a chapbook

CENSUS OF SEAGULLS

Faith is the paperbag I breathe into when air is scarce.
The presence of holes is inconsequential.
I’ve taught myself to ignore misplaced light.

When I close my eyes, gumdrops taste like poppies.
I’m convinced when I spit, a field will bloom.
Red is a born-again color, but in the rain,
cheap fabrics bleed. It’s hard
not to get discouraged. On down
days, my tongue turns to mud.
You don’t know what it’s like to go fallow.
You worry about going lame.

In Sandbridge, I met a schizophrenic.
We moved into a room on stolen credit cards.
When we quarreled, I’d send Charlie
to the pier, demand he count seagulls.

Folded inside his suicide note, Charlie
left a white feather that smelled like salt,
lost buttons, and every color in the Crayola box.
He said he’d always loved me,
but couldn’t tally birds who kept moving
and all looked the same.

OMENS FOR PROLONGED WINTER

Winter is a sadistic lover. Ice feeds the pauper
and we all starve. Mon dieu.
Why didn’t I dream of crows? The night swans
came to me, the world turned downy white.
Listen to the cold take away your breath.
We wanted the color blue, but it wasn’t available.
Touch your sex if you dare. Exposure
sounds like church bells breaking.

Frida Kahlo would never trek to New York in the snow.
The girders bracing her back snap at 0 centigrade.
My dog vomits on the porch steps. The wind
snatches the pink debris before the crows settle.
My belly is full of stone soup and the farmer’s
wet-thumb forecasts. I might have taken him to bed,
but he predicted the groundhog’s shadow.
I threatened to gut them both and roll them in meal.

My own shadow is thin and angular.
Someone claimed I once walked halls with clenched fists.
The yellow note is a prophecy. It tastes like olives.
Outside Jackson Hall, professors chant,
“It’s as cold as a nun’s tit.” Only the Pope knows
and he’s as dead as a kettlefish. Rumor has it
postmenopausal milk is sour and chalky.
My own breasts consist mostly of fat,
but fail to keep me warm or well fed.

At home I boil water, stir in
clipped hair and feathers.
Shoestrings knot themselves in the dark,
but comfort is hard to find in a meager room.
At first light, I’ll crack a little corn, leave it
on my narrow steps to appease famished crows.

2 AM

A bowl of twilight spilled on my floor.
The night is a needle stuck in the groove.
What to do when it goes on too long?
I cannot find enough darkness
to trick myself into sleep.
The woman next door shaves
her legs with matches and a conch shell.
I’m smoking cigarettes and coveting
the fine stubble on her thighs.
In my palm, olives glimmer like dull stars.
I pluck one at a time, drop them on my tongue.
The taste is lemony, like the inside of a skull.
I believe there exists a room where ghosts
quarrel and fuck, but are never satisfied.
A good dream might lull me
to sleep, but I am afraid
to go next door and ask for one.

STORM

We’ll ride this out, eat sardines from cans,
last night’s pizza cold, reeking of thick
and anchovies. Sam drinks what’s left of the beer
before it goes warm. Somebody puts in D batteries
persuading Roy Orbison to croon in my kitchen,

dark now except for the candle burning by the stove,
the white streaks illuminating black skies
stripped of stars, and Sam’s cigarette glowing red,
a period at the end of a sentence, a garnet belly jewel.

The wind blows, bending trees into the road.
The gods are flinging shingles from my roof.
Like plates tossed in the middle of a quarrel,
no one cares where they land.

WALKING ON BELVIDERE

I am certain of nothing except my uncertainty.
In the morning hours, I pass by windows
without looking inside. My destination
changes with each step. Any moment,
events can turn on themselves.
The robin’s blue egg fell from its nest
and cracked on the side walk.
Something profound got lost along the way.
I scribble notes on matchbooks
and cheap paper towels dispensed in public johns.
There is nothing pristine in this city,
but I am willing to settle
for bells tolling in the church tower,
a puddle of rain,
and a few spare coins to buy black coffee.

CHRISTINA’S WORLD

For Christina Olson (4/ 3/1893 to 1/27/1968)

Even as a girl, you were fierce, practicing
straight-line walking on linoleum seams
in your mother’s stark kitchen.
Those around lost count—
so many occasions a chair offered
refused. Instead, you crawled through
wheat-colored grass, intent on visiting
neighbors and graves, collecting the day’s mail.
You corresponded with a man for years,
spent nights dreaming steady hands
unfolded your thin legs like paper stems
to peel the petals open.

In the distance, the Maine house where you lived
breaks a gray sky. Any moment it may rain.
The artist tucked away in an upstairs room
watched from the window, his fingers
ever darkening with charcoal and oil.
In all those years, he never painted your face,
only this view, dark hair coming loose
in strands, the slope of your lower back
widening into a curve
rising softly beneath a pink dress.

ON A DREARY MORNING

You could go out into the rain,
search for a stranger, preferably one
with holes in his clothes
and no permanent structure
he calls home. In exchange for coffee,
this man whose name you do not know,
who can offer no forwarding address
no proof of existence, might be persuaded
to tell you one small story from his life.
His tale might begin in a cellar,
damp and cold, where only a single bulb
burned overhead, casting a meager glow
on the open pages of a paperback
balanced on his lap. And if you offer him a
second cup, or maybe a wedge of Mabel’s apple pie,
he might reveal who sent him downstairs,
or what misdeed he’d done,
but he is more likely to remember
the title of that book, and how the dark
welcomes the smallest sliver of light.

TUESDAY NIGHT KITCHEN

Can’t write. Can’t sleep.
In the dark hall, I sob in a paper wad
pulled from the pocket of my bathrobe.
Stumble downstairs, fumble for the light.
Crows on the wall frighten me.
I wipe my nose on my sleeve, sour
with baby’s milk and winter’s sickness.

In the kitchen, I gather eggs, sugar,
flour, and Crisco. Set my oven to bake.
Sift, melt, measure, mix. Spoon
imperfect dough circles
in rows on the metal pan.

I open the oven door, squint
against the heat. There,
through the thin slit of eye,
I spot Sylvia’s dirty dirty-blonde head
nodding on the bottom rack.
Charred skin peels from her cheeks.
Her pale eyes blink in deep sockets.
Spitting ashes through red-stained lips,
she asks what I think of her poems.
“My best yet,” she grins.

I clear my throat, try to think
of something to say, but choke on words,
start to cry again. “Yes, well, stop sulking,”
she says in her best-Boston. “Mustn’t ruin
the batter. Never mind the mess. Just leave
the children’s milk in a bowl, and don’t forget
to stuff rags in the cracks of the kitchen door.”
The fumes….”

How did she find me? How did she know?
Has she watched me bent over paper,
pulling away from small fists
that tug my frayed hems?
Has she seen me wistfully pass by rivers
or browse market aisles
where the hours, like old tomatoes,
rot in my hand?

I move quickly through the house,
dump my husband’s razors,
empty the bullets from the barrel of his gun.
Flush all my pretty hoarded pills
down the pristine john. Toss out the window
assorted ropes, matches, and gasoline cans.
Rushing into the next room, I shake
awake my sleeping children
to feed them dough.
I sit at my desk and write until dawn.

BARBOURSVILLE VINEYARD, 2001

We walk the vineyard after a quarrel.
The rows run on, endless ribbons
beyond green hills. In the distance,
hazy mountains rise
like shoulders, cold and indifferent.

I touch vines, thick and convoluted
as the stories you tell
when working late is only an excuse
and strange perfume lingers in your hair.

You stoop to examine the fruit,
show me grapes ready for harvest.
I lean in, see blue orbs pulling stems so taut
I don’t know what keeps them from breaking.

GANGRENE

Hurling obscenities at desk leg,
I guzzle draft beer and crawl into bed,
rub stubbed toe and remember
the stench in his boots;
red streaks growing dark,
wide; sap gathering green
in the deep purple crevice
where his missing toe belonged.

I dream my grandfather’s gelded toe.
The freed digit keeps bleeding.
Torn tendons, seared roots
showing through skin. Snapped bone.
I see the surgeon in Turkish headdress
suiting up in his stainless steel room.
He scrapes with glee—
“This little piggy went to market…”
“This little piggy went wee wee wee!”

The next morning, Papa
won’t stop screaming.
He grabs for lost toes.
He beats swollen stubs, picks
brown scabs. They bleed.
I hide on the hospital floor,
cutting oval toes from paper,
but none please. I fall asleep,
crying on Nana’s lap.
My saddle shoes
hurt my feet, but I won’t
take off my shoes.

Fifteen years later,
my stubbed toe brings a dream:
The surgeon sings a tune
as he saws tissue, splitting
bone and yellow cartilage.
Blood seeps through gauze.
Bandages wound too tight.
Each cleft burns and burns.
The surgeon carries away
ten pretty toes,
my pink polish peeling
in a formaldehyde sea.

FLU

Six days sick, my belly is an empty bowl.
My bowels are hollow pipes.
I squat over the toilet, my asshole
darkening like star anise.

I trek daily to the pharmacy.
It’s true: with his vials and cobalt glass
the druggist promises salvation.
My lips pucker and twitch
while I watch him mix my tincture,
a pink liquid, cum-thick
and sure to taste like chalk.

Earthed under blankets, I shiver
chilled bones awake. Each joint
aches like a tooth gone to rot.
My cells shrivel and curl
into prune-fists. The spoon
glows atop my bureau,
but the next dose is hours away.
I lick papery lips. Swallow bile.
Watch slender black hands
tick away the clock.

ON MY DEATHBED

Insects gather. They rub thin feelers,
open lower mandibles, expecting a feast.
I go slowly. This isn’t a world
I step into easily. I have
the insomniac’s disdain for sleep.

Hands have scrubbed me clean
and dressed me in pastels.
I long for something gaudy,
a beach hat, fishnets, red jumper
embroidered with cocks.

I once accused a lover
of fucking me to death.
I should have made him promise
to attend me at the end.
How I’d welcome him rocking me
into the white light
of the insects’ incessant hum.

INSOMNIAC’S LAMENT

For three nights, I’ve paced the floor until morning.
The linoleum is in danger of forming rivulets
worn smooth by the thick soles of my feet.

I run out of cigarettes. Pretzel sticks don’t give
nicotine. They smolder when I burn them.
I lick charred salt and taste redemption.

A madly efficient woman, I want to make use
of time. I try to write, but the poem
is peanut butter stuck to the roof of my mouth.
I lack a fellow insomniac to join me
in a game of Scrabble, good gossip, or slow fuck.

I clean drawers. That’s what I do.
Sort buttons from coins. Ponder keys.
Toss half-tubes of creams I never use.
Newly organized with more night to spend,
I squat on the john and make up riddles.
What do you get when you split illusion,
marry well, and sing a capella?
I couldn’t say. The man with the answers
is in another town, fast asleep.

APPARITION

After flu, my bed smells as distant and foul
as a woman’s breath the hour before she dies.
I rise, strip the sheets, leave them in a box
beside the hotel Bibles I collect to burn.

Full of pores, orifices, and wounds,
my body leaks like overripe fruit.
What it gives is disturbing and raw.
I am varnished in sickly excretions.

Hunched over blue, I struggle to bathe,
perfume my hair, scrub with pumice stone
to rid dead cells forming mold on my skin.

Dreams of corpses haunt me more often.
Are the dead instinctively drawn to the sick?
I do not want them to visit when I sleep.
Once, the apparition lingering in my room
belonged to my lover whose suicide was still weeks away.
He circled my bed, pacing on ethereal feet,
the shiny black gun shoved in his mouth.
I couldn’t help myself. I pulled him into bed,
pressed his head to my breasts, stroked his oily hair.
I searched out the hole in the back of his skull
and plunged my fingers into its core.

SOME DAYS

I remember equations, but not the name of my wife.
Years spent moving between desk and blackboard,

yellow chalk numbers in columns, the smell of textbooks
and pencil lead. Theorems raced across the page

like brilliant stars or musical notes. In those days,
I was a god, the grand conductor. I still feel the metal

protractor exacting a circle. Mathematics
explained all I needed to know: how much to add,

how much to take away. How to multiply and divide.
What to do with what remains.

Today, a nurse escorts visitors to my bed.
She assigns each one a name. This is your family,

she insists. Not students. The students are gone.
They stand around, a row of faces

waiting to see who I know. In the evening’s dim light,
they are decimal points perfectly aligned.

BARTON’S NOTEBOOK

A constant rain falls
this morning. I seek out a nook
to dry my shriveled hands.
Inside the cafe, I drink tea
and nibble scones
while browsing Barton’s notebook.
I’m hooked on his scribbled words,
who he loves and why.
I’m not supposed to read
his diary, invasion of privacy
a trespass against him.
Barton says as much on page 73
in the entry he penned
after returning to our flat
to find my oily fingerprints
smudging his wet dreams.
This New Year, I resolved
to let Barton write in peace.
It’s a struggle. The rain pelts
the cafe window, sending
guilty rivulets down the pane.
I sip more tea
despite my scalded tongue
then turn another page.

BUZZARDS

(i.)

You don’t see them immediately.
Surely they rise from ground or limb,
but when first noticed, they appear
inexplicably in the sky, black
wings open blades
slicing light into shards.
Perhaps they descend from someplace
higher than trees. Maybe heaven,
maybe Xanadu. Kites
tethered to string, they circle,
swoop, lowering bit by bit,
not a solitary bird,
but a trio skimming air,
gliding over
thistle and dandelion
before the final dive.

(ii.)

I see them in my dreams,
black marauders falling from God’s sky.
Closer in, the heat from their wings
scorches my face, dries my salty eyes.
Fetid smells from last meals
seep from their pores and glands.
I notice dark feathers peppered
with ticks, specks of blood.
Lords of decay circle my carcass
receding now in tall grass.
Their eyes are chicken fat yellow,
the same color as jaundiced babies
placed on a funeral pyre.
In their excitement to feed,
the devil’s winged gluttons
shit and shriek.
It would be a blessing to burn.

PUZZLE

The examiner dumps pieces on the floor
and locks me in a room.
He leaves the box so I can check
his picture against mine.

I separate sky from sea foam,
gulls from stones.
When I finish,
green oceans will open
between my legs.

Red block letters tell me
there are 1,000 pieces.

I find only 999.

I look under chairs, dig up carpet,
bite brittle nails to quick.

On the mirrored side of the window,
I can’t see the examiner reach into his pocket
to caress my piece of sky.

MAMMOGRAM

7 Down: a four letter word for tumor is cyst.
He took the newspaper from me,
pulled me into bed. Afterwards,
his calloused thumb found the lump,
size of a crab apple, first plum.
Fascinated, he pressed to make it hurt.
Frightened, his kissed it, took
my nipple into his mouth.

The technician says to hold my breath.
I want to tell him I’ve been holding my breath
for days. I glance over his shoulder
while he checks each print.
On x-ray, my breasts are white and opaque.
The dark mass in the left breast is a star,
off-center in a milky sky.

I once saw a glass dome containing water,
air, and a small fish. For the sum of sixty-nine
dollars, you could own a complete biosphere
to hold in your hands.

The prints will be sent to the physician for reading,
the technician explains, then leaves.

My aunt read fortunes in cards. The summer
I turned twelve, she pushed my hands
down the front of her dress.
I rubbed her lumpy breasts and remembered
mushrooms sprouting red caps in the rain.
Six weeks later, she couldn’t lift
her arms to curl her hair. Under bandages,
rows of black stitches hemmed
the place her breasts had lain.

A knock at the door brings the technician back.
Please hurry, another woman needs this room.

I nod, slip off my hospital gown. Before I put on my bra,
I cradle both breasts in my hands.

RETURN TO THE BAYOU

A woman’s face is an opal. Egrets peck each other’s feet.
I’m grateful for lost binoculars. I’m the sort
compelled to look at things I don’t want to see.
The smell of ivory soap leaves a chalk on my tongue.
I’ve come back to Bayou LaFourche to find Julia.
Redbud in bloom proves to be detrimental.
Tired of what I cannot see, I hide my face in her lap.
In the next room, an argument. A man’s voice
slaps a face. “Stop dicking me around, Annabelle.”
Harsh words peel wallpaper. I pick up a petal,
place it at Julia’s feet. “Where are we headed next?”
“Je ne sais pas. Take off your dress. There, by the window.”
Teal raindrops are evasive witnesses. Don’t ask anything.
Stones are pliable in the right hands. Tink is a smart girl,
but she’ll spend her life gnawing her own feathers.
Scratches on the wall tell someone’s dirty secrets.
Wilted plums fill a plastic bowl. Fais-do-do.
Plums speak the language of sleep.
All I need are these moments with Julia,
to wash her face and hands in cool tap water,
to lick clean the opal tears congealed on her cheeks.

STORIES

1.
There are stories I don’t want to live,
don’t want to tell, don’t want to write down.
This is one of them: In Kansas, a mother
beheaded her child. Neighbors found the body
in a grassy ravine. A few days later, police found
the bagged head. A small mouth opens
a cavern of milkteeth and flies.

2.
If you press your thumb
through my skull and reach the place
that doesn’t love you, maybe we’ll
sort our differences like mail,
a few flat envelopes in each hand,
return to sender, postage due.

3
Outside, the sky lowers gray and starless.
Doves coo lonely notes that mean nothing to me.
Up the road, mourners gather at a grave.
Someone prays for the spirit.
I pray for rain.

4.
Since you’ve been gone, I sleep with the light on.
The jar by my bed holds a fistful of fireflies.
Come morning, they’ll all be dead.

FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS

1.
The Duchess of Devonshire feeds courtyard chickens
a blend of millet, cracked corn. Hens peck
her slippered feet, the hem of her evening gown.
She tongue-clucks her plumed girls,
urges them to eat their fill
before London’s chronic rain sets in.

2.
The Fortune Teller spreads tarot cards
across a dark cloth. Nobody wants to draw
the hangman or tower. Her pale hand
is a planchette moving towards death.
Nearby, a glass ball
absorbs certain slants of light.
Don’t ask me to look into it.

3.
Two nude girls step into a Model-T
parked in the woods. Slender arms
circle waists. Perhaps the photographer
expects them to kiss. I hope he is right.

4.
Gertrude and Alice seated in the salon
at their apartment. 27 Rue de Fleurus.
Expecting guests, they take chairs
on opposite sides of the room.
Later, Pussy slips off Lovey’s dress
and whispers in her ear
how they’ll spend night’s hours
lifting belly beneath dim stars.

HECATE IN FARGO, NORTH DAKOTA

My skin’s dull as worn bedsheets. My teeth on edge.
I am not the woman you think you know.

The house has the pallor and odor of earthworms
kept in jars of dirt. I feed the box turtle

wintering in my cellar. He barely nibbles
strands dangled between tweezers. I tap his shell

to watch his cock-shaped head stretch toward my hand.
He’s humble and not easily alarmed.

Some days, I burn water. The neighbor laughs, says that’s impossible.
Her mouth unhinges when I toss scorched pans in her yard.

At night, I read sordid stories my mother warned me to avoid.
Practice scales, practice smiles in the broken glass.

I grow restless, bring home droll men, feed them earthworms
and burned water, make them recite aloud

while bound to a chair placed under the lonely bulb.
Sometimes, I wear leather and a feathered mask.

I crush bodies, shove my tongue into their mouths,
don’t let them go until they promise blue skies.

GEOGRAPHY

How the mind lags behind the body.
In the basement classroom
he struggles to make
the letter M. The facts of addition are distant
as wind. Subtraction is about take away,
but what’s left is never enough.
Geography is places on the globe
which spins blue and green
as the teacher says come closer
then finger-stops the world,
points to random
destinations,
countries and oceans
he can’t name no matter how many times
she says
Think–
Think–
Think–
What he thinks is how he’d like
to watch her spin like the globe,
her blue and green skirt
a raised flag revealing new worlds.

DEAR CALEB

How can I explain ? You were small and indifferent.
Maybe I craved the sound of a vacant house,
no voices or footsteps,
no one seeking me out with a litany of needs
I couldn’t fill. Maybe I wanted to spare us both
that moment when we’d wake, mother and child,
hating each other. I’d be lying if I said
I’d had second thoughts. I can’t tell you if the notion
floated into my mind that day or if it been there all along,
a seed wedged in the creases of my brain.
The certainty of what I was about to do, the unwavering course –
how can I break those into segments you might comprehend?
I was compelled to take the life I’d given you.
The sequence unfolded like the scene in a play,
you sitting on the floor with a fistful of crayons,
me in the next room, kneeling by the tub,
waiting for the water level to rise
before I called your name.

EXCUSES

I didn’t take out the trash last night
because the can was only half-full
and we’d eaten asparagus and glazed chicken
which doesn’t smell rank the way fish
or onions do. Besides, rain beaded the window
and I didn’t want to make my earache worse
or slip on the sidewalk, causing my gimp knee
to go out. Just then, a flash came across the screen,
BREAKING NEWS on CNN, and I stayed to witness
the next abused prisoner at Abu Ghraib
because I’m appalled at the cruelty
and admittedly a little aroused
by pyramids of nude men
with brown haunches and blurred genitals.
But the news was something else altogether.
Bored, I traipsed into the kitchen for a late night snack
and promised I’d endure the rain
as soon as I finished the last pretzel.
The thin sticks made me think of orphans
starving in foreign lands, so I downed a few beers
to lift my spirits. As soon as the last can collapsed
in my hand, I intended to find my boots,
but my bladder isn’t what it used to be. I rushed
upstairs toward the john. Stepping out of the bathroom,
I saw your sleeping face, noticed the soft flicker
across your eyelids as you chased moths in your dreams.
I wanted to hear what you’d remember upon waking
and rested my head in the crook of your arm.
Downstairs, the garbage man pulled away empty-handed.

OBSERVATIONS

1.
In stunned moments, quiet slips of paper bring bad news, and the most
ordinary things escape you. The taste of bread is impossible to recall. You forget
the names of your children.

2.
Two little girls in Illinois rode their bicycles into the woods. They did not
come back alive.

3.
On trips to the Salvation Army Thrift, we pretend to be princesses, dethroned
for sucking the wrong man’s cock. Look, the part-time clerk wants to tote
this brown chair back to our house. His story is full of holes.

4.
Salt on ice dissolves ice on roads. Still, you proceed with caution.

5.
I crave strawberries out of season, eat an apple instead. Dissatisfied, I
spit up seeds and core on my livingroom floor and storm out for the night. I
chase a girl down the street, her skirt covered in strawberries.

GONE

Apathy is dried mustard on last night’s dinner plate.
I waited on the front porch all morning

and not a soul came by. Limbs fall from dead trees.
The sound of bones snapping in evening wind

leaves traces of dust in the air. The smell of it
is regret, and this half empty bottle of wine.

Sun dappled sheets cover the bed where Eli and I slept
last night. The light needs his body as I do.

Loneliness is a fever, igniting the hands and loins.
A woman can get scorched that way.

On the radio, the announcer reminds me
to come down to Sixth Street before all the tomatoes are sold.

He doesn’t know I’m having a hard time
even leaving my house now that Eli is gone.

CHOICE

Indecision is a bowl of broken yolks drawing flies.
Their thread-thin legs are holy. Watch them Jesus walk
across the slimy sea. Their buzzing
smells like the inside of a cave. Don’t roll away
the stone and let Lazarus come after me.
I touch my face and wonder who else I might have been
if I’d been born with higher cheeks or a propensity
for facial hair. Lipstick fixes everything except this.
When will you bathe again, Isabelle? The roses go sour.
Flies find their way inside wet petals.
I’m afraid to look at their larvae, diabolic and obscene.
The humming sound of insect sex
never rises and falls, but goes on, a steady drone,
monotonous as a three day rain.
What will you choose Isabelle?
The trains are pulling into Shokoe Bottom
and you are wrapped in scarves.
The visionary warned not to let
the blue stain of apathy haunt our life.
Fly specks ruin the curtains and bedclothes.
Get up, Isabelle. The time
for choice is closing in on us fast.

HOW TO KNOW YOU’RE DREAMING

A twitch in the knee sets pictures in motion.
You see a man and woman,
nude, legs sprawled to show their sex.
An ape in an open window
peels a wax banana.

I don’t know how to peel anything.
Keep me away from grapes and burned skin.

I hide a collection of postage stamps in a box under my bed
It pleases me to sleep where strange tongues have licked
little paper squares. The intimacy of kissing isn’t far away.

Hung in a black sky, the moon is rude and oily,
a gaping eye that keeps me awake.
When at last I sink into the white wave of sleep,
my drowsy twin rises from the bed. She flies
like a moth, yellow-wings swallowing my room.

YELLOW CAKE

Forgotten eggs ruin the batter.
The yellow cake falls flat as a breast
deflated with age. I’ve lost control
of my black and white tiled kitchen.
Someone let a mad rabbit inside.
He’s taken over the cupboards,
raided the vegetable bin and downed pills
I kept in bottles lining the window sill.

Beside the sink, a spider spins silk traps
to catch blue flies and incapable moths.
The rabbit put her up to carnage.
He’s that kind, I can tell from his smirk.
Recently, he wears glasses, reads
a newspaper I never subscribed.
My mailbox fills with advertisements
for things I don’t want to buy.
I’m terrified the rabbit will show up
for breakfast and beg yellow cake,
pull a contract from his pocket,
proof I agreed to this life.

LOCAL GIRLS

i. Cripple

Legs blue and thin and wasted. Receding water. Pink amoebas on a white plate.
Crack the doll skull. Tape up legs. Fix wavering eyes. Doctor says its due to
bathing in hot water. Midwife says don’t bathe at all. Nana shucks corn and
prays the Lord forgives love between cousins. Genes spliced the apple dumpling
and the house of cards comes down. Broken water and a baby born wrong. She is
not what anyone wanted. She is not what you wanted, and you are her mother.

ii. Tar Baby

Only colored doll on the whole street. Cow shit brown in a white baby’s arms.
Papa knew books would be her downfall. She wouldn’t know about colored dolls
if she hadn’t gone to town. You can’t trust a goddamn librarian who wears cat
eye glasses and has kinky hair.

iii. Sewing

Singer on the back porch and girls in white panties. Uncle Rob learned to sew
in Nam. Narrow hips show off missed stitches. Tap dancing in flipflops under
halos of cigar smoke.

INKBLOTS

The session goes well until my therapist draws back the yellow curtain.
Sudden light sets the bats to shrieking. One by one

they fly off stiff white cards and circle the room. Lift, swoop, dive.
In a small space, echolocation is useless. Dark lunar moths

smack into shelves, doors, windows. A solemn globe tilts and spins.
Books and curtains tumble. I’m trapped in a ruckus of paper and wings.

My therapist crawls under the couch, assures me the bats
will return to the cards on their own. He’s forfeited notes and an hour glass

for improvisation. Doesn’t he see the bats bleeding?
Blue-gray veins are pipettes snapped in half.

Wounds open like the mouths of whores.
I’ve fallen into the custody of raspberry stains.

I kneel on the floor, rock myself into a fetal curl.
Overhead, blind angels flutter, shit, and cry.

GHOST CHILD

Downed powerlines darken my house.
I’m a husk, a shadow

moving room to room on bare feet and stories
I tell no one.

I’m afraid to look out my window and see
eyes, pale and milky, staring back with accusation.

It’s true, I never wanted her, a mass of cells
splitting, replicating, taking root

like a parasitic jellyfish making me her host.
I’d counted ceiling tiles and waited in a backless gown

inside a room where ghost children floated
between the slippery thighs of women in stirrups.

All these years, she’s haunted me on stormy nights.
My neighbors say the ghost belongs to a child

who died in the orchard. I’m not convinced.
I pace my house whispering the same defense,

how she’d threatened hollow spaces I didn’t want filled,
the gullies washed clean as spoons.

AFTER A QUARREL

I never noticed until now,
but the kitchen walls are too white.
Broken eggshells fill my pockets.
Daisies bloom in pots on the windowsill.

My mug is crusted with coffee grounds and haze.
I want tea, but the ginseng is gone.

I fill my kettle with tears, raveled napkins,
and teaspoon of nutmeg.

My lover has taken up cooking. Last night,
he steamed asparagus, roasted beans.
Carved tomatoes into roses.
I said the tomatoes looked like cunts.
He said so do roses and handed me a mirror.

In bed, we argued over the meaning
of forfeiting and perversion.
This morning, he filled a blue bowl
with stale cereal
and left without speaking.

After my tea, a born again Christian
brings salvation to my door
but declines my cherry Poptarts.

Outside, a meager dove mourns her lost mate.
I open my window, hear her slow coo,
and toss waxy seeds on the ground.