The Great Entrance
Angry bloom of purple
skin wrapped in
gossamer
gauze soaked, human seran
wrap with an expiration date
I come from
the repeated
rupture like a
hole in a hose
faucet turned to
flooding is that a
setting?
Usher in the future
generations of shuffling
feet
Before childhood
comes the inevitable
rip
open clock never
closed lunar sore of
beginnings torn apart
like a t-shirt over a
too-big chest
I was safe inside the
belly of a chipmunk
once
I did not want to be
drawn out of the
sack it was a pain
I can’t remember
The suction sound
pulling tendrils of
hair from a clogged
drain Oh, suction
sound popular
plumbing song
Dear God, please be
kind to this bloody
thumb thrusting itself
out and into the grease
of morning
Light filters through the
glass lamp on the hospital
table there is only sweat
and crying
I pat my silent, empty
spot the minutes stick
on my fingers
like over chewed chewing
gum or too much sex
Praise the expected
hierarchy of birthing
trauma
cavern of unspent
years praise the
children that slide
down like dirty rain
on angry purple skin.
Sitting in the Grass
Why didn’t I cry
when my grandmother
died?
Did I hate her, want her
to drown in the bathtub upstairs?
Do I miss the sound of
her 50s mentality
silence?
Who gave birth to the concept of
silence? What drugs were they on?
Was the inventor
a housewife?
Did she wake up before
dawn to roll on a fresh
coat of paint?
Did she slide
back into bed, close heavy
lidded eyes
just before the alarm ticked eight?
Do the train tracks behind
Grandmother’s house ever close their
parallel legs?
Do they tire of being an in-between body,
of bearing so much weight?
Do I sit here now singing hymns in a church pew,
or am I somewhere else?
Is the subtle crook of my black clad elbow,
the subtle crook of my black clad elbow
or an empty house?
Do I wear her funeral like a mask
of expressionless glue?
Do I drape her death around my shoulders
when the pastor bites his lip?
Do I want to bite
the pastor’s lip?
After the ceremony, why do I dig a six foot hole
and toss my baby teeth in?
Do I imagine those yellowing keys
are seeds of my mouth?
Do I hope for my own tree to
climb? Do I want to burn it all
down?
Are the static voices pushing through the telephone my parents?
Can they tell me the history of hunger?
Will they ever stop the pattern passed down to them
from sweaty thigh to sweaty thigh?
Lesson On Breathing
Find me
in the
seams
of all
broken
things
kept silent
in a drawer
of the sea
floating fragments
char colors
of indignant
waves goodbye
glue that
held dirt
walls
standing
together.
Kick or Be Kicked
Ten thousand wombs
wounded by wire
rods assemble in a
row outside the door
of my bedroom
I climb their
hollows wrung by
wrung
a fleshy ladder
of fully formed
fingernails scratch the
amber sky
I smother my face
soft edges and
seams
catch my woolen
screams they hold me
together like a half
hearted pillow I cannot
fit inside
Knuckles tight
around severed
chords sick of
unsung
lullabies concrete
cough syrup I am
careful to refuse
Motherhood bangs her
hands of pots and pans
There is no
food on the
table
one leg tilts low
a bow to the plentiful
pantry empty and vertical
coffin angry bare-breasted
shelves
Can something die if it was never alive? Legs part and flutter
open like battered
wings after rain,
wetness slides down
cracks
in my windowpane
Wetness slides
down body bursts
out a history of
names,
I am intent to repeat
repeat the birthing game.
Proximity
I never questioned why the cemetery bordered the elementary school. I questioned just about everything else, but not that. The headstones are so weathered and moss covered that they can’t be threatening, caked with so much time. I think it would’ve been different if the plots were marked in crisp cut granite with the hard edges of yesterday. Corners that silently slice the mourners apart with the freshness of death, the immediacy of loss.
But many people who lie there have been sleeping a long time, so long that their children’s children have lost the map to get to them. I never saw anyone in the cemetery unless school was out, and floods of children invaded the library, the corner store, the square. Then, I would see clusters of teens wading among the graves with bottles of purple Fanta in hand. They would push smoke out of their mouths in an attempt to chase away their innocence. When it grew dark, some would have sex and sleep under the shadow of someone’s great grandmother. They would flounce into school the next day with dirt on their backs, smelling like something sticky.
The only time a person passed the gnarled gate to pay their respects I am not there to witness it. A man with faded red corduroy trousers puts flowers below a name in crumbling letters that reads “Sheila Downing”. Let’s say the man is her father, Mr Downing. He touches Sheila’s years on the earth, “1970-1973”, before she became the dirt beneath his feet. He does not know enough of her to cry. Her three years passed forty years ago. It’s like setting paint out to dry in the August heat. He only wonders about this daughter, this ghost of a girl he can’t stamp out. He sits in the grass for a while tearing up dried yellow sprouts among the mass of green.
All the while, I get paper cuts in my second grade classroom and curse mathematicians. I get older and pass the cemetery every day on my way to school, I learn about Sheila. I learn to be afraid of that bedroom of disintegrated bodies. I learn to hold my breath as I walk by. I learn to pray to God and renounce the devil. I learn that one day, someone will come to me, perhaps dressed in red corduroy pants, and pull out the dried bits of grass above my head.
Archive of Sleep Through Withdrawal
Lobotomize loved ones
leave their letters etched into the skin
on the sidewalk Be still and
listen.
Listen to the din of broken branches growing
through the wall
of this boisterous room
Be still.
Silence behind eyes eyes move
in reclusive circles with
lids pursed
Tight like an oyster’s shell
Bodies made of mud and
sand crawl through callused doors
Snakes in the street steal the tongue of God
rainless mouths
crave wet words
Listen.
A nosy stethoscope exposes
the ground beneath this city of stacked
metaphors and mattresses
afraid
to touch yourself?
hollow in
draw finger to flame
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search for a shock
_____________________________________________________________________________
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too strong.
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Indulgence
waits
in every crevice
of anatomy
concealed in each voice
found sleeping.