Poems

the Atlantic’s salt sting intolerable. No doubt

drops of the Great Lakes still flash through

my guts. When I told the boy freshwater is also

called sweetwater, he didn’t believe me.

from meat-fragrant slits
in our speech patterns,

where a way of seeing home,
smeared on walls with elbow blood

How jokes are gone and empty is my mouth
Long, green-eyed scavengers shall pick my eyes,
Purple fish play hide-and-seek,
And I shall be song of thunder, crash of sea

But of what color?' - 'Rose-red,' Love first chose,
Then prayed - 'No, lily-white - or, both provide;'
And Flora gave the lotus, 'rose-red' dyed,
And 'lily-white' - the queenliest flower that blows.

hill I have taken a title out
of  the love for you jumping
down the clear shaft of  your eye
you would not know how long I
paused when writing this

your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

On the bike path, a bunny's body and blood
where the head should be. Something
has torn off its foot, something has eaten
its heart, its entrails frozen in snow.

Like witchgrass effacing a wheat bed gradually a ghoulish shadow

swallowed me from the earth up—

curtained ankles stalk thighs & belt line haunted every golden

region—unhinged behemoth

It is midnight in the bottom and the winter
is an embolism. Coverlets of frigid civility.

I carry the seeds in my beautiful jaws
for thc milkweed of malcontent.