Gutter-leaf rain is clack-smacking
a basement sidewalk somewhere,
in a hornbook corner,
spiders are holding rust-lid
jarred tomatoes hostage
on penumbra skinned petrified shelves,
as child-hid, glyph-deaf church tinsel.
Joseph would take the gun out
of his mouth long enough
to hear these things,
but swollen vanilla sun has rested
in the gordian brain,
a moon-fisted,
bushy water bellowing.
Windows fingernail blue,
color of snow at 1am,
rain still tap-scratching;
I’d hold your hand if pillows
were not your ocean washed birds.
(From my poetry collection, Raindogs in the Sun.)
This stainless steel drawer room
is a cold flame-spilling.
We have been everywhere but
where we are now, Jacob,
storm-naked and lost in 1000
paper-clipped theories
on razor white war.
Bone-empty ghosts haunt our syllables.
Laid out in crooked rows,
they rot like silver fish
in winter sun, a slow-cold burning,
killed once and now twice.
We cannot live beside our
dying/bird/war/words/
watching trumpet-glass men
lay on their backs and strum
picasso-tree mandolins in frozen
room corners, smiles blue,
teeth machine red and chattering oddly.
Jacob, we have been everywhere
but where we are now.
(From Beautifully Thin Oneonta Moon, a chapbook co-written by myself and Donna Kuhn.)
sophia feels the need to cry,
watching crows gather like horse-rain,
liquid under telephone lines.
she needs their witchcraft--
they have her curtain-drawn face,
she sees the rest of her life
in their split-pressure mouths.
sophia remembers being burned at 9,
staring like water stones
at yellow sun; how her arm
was almost beautiful before the pain,
as bone-cored birds falling,
gray sculptures singing with dead eyes.
a zebra-coal sky is listening
like a hostage for god,
is tangled fish in tar,
rubber-trembled,
long, scream-dark music.
sophia burns quiet like perfumed thighs,
one coma hand tracing her face,
chasing chatter-asthma
ghosts through brown hair.
~For T~
Shannon was born a bird once,
before he learned the scratching color
of things; was born when blue
was still violin-star orange,
kudzu storms green and yellow,
beautifully thin,
blind hair-shoulder painting.
He came to see me on a Wednesday
three years ago, green eyes cannibals
craving soup, fingernails vampire skin-harps---
came to me crying and laughing about
yellow spiders and diamond-eye voodoo.
He told me that some people dance
like kitchen drawer scissors,
survive horse hands and bowel-crunch
seas by licking the sun’s spooned
neck and heat. He told me what it
was like to have once been born
as a small bird falling against
nothing but piano air.
(First published in Aesthetica Magazine.)
Your electric paint lips are eating
a vertigo fire, Angela, your city
is eating suburbia; and you twirl,
singing in a fork machine
garden of ghosts.
Apple leaves and alto branches
are wailing like dogs in pain,
I am your milk-cup radio-drizzle
suffering, swelling crack-red
in the November belly of a bird.
Sylvia’s bees are aluminum fish
on the other side of your cities door,
pain sex bluing, chewing men
into word splinters.
Can you hear the raindogs screaming, Angela?
Can you hear them lapping an orange
rope-knot sun in your chimerical city?
November is clock-tapping,
the city is a garden of ghosts,
you and I are ash and electric lips.
(First published in Underground Window.)
Vincent and I, sat with whiskey and cigarettes,
spoke about orange rain of August,
Joseph in trembling bronze,
frozen and wailing, how to open
aluminum hall-chatter doors of the dead.
Family secrets kept as lame dogs,
mudfish staircases and stagnant closets,
brassy snap-tin locusts with sandpaper
mouths coma-burning green fields
and palsy fathers; everything that tastes
of bruised skin kicking against painted
moons like hookworm palette milking.
Vincent and I, laughed and coughed while
watching spiders carve dusty shelves into
a bleeding, colors like broken God-spoke fingers,
dying things that dance in the ears.
(First appeared in Scrivener’s Pen.)
The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
W. H. Auden
Angela sits mesh smoking, drinking lost
tea stains from her empty glass,
brown bird hands making ten
fingers seem like twenty-four.
A still child born in her every word,
she rattle-pops split-skirt letters,
ravenous fish statue words,
crimson bullet questions. I think about
vegetable soup and cannibals,
two hungers I should have already used
together in a war poem.
to Joseph? Is he still spiders in the mouth,
clack-smacking rain? Is your little
boy grown still a yellow twitching horror?
Her hack-ear questions sound like so
much mud drinking, six feet down
bitter-fisted whoring.
(Nominated for the 2004 Pushcart Prize For Poetry.)
You came home in October,
screaming of paper birds
crawling across crumb-glass
table tops, hands red trumpet
playing cigarette horrors,
faith based on hating yourself.
You spent days telling me the steak
knife sky was getting faster,
like stick drawn letters under
water caught sand,
hungry breathing of a secret orgasm.
I don’t think anymore;
I know an apple tastes the
frigid blue of winter doors,
that your mouth is a hazel
bruising, rain-cotton yellow,
something like sugar and hair.
(First appeared in Texas Poetry Journal.)
~For Don~
What beautiful shatter-diamond
photograph do we make of a diminished thing?
Elizabeth window boxed herself
for future dead sisters to view at their leisure;
a snap-jacket lesson of how many
winters spent creating a dream of gull
swollen seas and crow speaking fields,
it takes to hang black curtains beneath
heart swallowed eyes.
She phoned Sylvia one rainy
Monday afternoon, let the phone
ring 126 times too early,
before breathing a lung
choking into the bell jar.
One more ring, and Sylvia would
have opened her devoured eyes;
and the moon and sun would
have turned over and back again.
(First appeared in Texas Poetry Journal.)
ms. browning coughed and talked, drank the city
and chicken soup from her asthma window
above steaming concrete-rust seas,
aluminum and glass barking dogs.
her conversations were directed toward
small gray birds painting sex-music
tornadoes above spider-carcass power lines,
last week’s sunday dragging against february’s
urine-
breath-
uterus-
bullet alley.
143 years old, her mind and hand her
illness and lung, yellow cavity scratching.
she avoided her cat and gas stove,
two needy mouths she could no longer control.
at least that’s what her sister sylvia
used to write, in cornbread and bean
letters that smiled and died.
(First appeared in my chapbook, Simple Truths and Coughing Things, co-written with Patricia Gomes.)
your atlantic birds are incarnations
of a milk-winter god,
glass-mouthed where you step
through neon lipstick urine colors,
a nakedness that whores sunday children.
why did you leave her dead on
the ground? bullet-gypsy yellow-crack
leaves down slipping,
cold finger-cut bleeding,
clumsy young voice wandering.
you, empty-pocket parking lot walking,
a fuck-belly ceramic storm.
so, dead, your bourbon jesus mouth
a drop of crying candle-wax.
kneel on my hold-on-water-oak chest,
there are cigarettes under the back step---
you inhale, a dirt-lip breath
scrapping winter-flowers to white.
(First appeared in Underground Window.)