him how I navigate the sky--each constellation a former love: the Queen, the Hunter. He apologized for the burning spheres, for my loss of language. His lungs, fingers, eyelashes will become dotted blue traces, pin-point pricks on my character--my navigation. Kings will keep my guard, and I will sleep soundly beneath his face.

2008-03-31T23:12:00.003-04:00

She lifted the blankets, gesturing for me to crawl in. I curled against her warmth, pressed my lips to her shoulder, wondered if I was born of restlessness.

She explained different levels of seraphim; I listened, feigned belief in effort to ~~please~~ belong inside of her sheltered walls. She said "cherubim" and I remembered when she didn't have breasts and I felt closer to her heart. She asked about my day and it was the only way she was a part of it.

2008-03-26T22:09:00.003-04:00

I track my days with tiny pink pills. The weeks are left as ribbons tangling between blue lines--a tired litany, an escape through my refusal to acknowledge his wars in/away from home. His face is that of the mother he hates; his voice molded by her inadequacies and haste.

2008-03-26T18:50:00.001-04:00

Ich bin, aber ich kann nicht.

2008-03-23T23:36:00.003-04:00

I watched him sleep, wondering which parts came from long-forgotten gods; wondering if anything I felt for him would translate so well into black and white. I could only form the words that would close his chest.

2008-03-18T23:50:00.001-04:00

The wires snapped from their poles--
wind-whipped and furious.

2008-03-18T00:21:00.001-04:00

I stopped sleeping to make sure the days come and go as planned:

31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 31, 30, 31, 30.

275.

2008-02-26T01:15:00.002-05:00

The plucking distance stretching tight, tugging my skin and veins, thinning my blood. I retain my heart in bits and pieces, shipping the rest like postcards--vague and insufficient. I sign my name with pens stolen from motel lobbies; a running travelogue of cautious goodbyes and eggshells.

My pangs of longing are rife with bad timing.

Appomatox?

2008-02-26T01:14:00.001-05:00

I want to be born of the River Fog and move silently through the night; to be a whisper upon the water, harboring secrets--my calm reflection.

North Carolina

2008-02-19T22:34:00.003-05:00

My mother didn't know she was driving the wrong way--north to Boston, to a psychic fair/convention to ask about her grandmother (deceased), me (alive), and my brother (?). I told her I was going south to give R----- my blessing to kill people who want to kill him. To give him my goodbyes and my blessing to live or die.