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1858, my botullistic bride,
birthed from an ether of sand
and soot
sieved by mr. mason himself.
I dream of your curvature,
screwing your lid,
gripping your walls,
letting the shards you break into
become
my song.
Oh holder of things!
Collector of goods!
Keeper of secrets and pickles alike!
Oh joyous jars!
Oh jangled jars!
Oh old and new-found-fangled jars!
I use you wrong and botulism.
and you shed your skin,
cling to the pieces and consume them
like sheets of grocery-store seaweed
in the air, you become something other than
yourself, tissue-made torc-body dressed in
crown moulding and a sweatshirt
you watch some mother who is
crying to the kisses of a romance movie
in a way that makes you think she is either
loving someone or losing someone or both
and outside your window the world
is pooled below you, a pangea
who left her laundry out to dry
on a curtain rod and remembered to
forget it so she could watch it fall to beautiful
jagged pandemonium. this reminds you
suddenly of everything that never was
that you are in the middle of nowhere
wondering about nothing
that, as your exhales cloud into a
being of stale-breathed death, you are lonely
in a crowd of subliminal messaging grasping at the
diary entry of what it is you wanted to do, where
you wanted to go, how you wanted to live —
it eludes you. that you are one
of many such travelers, driving a paring knife
between the stretch marks of this wavering terrarium
and searching for a destination in the afterbirth
and that in this space where time loses
its name on a sonar-less shout,
you have only ever been trying to remember
in the fog
the American flag
ripples in the wind
like a wet dress caught
between the sea breeze
and a headless
body
I stare
rudely at her silhouette
atop the spire she
appears less crucified
and more delivered
than little me
who
breathes the dewy air
that falls from her
skin which sometimes
I pinch and tug at
and hold up to the
light
looking for some
essence of her
that unhinges
like the jaw of a snake
and plucks me
from my place
below
I stare
until she is dry
and has nothing left
to offer but the soft
flapping of something
cold and far and
nostalgic
I lift my hand
she is no taller than
my middle finger
and so I laugh
as my hot breath wanes
on my
dumb
glassy-eyed
hope
There’s cereal for you in the kitchen
If you want it;
I left it there because I know you like Cheerios.
There’s no milk, though,
Because somebody else already drank it.
There’s also no spoons,
And now that I think of it,
There’s not even a clean bowl,
But there is dish soap and dirty ones.
Flies buzz between the lights,
Greasy pots and pans pile high in the sink,
But your cereal is still sitting there on the counter like a prayer.
This is a love poem,
I think,
But it’s up to you.
I should tell you
There are mops in the cupboard
And sponges in the sink,
And I’ve been looking for someone tall enough
To reach the cleaning products on top of the fridge.
Do you have a car?
We can restock.
You and I,
We can restock everything.
the woman tanning
decomposes, melting plastic
into her chair the sun
smells like meat her bathing suit
moulds in seams to her skin like
a kiss she lies still and soaks up
radiation
tonight she claws up from the sea
of sheets, she can’t ever fit
around his ribs
to reach his back, fingernail slice
over goosebumps, a predator always
chasing the roll of a wind over
open skin, open fields
open up
tongue depressor down her
throat the retch of prey
on the operating table
how far down will you find
what she ate yesterday
she is always playing
the red card, never one to
share, she is always playing
dead, the skin of the snake
in which hides the host it has
outgrown
My playground nemesis
was hell-bent on embarrassing me,
so when I hopscotched too hard
for my first-grade lungs
and my cheeks flushed as ruby as pomegranates,
like the low hanging fruit they were,
he called them—and me
—tomato instead.
Turns out shame, not just cardio,
turns me bright, bloody, brassy red
because when his syllables hit my ears
they branded me,
dyed my skin fuchsia
to match the juice box stain
Mom couldn’t quite scrub off my cardigan.
Turns out he didn’t have to tell me
(he did, of course)
that I kept getting red and more red and, yes, redder.
I felt almost feverish
as oxidization ate away
at my face and neck.
Melting right into the blacktop,
I hated him and hopscotch
and my red-hot blood.
Turns out my father is also a tomato.
Irish genes must make extra special arteries
from our hearts to our cheeks
so the blood pumps right up into our faces.
Something like that.
One Thanksgiving he told a story we’d heard over and over,
and this time my all-American aunt teased,
echoed the way he’d said “garage.”
Ga-rage, not grrage.
He turned tomato red,
and I saw in him
the brassiness that first grade made me hate.
Warmth again kindled up inside me
but this time flickered
across to the head of the table
where he sat, still more than a little pink.
This time some species of pride
had crept up on me,
restained me even deeper,
and I hoped he felt its glow.
i rode back up the hill in a dream today and snorted cocaine off my knee
with you. the memories come in waves. i know this isn’t one of them but
on the way back down i’ve got a six-pack in my bike basket & you’re steady
behind me. the sunset lasts forever and we’re talking about driving
upstate for the beaches cause it’s summertime. you look at me like
you know something and say biking’s good for your core, you know.
i know.
my dreams usually make a lot of sense & i guess i didn’t
have enough material for what happens next. i’m at a party
and you won’t kiss me but you make excuses to touch
me. nobody hears you whisper bullshit into my ear. the
music’s loud and i can’t move.