POETRY | writing

POETRY: A SELECTION

Terpsichore Takes Her Clothes Off

Terpsichore dances so hard / her fingernails splinter. Red on her cuticles / grime edging her lips / she grinds in the sugarcane darkness / while gumdrop eyes lick her body like a lollipop / purple sugar / sandpaper tongues.

Terpsichore takes the subway home / body bruised to lavender candy / she has shown her skin to a thousand men / made her body a terminal for them to pass through / to return to their airplanes and dope rings / to their moonshine and wives.

Terpsichore stares at her body / in the cracked mirror / while her eight sisters rub oil onto their shoulder blades / and come up with dreams to present in succulent flesh packages / to the audience at the next show.

The men in the seats / change shape when the sun rises / men in darkness as hungry vessels / men in the gilded morning as writers / presidents / God / women as the wings / as choreographers / as blown kisses / women as the moonlit teeth of life / building the stage and writing the score / in the dawn are vessels / watching the show come to salty life / the darkness tastes like / orange rinds.

Terpsichore bares herself / to the white cheeks of the walls / her skin hangs in folds / a thousand men have learned to dance because of it / memorized the steps she germinated / sold them as their own / but they have not seen the brawn of the muscles / the power she has built atom by atom / she pulls off her skin until she is a skeleton / androgynous as the burn of citrus / she hurls her bag of flesh away / lights a cigarette / smoke crashes through her ribs / looks at the men with hands twisting inside their pants / and says to the audience of open mouths / I am tired of being your muse.

Why I Don’t Sleep At Night

every morning, I tell myself

go to bed early tonight.

in the plastic cup of dawn

sunlight smears the blinds,

coffee brews on the countertop.

on the train, I tell myself

I’ll sleep tonight. I bite my lip,

and we slide through the tunnels.

I am most myself

when I am no one at all.

I sink into the bones

of everyone passing by

the woman carrying the mattress

the man without arms,

eyes fertile enough to grow gardens

the girl whose teeth are stuck

in an apple, body preserved in the amber

of the old man’s honeybee irises.

his very existence pollinates her, pinkens her flesh.

I am all of you and I feel stories

rush past me in bursts of heat

from the cigars, the burnt meat, the fucked air

passed from mouth to mouth,

impregnated with smoke.

A man plays a keyboard on the subway

music blossoms on the concrete.

II.

when it is three A.M.

and insomnia blue

the world shifts.

I can float outside my body

into the mouths of my mother’s orchids

and roses, all in various stages of dying.

I will shave my flesh down to bone

so I can pretend I no longer hear

but I do.

insomnia is my rebellion

I am on a sleep strike.

I will inhabit the hours

I cannot define.

IV.

in night’s dark rushing tunnel

you are the yellow lights that line the walls

like knobs of a spine.

this kind of ache lives in diamonds.

I can love you in the gleaming darkness

because I am not myself then

and neither are you.

this is the only way we can be together.

all those I have loved

were figments of memory.

you once said my eyes were deep as the sea

while we were having coffee, and I stared at you

I wanted to let you drink me

I crush a white pill

a memory can haunt

like a body can love.

the garden rises

and swallows me like I am a fruit.

I swallow the poison on your tongue

I want it in my blood.

this is swallow or be swallowed.

I was never interested in the garden

or the rib that made the woman

only in the open maw of the dark,

pried open by saw or sword

where I am far more than bone.

and if I sleep now,

I will wake up sooner

(I don’t want to wake up.)

five A.M. the cat curls against me,

crawls into the spaces beneath my eyes.

there is something red beating in my chest

devil or god

there is no difference

was the apple just an apple?

did Eve always know?

VI.

the sun is starting to rise.

it’s all bled out, and the sky’s flesh

is turning blue. it’s morning.

I’m wide awake. I walk outside.

I can hear the subways in my head.

I can hear the man on the train, playing his keyboard

on those rails lined with cigarettes

clumping together like knobs of a spine.

music blossoms on the concrete.

you are alive.

I am everything that ever existed.

time is like my teeth. I can taste it

I can feel the wind blowing over it,

the wind of that just-risen sun

that really never sank at all

just hid for a while.

the sun and moon are in my belly

my children, my seeds, growth

is inevitable, and I am alive

and you are alive

and we are everything that ever existed

and that means we are also nothing at all.

you are alive, the morning says.

with the sun

I lose my death.

every ghost once had flesh.

Ode to Chameleon Queens of Hollywood Sadcore

I’m in a gas station with Lana Del Rey

we’ve been driving for ten hours

and we’ve drunk enough coffee to fill ten of us.

“I love gas stations,” she says, picking up a pack of beef jerky

and shoving a strip between her honey-plumped lips.

She slides a piece of wintermint gum between her teeth

and looks at me as the shadows change her eyes

from smokestack grey to cinnamon.

“We’re the most glamorous things in the whole store.

And here, the store is the whole world.”

She wipes a line of soda bubbles on her blue jeans.

They trail over her legs like ants. I want to tell her

she could be the most glamorous thing anywhere,

but she changes before my eyes and now I only see

a thirty-year-old woman with cheeks furred like peaches

holding a sweating pepsi between hands that have been everywhere

from the balls of an eighty-year-old man with blood made

purely of heroin to microphones balanced on the

stage of the Hollywood Bowl, equal amounts of heroin

pulsing through the bloodstreams of the camera lenses.

We head over to the drink stand and fill large cups

with thick brown coconut coffee and ice and splenda and skim.

She spreads the mess of chocolate, cigarettes and peach lip gloss

on the counter, peels apart singles sticky with mint gum

and starts chain-smoking like she wants to choke on nicotine

huge throaty gulps, lips beating like hummingbird wings.

I wonder if we’ll make it to LA by morning.

“I wish I was dead,” she says as we walk back to the car

and the synthetic gas station light leaves her eyes.

And I think she sings the song of herself

just the way Whitman intended

a thousand forms of her spinning in and around

the walls of the Pontiac.

Hers is a soul so scattered

it could never be anything but what it was born.

She is a woman and she is a fantasy

depending on what your world looks like at the time

gas station or beach house full of guns. The highway

stretches out before us like the devil’s tongue

or God’s backbone - it’s so dark I can’t tell -

we’re gods, we’re angels, we’re demons

either way we fly. I light her cigarette

and we talk until we run out of coffee

and pull into the next throbbing little artery

in the web of highways that knit the body

of heaven.

Mariners

this summer I let you craft gullies into my skin

and sculpt coves into my sides.

when I was a child I spent summers by the ocean.

I still spend summers by the ocean.

remember: you do not define me.

you are not all I am.

lemonade still tastes sweet, and the waves are still liquid wind

seagulls still claw at the windowsills

sea glass still gleams from the rocks.

the corpses of seals still wash up on the shore

they have nothing to do with you.

they are not metaphors for the fact that you don’t love me.

they are dead seals with distended silver skin

eyes black holes bored into by sandpipers and fleas.

the seaweed withered and creased with sun

is not a symbol of my lungs

without you breathing air into them.

the boat washed up on the sandbar

the cracked sand dollars

the mackerel heads hanging bloodied and stiff in the freezer

from when we caught them with our silver hooks

are simply parts of ocean living,

natural as breathing, worked into the land.

they are not different from my having loved you.

yet they seem to glow. the seal bodies mean more than they should

the blood on the freezer ice is redder, darker

like the blood on your fingers

from the night when the seals all swam in hordes

leapt above the waves

and I am no longer the same, having loved you

but I am not entirely sure I wanted to be the same

not entirely sure I didn’t open up my veins with my own fish hook

and make the hole for you to climb into.

now my lungs are washed up on the shore,

and the evening glows, and even the moon is yours,

as yours as an illusion can be.

Violets, II

I’m standing with armfuls of violets in my hands

each one is a bomb.

Petals ricochet like gunshots. Opium blood made from poppies

spills from the slits where grass

sliced through skin like fragments of windshields.

A beetle crawls over the dirt

its legs sliding into the soil like needles.

The flowers you gave me

were frosted with diamond cocaine.

I snorted them up

drank in the floral scent, the pastoral scene

put your pretty rose in crystal glass

went reeling around Manhattan

tripping my eyes out

thought I saw God

though he looked sort of like Jim Morrison

with hollowed eyes and heroin holes

knitted around his veins like knobs in wood

and he said,

I created poison

long before I created you, woman

And I said

aren’t we the same?

And then, to break the silence that had fallen

over the back alley where we stood

in a mire of yellow streetlamp paste

I asked him how the angels were.

And he laughed and put a halo on my head

and tried to slide a hand up my skirt.

I came down from the high

and was hooked on the snow

that fringed Queen Anne’s lace

and other wildflowers frosting the windowsills.

I swallowed your flowers like pills

prying open bouquets

of orange plastic childproof containers.

Who do you think you are

to play creator

to poison a creature invented

with the sole purpose

of poisoning you?

I’m giving you back the violets

laced with explosives.

I will pollinate your garden with shrapnel

your blood will fill vases

and paint still-lifes and sunsets.

They will see us in a garden

made of human skin

an inside-out Genesis

a perfect inversion.

From the back we are all the same,

blank slates of skin broken by spine

tectonics of organs shifting up and down with breath.

She walks through the subways

late at night, roses between her legs

diamonds dripping from her neck like rain

and the sweet milk storing up in her chest

weighing her down. She tenses up

red fingernails tapping

against the railing, bulbs beneath her sweater marking her

as a target for swarms of bees with

midnight tongues and liqueur eyes.

She walks through the subway late

night, roses between her legs

& diamonds dripping from her neck like

rain. Sweet milk stored in her chest

weighs her down. She tenses up,

poppy fingernails tapping against

railing, bulbs below her sweater marking

her as a target for swarms of bees with

midnight tongues & liqueur eyes.

He runs to catch a train

late at night, obelisk between his legs

hair curling from his chest like a fern

swimming creatures inside him

pulling him below. He tenses up in the station

knuckles white algae on the railing

knowing he holds back tears

that would fall like diamonds if he had been born

with the chromosome that made them acceptable.

The power flickers off,

and in the darkness they exchange bodies for a single breath

sliding into each others’ skin

then realize they were always one

In the light they separate

he breathes the tears back into his head

she pulls her shirt down over the bulbs of her thighs.

Somewhere, a seed cries out for milk

the only fixed separation unveils itself

the rest just plumage and sinew

created by culture and

propagated by the liqueur eyes

and the cities we build and devour

to suffocate our sameness.

Colossus

For Benjamin Gordon

after Sylvia Plath

My brother, the sea is blue tonight, as it always is

but I would like to be the one to show it to you

as I run my fingers through your hair

but your hair is buried seaweed

and your eyes are new moons.

You are Diana's lover in distant skies, while I

kiss Helius and dream of your moon-dance, and sleep

beside my mother, who still carries fragments of your skin

inside her. we sleep on a shore of shell-pink

velvet blankets that flood us like the sea.

My brother, you hung in her for sixteen weeks

a moon in a cocoon of flesh

but you would not metamorphose

instead you blackened within the wet world

from which I too came.

You are the patriarch

the heaviest body swinging from my family tree.

you slid right through the gallows

like a circus performer through a ring of fire.

you became the rope, and planted violets on my neck.

You soared to a world redder than flame.

you never bit the serpent’s apple

never knew anything but nakedness

to you there were no gardens at all

to you there was only open sky and air.

Is the sea blue where you are

is the city fluid, melting like a clock

is all of time stretched out before you

can you see the red light seeping over all three of us

as you rock the shoulder blades inside my mother’s back.

I wonder if you would have loved her

or if you would have forsaken her as my living brother has

or if she would have forsaken you like she did my father.

shadows web the ceiling

a spider gnaws on the edges of sleep.

I sit back and see the rise and fall of my mother’s chest

can almost see your hands pushing it up

raising it like a circus tent.

you are already in the carnival of limbo

the endless burn between life and death.

You danced away from the certain decay

that comes with loving a living person.

you will live forever in the first instance of a mother’s love.

My huge ten-year-old brother, you billow

like a cigarette tossed carelessly in a barn.

You are the most alive of us all

and perhaps the moon is the true source of light,

for it will never burn out in a convulsion of flame

but will rather float in its silver bed, laughing

as the ocean laughs, with the white lips of tides.

Brush Creatures

she has often stared at this path without seeing it.

today the sun, ankle-deep in september, seeps through

the cracks of trees. something scurries in the brush

she can hear the bushes breathing,

deep gasps of air running like liquid through

their crisp summer dryness. she does not know

if it is the not-knowing or the knowing

that makes this hard to swallow

if it is the creatures, winged in gloaming

that paint the vision of the otherworld

or the surreality of this fairy trail,

its impossibility fortified by the walls of houses

half-visible through the weeds,

that call sugar to her spine and

cause her shoulders to sink. light slumps

into pillows of ferns by the dried-out river.

she draws hash marks into her leg,

thinks they look beautiful, would look more so

if blood beaded up underneath

a scarlet river to another world.

she wonders, plans to return tomorrow.

Insomnia Blues

your abilities astound you. you sleep constantly

but never shut your eyes. your movements are cyclic spinning motions.

you have been in the hallways. you have seen how it was.

you have slid down sea-green lockers amidst metal doors clanging,

locks clamping shut joints clicking together.

your exhaustion is a source of pride. you hold coffee up to your lips

feeling older, dousing your bloodstream in cafeteria-bought caffeine.

you challenge someone to comment, to express worry

at your sudden reliance on styrofoam and skim milk

no one says a word. you are following a marching band.

you have sat at the desks. you have tapped your feet.

you have looked at the door and watched the clock

perform its slow painstaking waltz, kissing the fingers

of each feminine minute, before loping onto the next slow whirl.

your lethargy amazes you. it persists

despite the second folded case of caffeine

that supercharged your particles, sent them banging and racing

against the insides of your skin, carried by liquid cacao blood.

you are drawn by magnetism down that locker to the floor.

all results from some marching band you follow

a splenda-sweet imitation. you blame it on a lack of sleep.

Certain Things Cannot Be Said Via Text

hey

(i want to talk to you for hours i want to know the furthest reaches of your mind your imagination and the vinyl darkness you create in whispered lyrics astounds me you are a fabulous windswept prairie of lavender you are the essence of bergamot you are nightshade sweet poison you are you are you are)

i hope you’re ok

(if you left you’d be taking me with you my body is laced into yours blood running in blood if you left you’d be pulling me down long shadowy alleyways if you left i’d fall further i’d catapult myself into nothingness just to keep you here)

sorry

(you wake up each morning with a stormcloud biting into your mind oh god oh god another sleepless night how do you still stand and move with such grace when there is pain cutting through your scars a visceral sensation of drowning that taunts you while death stands like a taxi driver waving you on smelling of vinegar speaking of cash and endless sun)

screw them

(if i could pick up the blood removed from your body and somehow carry it to you in my arms i would i would revamp the chemicals in your brain make them pump in all the colors of the world and send them back into you fully revived i would build you a house day after day and when the wind took it down i would build it again i would give you all my blood if it meant you wouldn’t make it leave your veins)

(i love you i love you i love you with every physical fiber with every extent of my mind over and over again the words are beating against the sides of my skull i will say them until my mouth is dry until they cut and burn themselves into the landscape and each fiber of my being until you somehow feel me screaming that even if the universe is meaningless and the world is a fabrication of our own minds and the stars are all dead i love you i have always will always love you)

Scars

(i’m writing about you again.)

once in these stanzas i could

visit cool quiet otherworlds

and cleanse and soak wounds.

in the deeps of the violent and

opulent written world gorged with blood

where skies bloomed like poppies

and rain gashed the stars, I forgot the

shivering blankness of these pale walls

and the lukewarm coil in my chest

fell apart into fragments, if for only

the length of a paragraph, a phrase.

but now you are in every sentence

and no matter if I carve them from amber or quartz,

flakes of your dead skin and ash from your cigarettes

will still be in each consonant arch

and in each vowel swoon.

now in every black sky, once a testament

to the infinity of this star-choked universe

where distant moons burn and cycle,

I see the color of the clothes you wore

when we sat under the sunrise while you smoked

and that image consumes every vision of

nordic seas or emerald jungles I used to drown in.

you stole my medium of leaving this world

now you’re the entire cosmos

that once were mine to cultivate.

so if worlds align and

you pick up my book one day

don’t be surprised to find your blood

filling the pages and beating in the seams.

Maybe the jazz age happens to us all when we’re seventeen,

maybe it’s sewn into our bloodstreams.

Having seen blood flowing from sunken submarines

and because we had an arsenal of power in our young heads,

we went bravely into the trenches of our youths.

And afterwards,

we hobble home,

fingers and toes buried in the soil of a torn-up continent.

We write burning words and dress in gold and shoot champagne

and there are parties under neon fires

where rhododendrons bloom

and we bathe in cashmere perfume

and white sunshine.

These are the tender nights of our youth, the nostalgic years we will observe

from behind fogged lenses as we descend into other, further wars, in jungles and deserts

and these are the nights we will cling to when we can hardly recall

the sweetness of distant melodies.

Summer Home

In this house that was once a mess of forest

my legs stretch longer with the shadows, and here

I am as old as the earth.

The globelike carcasses of jellyfish hide

in lunar suspension among the seaglass,

worlds above worlds.

The most beautiful among us are the most ephemeral

youth the most transient shell of them all, and I press

broken bottles against my summer skin, smelling salt

and the perfume of flowers, in an old house

by the waves where there is no kingdom, only the sea.

Resuscitation

This house is orange-gold,

and stories collect and huddle in the dust

that clings to its rafters through

winters and burnished autumns

We arrive in the summer

to songs of lupine

and to wide clear air

to drink the sound of the ocean waves

in and out, in and out.

This house has worked its way

into the skeleton of the land

and it smells like raspberry flesh

and the rapture of the strained white sun

I remember when the yard caught fire, still catches

and the cycle of the seasons laughs

and our flesh will return to the ocean

and we will repave and crack, and repeat

The blueberries ripen and shrivel on their stems

as a hint of rot tinges the cherry bowl

from the yard, we breathe in smoke

as the ocean breathes the shore

Year after year, summer after summer

we plow our way through deep concord forests

tracing roots through the gathering dark

breathing in sweetness as the waves crack.

Slate Blue

your father left his hands in the creek

the woods smell like him

the wind with your mother’s eyes

bodies imprint themselves in your skin

they will follow you from home

to alleyways and smokestack peaks

and oceans roaring with promise

and for every cape town you try to drown in

he will always have been there before

Becoming Water

There’s rain sinking through the trees

last night’s moonlight in the droplets

and I am shaking down this street, swaying

on feet stained with mud.

I am growing a small tree in my room

and I hope it isn’t sitting parched

the rain whirling across the window

while its roots grope at clay walls.

The road is morphing under ultraviolet rays

I have lived here all my life and nothing changes.

Yesterday I had mesh skin

daisy-soft like maple leaves

gold kissed the sides of my mouth

and I tasted chinaberries.

Last night I slept wrong and shape-shifted

again, fluid across nothingness.

Today my skin will turn to cement,

my eyes to silver.

I carry jade between my teeth

hungry enough to eat fire.

I want to see everything

hinted by refractions in these raindrops.

I don’t know what that makes me.

Whatever it is, I won’t be for long.

Foam-Born

you make me feel stripped,

like an orange, trembling

not yet ripe, my skin fallen to the ground

like sliced peels,

ovular, distortedly ovarian

displaying my carpel veins,

my dry throat

open to the summer heat.

i am a liquidated core

marinated by this leonine

rawness, this gold idolatry

divine in its preordination

feral in its predetermination

its biological fixation

in the human id.

i know this has been done

since microbes first

bloomed into each other

i have seen moths dance,

butterflies converge

tigerlilies enflamed, organs splayed

wet, heavy, steeped in pollen

seen the obelisk dance, the sun

dilate, the carnal seraph.

but mine is a prescient

recoiling of the limbs,

a tensing to closeness

this is my body, i want it

to mean something, to be different,

not some metamorphic inevitability,

not some sonnet

this heat will be burned in my memory

this blood will not return

to my veins

this is not a story anymore.

Islands

I balance in shades of blue

as the shore sweeps back and forth

and the tuneless sing of the wide stars

twists truths from my lips.

What once resounded inside my chest

(a tidal wave in the basin of my stomach

splashing acid back and forth) is now

hardly a memory in its abstraction.

And since then I have learned to balance the scales:

sun rites pull me to the conscious earth

and spells, jungle green and incense-heavy

keep me a perpetual traveler.

and yet you know nothing of this storm

that has festered and faded in my head

but still seeps from its grave every now and then,

and to you these confessions are new jewels or stones

that, when swallowed, sink or shine.

Sacramento

after Allen Ginsberg