crank operated love songs

you hate when I write
because back-to-front makes you ill
like the anenomes on 32nd street
or the smell of fulton market
I swallow  leftover bird-words
praising the patterns of lint
and the dancing hives you create
and the war-torn children you train
and the spines you twine
and tangle
and wrangle
I call you motherfucker
as a term of dear meat
the cease and desist hasn't stopped
you from collecting my hair
to braid back your sister
into contour line drawings
or tea leaves

smoke houses and you

venison prays at the night time
kneeling on honeycombs, crackled and whispering
they ask the skies for larger antlers
for that kool and the gang album they never got
and for the divorce to be a joke.
in earl gray lights, the tan man passes a note,
silly dear, you are only a woman.

educating on the transatlantic tunnel

we sell courses on weekends
and how to be humanic
but enrolled humans peer and pear
(which are my favorite fruit)
and deers are feared
or worshiped
i forget
but the russian mules know
four
and six takes the wheel
to the break in the map
because cartographers fell into heroin
and the atlantic shoreline
is dressed as a wake
and the floral endangerments
smell vaguely vaginal
and cinnamon
like when we left that corn
husk doll in the sun too long
and no one trimmed my nails properly
because daddy told me
only the real ones see diggers
when antiobiotics are currency
for the women with both
and then men have done
and your face cracked first.

blasphemy on the radio

i am lost
  with walls of walking stairs
    in a place where we forgot to
      how to whistle
and your mother is a marionette
moded and molded
to chips chipping metallic lice spouses
and soup tastes of motoring mint in your one girlfriend's braid
but no beetles eat berries
and snouts are the envy

I'm baaaaaack

wow, so it has been over a year since I have posted anything which is terrible!
I have gone through the longest dry spell my writing has ever seen I think, but have a renewed sense of commitment. I am even looking into an open mic night next week to try to re-inspire myself.

I will posting a new piece in a few minutes!

western records and my septic harddrive

the man lied about the ten gallon
hats that held only six
and johnny was rooting in
the scrap metal looking
for my graphing calculator
but i couldn't stand the concerto


it was cotton and eight after the evening
and mark is pulling at my hip skin
but I am busy rerehearsing my funeral
but the music is off and the foxtrot is wronged
so bathe me in coffee to forget the town
because I will


I am setting your pinned moths free
but that cat from last year
is chewing on their dust
and I am not pleased
but tin cans are planted
and whisper it is 1962

rain echoed blues sounds

whiskeyborn to the mommas
yester-ed, yes sir
and my dreams are lying of
curls-slain and tin can impatiens
grow out loud

you find romantics
in the bagel halves thrown
to children in shells
pink and eroding
like the long weekend

tattoo your face in
my armpit
then I will always know home
and when they sell me
to chickens, they can read
of the wrong

speak softer
into rain filled jugs
for my mouth cant stand the sound
click one and
two
and two
and static

hate you yet

you stand at twelve and twelve and 2
too tall
from me and
i think i love you
because i haven't learned
to hate you
yet the birds
and the turns
and the yellow cried
for that maple syrup smell
fades from the pillow
casing the one earring
i pierced your ear with
right.
was wrong
and swelling
tell me again the story of ours

"that summer you lay between my collar bones" (newest)

that summer you lay between my collar bones


you, the smell of potato rosemary bread
warm in my sheets baked
and twisted
like tiny whirlpools in the mattress
Maine in springs and foam

me, hands bathed in vanilla
extract and garlic still creeping
from my finger pads
orange rinds sleeping under my
nails to hold your soles to shoes

light honey-limps through the broke
glass pane taped with news print
we take turns reading the
stories aloud
april 14th 2003, same day
lasting forever (until it rains)
and that one story about the dog
and the house fire is always
our favorite

loftily truthed

sew speak so speak the     truth they tell you

in this stop watch    pocketed by the Cuban
crises and that gum stuck in your hair
(try peanut butter) but mom is crying
from neighbor boys fructose induced bottled
sex drive to the store because she can’t
find milk and            you steal the twenty
to buy those sneakers or gym shoes or
whatever the dialect tech tics told me to tell
you to chew on before the procedure
where they will     imbed that sing bird
in under outside the epidermis
then you will sing it
not speak it
it truth

poem from last week

it was a tuesday after a laundry day and you and luella and elvis and and. that was the crowd plus the beaded eye from that blinking doll you carry in your breast pocket like a miniature fennec fox whispering lines from children's tales, grim and genderized like the little blue boy in all his teenage waste and the intravenous literature was not enough to update his thesaurus. and that is when elvis dialed out on the peeling blue rotary phone with the numbers that spelled l-o-s-t-y-o-u. i painted my face white and left my face on every pillow in the house. i found you in the kitchen swallowing your fist and luella is eating faded polaroids of me from two summers ago, you know the one in my underwear in front of the old oak tree by the lake where your parents first met?      you replaced that memory with the equations for your geometry on the twenty-ninth and seventh and i sing dolly parton songs backwards in that faded buckskin costume we borrowed from the children's choir three thanksgivings ago and elvis is laughing on the empty reciever. thanks for calling me slugger is the note sprawled across your breast bone with the wetted ash from the bottom of my purse, but i used the freckle under your nipple to dot the i, after that night where i followed you home and it never almost happened and i wait at the bus stop with the woman and her three children dressed as skeleton ducklings tied together with twine. she whispers 'laundry day' but it is may.

phantom minnow

moon boned and winter
faced. a cichlid die each
snowflake in the arms
of a tramp-
oline like that Amazonian
fish that nestled
home in your urethra

I am parasitic

there was that once
and you were singing
the one about the
roller skates

but I was swimming
and stealing the odd numbers
and and you

stole that tank
from the man with the fraying
mustache and he
ate raisins from my
hands for he the chickadee
went fishing
for phantom limbs




This is the poem from the first week of the project with Adam. We are picking a  "subject" and each writing a poem in response to that. This was written last week. I might post this week's poem later..

just wrote&shared

said ten weeks and dry milk

nipple-faced and monster childed
eat trains like tunnels
like a hitchcock still of sex
but wrong
or er
and they will climb aboard my back
at least until may
when i unload the disinfectant
and the g-day will eat me


it will be a softer appetite
and i will avoid the lungs
on wednesdays
and always bellow
like ella and billie
but will be eating stamps if unproven
to you
or them

hide your antlers today, the dress
code is business
but my windows are not cleaned

re-working

I am trying to write again. After a long dry spell....I am trying to be better about writing more often.
 Adam and I have decided to try to write weekly responses to each other...which involves picking a topic and then us each writing a poem based off that and then emailing it to each other to review.

Last week's topic was "phantom minnow" and this week I decided on "rotary telephone."

shoe ties like lamps

tumult walked dainty like

in line

lined by powder

where you left that one time

and I was supposed to wait

but three and two and ten

passed

and you hadn’t

but

hey, etta did you leave

your hair here

hear

I cried it to the wash

room

whom the lady asks a dollar

her name is pearl

or u

trance like and staffed

my mother

asked you to dine

yes

-terday

but your tea drops

had made an appointment

first

sleeping in wet cement

was prescribed

to the woman

whoo

pigeon-eyed and

fringe banged

like lamps.

for MyGoose

empty breasted face panes are talking to me about options. collaborative counseling and my you
is in the room, but i asked for the bandages to be removed. the bandages removed. are you
dancing to wards that spirit gummed hussy with the black fur when all i could afford was the blue
and you never wanted me the same. i wanted to eat you to the spring hours, but i think you lost
my number, i could send it again? again, you wink calloused fingers and i collapse in between the binding
string on the composition notebook. you hide your ticket stubs there. of all the movies that made you
think of me before we met. can we meet again?

flavored development

Eating giants on cornflakes while the sugar dives for oysters who hid the last radio show under their tongues tasting the saccharine and spearmint. I search for gelatin air waves, but I think I am landlocked. And drowning. Like a salt coated slug. Pink germaniums. why do I only write when my cardboard surroundings crumple to the wind’s hand? the internet reads sentiments like praying mentis eating at innards. I quickly try to close my abdomen but the bike ride is too long and I drag behind. where were you with my lunch bag, when I was choosing to scalp baby birds and writing addendums to endings that were never mine. I am thinking about a drug habit. But my veins leak rhino beetles and mothers cry on hill sides. Where every side if green. But the void is what. Until I stop having trouble growing antlers, but 13 years of puberty eats inside out and fawns have moved on. You are grammatically seizing and the foam blinds my hands so we sit spit conjunctions and sentence diagrams like back inked tattoos.

dear hair, grow faster.

that is all I can say.

new poem thing:

hey vestal. i though about the yesterday and you should shorten the hearspeak. i can only taste the jargon when i got to that one porch where you ripped your shoe lace, but i don't seem to remember the shade. madison was smaller this year, shrinking the porn shops to doll houses, in a child love sort of way. my mother will delete this. vestal call me two ten. and then.
and then.

just now

just wrote this, at work. I actually am kind of excited about it. I am reading a LOT lately, so that is good.





sometimes your face looks like a horse
when i forget your long vowels
and long eyes
drawing out each b
blinked
and i forget about your elbows
the angles that speak
to each of my rib bones
about the menial items
like weather next week
and the girls on the block
with too long legs

the fourth

wrote this yesterday on the bus on the way to fireworks...



when graveyard suns
lick my face
yesters sane into
the background and
I want to wear you home.

your reaction to
my arm length
left me
lingering for rained feathers.