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.