Apoptosis

Human cells die in one of two ways.
There is necrosis--where the cell bursts

in response to injury or chemical attack in a toxic

cascade, littering fragments in its fluid wake

that become Alzheimic plaques or scar tissue

trapping space in immobile parenthesis--

and apoptosis. From Greek 'apo'--off, from, (without,)

and 'ptosis,' or falling, specifically in the way

leaves do from trees, like scabbed and loosened tissue

bordering old cuts: fifty billion cells a day burst

in the adult body, tiny supernovas, to wake

open-mouthed sister-cells that recycle the non-toxic

apoptotic debris. This programmed toxicity

is woven into the cell's genetic fateline, destined parenthesis,

funerary catalyst for the waking

of foetal hands into separated fingers, the way

lilies fall open and spread in the sun. These bursts

scatter the seminal stardust of new tissue.

Similarly, of course, self. A trillion cells form the tissue

that folds into an adult body, creasing to allow every toxic,

violent gesture, each uncertain thought, before it bursts

with a fragility that passes undetected, a parenthesis

lasting two thousand days, and falls away.

This can change what it means to wake

to recognize the gritted eyes waiting

in the mirror above the sink, to reuse a tissue,

to love a human who will be new in most ways

within six years. Suicide becomes the killing of another, less toxic

possibility, perhaps unbound, less prone to closed parenthesis.

In a way, every contract bursts;

galaxies hang suspended in shifting body-shapes, bursting

at constant rates, silent, infinite, to wake

fresh constellations. The hugging grip of parenthesis

hardens into frames for dead thoughts lost beneath new tissue

burgeoning, unburdening, rinsing away the toxic

after-taste of time. This is the way

the past bursts, membranous, tissue-

thin, a closed-casket wake for toxic

clinging parenthesis, a forced birth of unknown ways.

We Spend Too Much Time in Kitchens

Over oatmeal and "butter" tubs I watch you turn

following the play of sun across your forehead,

the photons' slow drip into the loose ring of your collar.

The kettle comes to a boil, you glance up,

and the edge of the spoon is sharp, suddenly,

against the roof of my mouth.

I become conscious of the metal,

cheap, gummed with oats and saliva,

the hard click of it on teeth.

Sometimes when you lean at certain angles against our doorframes,

I feel myself a linen thread against the thin ease of your chest.

We fight about my leg cramps

and the onrushing demise of the global economy,

about the comparative merits of sliced bread.

I want to touch your arm

just above the elbow, where it's smooth.

I want to lick the corner of your nervous lower lip.

I like best the nights when you stay up banging on your laptop keys,

breathing hard, your toes staticking the dark.

Their sock-swathed softness as they twiddle,

restless, nearly drowns the discordance of your belief in God

with the perfect width of your too-tightly trousered hips.

Silence dips and shifts between the keyboard's plastic ratatats

and pools hot in your fists as you break to chop carrots,

leaving them to cool beside the day's potato shreds.

You drop the knife. I doze.

The fury of this silence stands firm and frictional against my back

with the barky permanence of trees.

Thirty Days

(It's a friggin' sestina, y'all.)

"Some men say an army of ships
is the most beautiful thing on the black earth,"*
but in this interminable lake of a month,
your lap is the beauty I want, the loose
and sparsely haired skin that coats your thighs,
the wrinkled unsuspecting ease of you asleep.

At the bottom of the teapot honey drowns, asleep,
an inch deep, thicker beneath the tea than sunken ships,
and I grip a mug between my denimed thighs
just tight enough to burn. You burn me,^ so the earth
piles in a ring around my digging hands, mealy, loose,
until they reach dirt cool enough to soothe the scorch. Only a month.

In the thirty steaming mugs that have measured out this month,
porous bits of citrus peel boil themselves asleep
amongst the cloves, and I find a loose
beauty that rivals armies of ships
in the wet pale rings they ghost onto my tabletops; black earth
pocks the scratched backs of my caffeinated thighs.

There is a beauty coarse and mensual in thighs,
the press and sponge of them from month to month,
the way they bleach through winter and bruise black as earth
when bounced around sandboxes. Yours splayed when asleep,
spreading sheets between them wide as water between harbored ships.
Lying beside their dark bulk, I liked to let my thoughts go loose.

Loosely I bury my toes in the damp chill dirt, loose
beneath the carbon, loose in the shelter of grubs. My thighs
ache a little in their muscled stillness, hovering like ships
above the holes that dot this plot of earth, the slow work of a month.
Something in me begins to fall asleep,
going limp and lax in the hollow earth.

Each of these thirty days I have waited for a little earth,
a mooring that with its murky permanence will set me loose
from the tidal pull of your lap, the perfect crescent you form asleep,
the ever-open invitation of your thighs.
With an abundance of tea and dirt I've stained the wake of this month
a putrid gold, and dreamt of submerged ships.

I'm asleep. The earth
sets our ships in teacups, loose,
drowning thighs and month.








*Sappho, Fragment 16
^Sappho, Fragment 38

Rush Out

I want words.
This way, I just bleed through.
There has only been
one conversation,
vein split at fifteen,
our aortas twinned.

Your finger waist wastes in me,
a wraith consumed,
my jaw blown by every flailing limb.
The hunger in your hands
crusts to my bones as barnacles to rock,
as lichens crust to spongy bark
and calcify.

Evenly we'll distribute saltines to geese,
shredded lettuce to the warring gulls.
The rest I rest with you.
We pour, drowsy,
into muddled blankets on the floor
and crack joints, join pelvises,
our bowls of noodles growing chill.

Anatomy of a Fish Hook

He taught me to fish. It fit:
His red fingertips stretched a net out from my palm's center,
shooting treble hooks to jostle amongst themselves in my gut,
a bladed amoeba punching pores into the acid membrane.

I snapped the twig into perfect fragments.

"Have you ever been molested?"
This, a question for clipboard forms,
the boiled Y/N of waiting room rape.
It trips from the throat of droning intake
without a space for adjectives or expletives,
falling in white sheets to muffle ligaments.
When he forced them out onto the library patio,
the words pushed apart our wicker rocking-chairs,
hung heavy in the afternoon.
A virgin cowering pink beneath a whore,
a child facing her first double-dog dare,
I felt the hooks glow.

Their mesenteric heat hovered in clouds between the pancakes
stacked to fatten our infrequent afternoons,
curdling the frost of my Vanilla Bean.
It cauterized patches of my stomach lining,
my fledgling conscience curled into a fetus crushed up
against the inside of my forehead
and coughed itself quietly to death.

I began to have trouble sleeping.
The phone's buzzing slid up my thighs
when scotch moved him to stutter about hugging,
wanting to start, being unable to stop.
I acted my fourteen years and let the euphemisms
glide into their proper slots.

When the bridge shook,
his hand on my back was tongue to flesh.
His wife's placid knife-eyes and the skin
that pimpled beneath her khakis
clipped the glances we strung out as monofilament
over fast-breaking blintzes.

In increments our language grew taut,
snapping in tandem with the flies knotted to their nylon lines.
I splintered into lucent scales.

At Ease

The magic:
If you hold your wet hand up to a candle in the dark,
it steams,
The watersmoke shimmering up to mingle with your breath.
I have
A friend who snores.
She knows
To lie with me in the morning beneath the ballooning curtains
without speaking,
Knows what it is to swallow her own head.
We drift,
Loose-eyed, lolling, resting on placid stomachs.
Sometimes, blinks.
I wonder what it is to line up the blood like attentive soldiers,
the endless
Rigid parallels of cited tables.
Dawn cracks
And sparks in the dimples of her pupils every few weeks;
I sigh
Into another lake of a month.
She snores.

Overwhelmed

I will unfold my heresies
In sheets, in droves of threads
That pool at my knees.
This litany of faults
And drives unquenched
Crunch in around my eyes,
Crush the rings of my temples
Into a massy pulp.
I shake at night, asleep,
Held in place beneath the weight
Of feathers,
Suspended somewhere on a string
Between my thirsty mattress
And the skin of the moon.
Oily. Faltering.
There is a tenderness that lights
Along my nerves
And flickers among the lists,
Casting shadows over every ounce
Of time that wallows, wheyish,
To curdle in my mouth.