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.

Citrus

Line me up like grapefruit peels on the rim of a bathtub.
Pink acid seeping lazy into your gaping pores,
Sink one bitten thumb into the rind and taste the split,
Hear the tear. I want my flesh to tug away in tiny cotton threads
That stick to your palms and dry hard.

There will always be numbers. Let me sour a little on your tongue,
Get caught between your teeth. I want to linger on your fingers,
Acidic, distasteful. I'll slide unnoticed in molecules down into the water
That marinates you, dribble down your chin to pool in the juicy basin
Of your bellybutton. My seeds will forever come as shocks.

Line me up like grapefruit peels on the rim of a bathtub.
To teeter, to curl in on myself, to gently mold.

Listen

If you wake up too early, listen for it.
The quiet constant thuds squeezing in your ears.
The humming peace beneath the skin of bath water.
Listen for the pieces of sheets that stayed cool.

If you wake up too early, listen for the bleaching light.
There is a weight in your bones.
Your blood a sluggish pudding, nestling them,
Listen for the stillness in your bones.

Listen for it, if you wake up. The sound of air.
The absences that pillow you. Listen to the grey ebb,
The heft of space against your skull.

Volunteer

"Wouldn't you like to make Susan into a brisket?
I've been iron-deprived."
I don't know Susan, or Ellen, this thickset
Black-clad woman who crowds the office
With a nicotine cloud and the vacuums in her eyes.
Last week it was that she needed dark chocolate,
That everyone knows to bring her dark
Chocolate, or her father will come. Her father,
Do I know her father? I should know her father.
She knows her father. The dark chocolate
Will get her high, give her that buzz, you know?
You know she needs iron, what it's like to live
Without iron. What it's like to live without.
Brown sugar, three hundred degrees. Just shove her in
The oven, fourteen hours, fifteen hours,
Whatever it takes. Delicious. The onions will
Caramelize, will melt in the juices. The meat
Will fall off the bones. The smooth, white,
Relief-tender bones. Into her mouth, into her
Open, eager mouth. Her father will kill me.
He's done it before. She needs that rush--
At least 70%, or he's coming. Everyone
Knows. Her hands never leave her pockets.
I laugh. I suggest iron supplements, a burger.
She can't; "I'm a freak." There's something
In them. Humans. No need for a fork.

Paper Lanterns

Barring egregious meter errors and acrobatic rhymes, this is a sonnet corona. It's a form I actually discovered today, and the circularity immediately appealed. To that end, the reader really can start wherever s/he chooses and go from there. I'm very much hoping it marks some kind of break in this endless, writingless fever.

1

She's five, all wet and pink and furrowed brow--
Some detail of my conversation failed
To please; she's flailing, her tears have just now
Begun to slow. They crawl down trails I've sailed
Along all year, through months of baths and colds,
And know well how to navigate. It's time
For Bubble Land, that magical old world
Of tenuosity, suspension, slime,
Where men float languid, women effervesce,
The children shine free of gravity.
This universe of suds we coalesce
With wands, with breath, with our love of pretty.
The bubbles coat with soapy residue
Our tongues--we stick them out, flag-resolute.

2

Our tongues--we stuck them out, flag-resolute,
To fill each other's mouths, particular
In salivation, careful to dilute
The ways we two lay perpendicular.
If for you I was difficult, too lost
In plot, in history, too bound to ghosts,
I'm sorry. Forgetting carried a cost
I hadn't paid, have yet to pay. Your hosts
Of bedtime parables, the mountain dust
That gathered on your shoulders glittering
In sodium lamp evenings free of "must,"
All these make of my thoughts a littering.
Our dust, the warm circles with which I'm lined
Collect like silt in the pools of my mind.

3

Collect like silt in the pools of my my mind,
Time. Make bearable this process of choice,
This thumbing endless options, rings of pine
I can't begin to count, to know, to voice.
I'm compassless. My maps all lead to swamp.
Failing to draw I am drawn, contoured, shaped,
Delineated, alien, a lump
Too willing, retrospectively raped.
A bubble of a boggart, really. These
Lithe puppet strings, this long parade of eyes
Are mine, invited. Should I wish to seize
Sweet agency, perhaps I'd customize.
I need enough dark to dispel the haze,
The simplicity of sidewalks in Mays.

4

The simplicity of sidewalks in Mays
Clutters in our Novembers when you stretch
My neurons like taut trapezii, daze
These tired synapses, send music to drench
Dendrite branch-lengths in song. Your existence,
Warming my eyes with incense sparks, shivers,
Lights fires in my toes. Any resistance
Dies, inanities I trap cold in verse.
Dismiss lethargy as hesitation,
Take the wobbling in my knees, like a sneeze
That never comes, as justification
For pause. I can never just taste the breeze.
When tomorrow you search but do not find,
Recall that reason need not require rhyme.

5

Recall that reason need not require rhyme,
That the vast spaces between stars do not
Define the light they shoot as wayward dimes
To pickle in our minds. Yesterday, caught
Like an iris dilated on the hook
Of vagrant love, I watched you sleep. Your lungs
Glowed, paper lanterns pressed into a book
Too often read; your ribs were ladder rungs.
Today I cannot breathe your breath. My limbs
Close doors at every joint. Today, frozen,
Each new contact shows words gone from our hymns.
Ice melts the exits I hadn't chosen.
Unchecked, our veins braid, rope-like, hard to see;
There is an ache in you which aches in me.

6

There is an ache in you which aches in me,
If more quietly. When ringed with gaps, with
Blank places strung between our ears like beads,
We crave voices. Noise cuts across the width
And breadth of nights too thick for simple sleep.
We cloister ache in laryngeal folds,
Doze in chasmal molar cradles, sink deep
Into the eupnea and mucus holds
Of familiar conversation. Silence
Dogs us, persistent, grimly lingering
In mirror shards that do quick violence
To our diaphragms. If I have nothing
Else, I wish to fill each chance abeyance:
Let this be the bright birth of my cadence.

7

Let this be the bright birth of my cadence;
Let the pulsebeats that clot my cuts collect
In this new impluvium, a nascent,
Unplumbable sea. I do not elect
To dangle forever among eeny,
Meeny, miney, and mo, to lottery
My life in quarter flips. Let me be any
Thing intentioned. I'll bottle misery
Against the storm of fluke that gathers here
In this cavernous vacuum. To decide,
To choose, to know that in me grows sincere
A reed-boned woman, slowly calcified.
In my soft spine her spine straightens, though now
She's five, all wet and pink and furrowed brow.