- January 2006
They had to paint little squares -
Derivations of red, orange, warm ochre.
The split started - cools, blues, violet lights.
She found a vessel in each half, an earthy organ.
Something organic. She fleshed it out.
They were supposed to use a thick medium, but
She ran thin and green cubes clustered, ugly.
She blended neutrals and saw herself there -
Split between studies, flesh tones muddy upset.
She should have wiped it away, but stayed,
Liking the lukewarm mistake her body made on the canvas.
- Spring 2005
She thinks she aches for the ocean,
Something roiling, vast and murky
Like she saw in an old photo once,
Hung in a cheap frame on her
Grandfather�s basement wall.
He was in the coast guard once, and
She liked to know the ship that
Cut the fluid black hills had rocked
Him to sleep in another time, in a
Life before alcohol and sickness and
Lost faith.
He had once been her age, weathered by the
Spray of salt, the taste of immense sky, and when
She sees him now with his plastic cup, quiet,
She likes to think he remembers water and
How storms took away the horizon.
She wants to live his photograph, to
Ride that ship, cut the shifting blackness.
But she lives in Iowa, and the fields
Don�t roll high enough for her ache, and the
Storms she weathers never lose the land.
- Fall 2004
She had my puppy killed
I was twelve and fat and sobbing
His honey hair, clean and soft
My arms tight across
His tight abdomen
I told her I was scarred for life
She was sitting on the couch and silent
My face serious and thoughtless-spiteful
Her arms tight across her chest
She wrote me a letter
I was twenty and thin and sobbing
Her lines neat, cutting and full
My arms tight across my knees
"...you all think I'm a monster who kills dogs - and has no heart at all..."
My puppy was deranged, violent
I was twelve, heartbroken and dramatic
I am twenty and still a fat little girl
Who wants to hold her first puppy and
Sob into her mother's soft, honey hair
- Summer 2004
Summer Shape-Up
She walks thin roads
winded, wounded. Ruined.
She avoids the kitchen,
dreams of sliding, writhing
into thick delight.
Her toes blister, bother
and beg for less friction.
Her mind begs fiction.
She cannot write yet, no creation,
energy in misapplication.
Her paints look too shiny-delicious.
She'll paint again, when her
hip bones and wrist bones jut
like so many moraines,
like the winded hills
she walked to get there.
June 30
- Spring 2004
-
My mother freezes her placentas,
burying them after two or three years
of perplexing cold.
A pebbled, earthy afterbirth,
streaked or steaked or frozen,
once held the purest poetry.
I wonder if I can find where
she buried mine, my first nutrition,
my elemental throb.
I'd dig it up and watch it,
a moist heap under some chosen tree,
for signs of my mother's poetry.
- Fall 2003
- He would be a reptile.
Already his eyes are
cold logic-green.
He leads with shoulders,
darting looks.
He delights in old bones
and doesn't flinch
to picture his
death sprawl.
-Age of the Dinosaurs, fall 03
