SAUDADE REVIEW

Loon, Trip light fantastic.  Trolls shading forest gate. Beat the drums,

Fiasco

BUBBLE

Amber frog squats on the patio table, bubble quivering in his throat. Turn off the searchlight. Lie down in silence with your imaginary hands holding me, fresh rush of silver between my legs. Tonight, I am a glass ready to spill. Concentrate, I whisper, the word a thought bubble filling with you.

COMPRESS

1.

to methodically unbuild a sandcastle (verb).

Turned angle straying out into the meadow. No need to listen for doors opening –

AFFAIR [in minor] Here’s Medieval alchemy: the blending of two bodies but  discordant hearts that won't align the beast with two backs but one spine adorned in beads of mercury.

THE CAVE OF ANTI-F**R 

we crawled inside a sort of comfort bomb. we can be here. we can be here for hours. we can talk about trees we cannot climb. we can avoid the f-word. we can shed  our timid sweaters. nothing to look at but the tops of our own knees. i assume you are etching the same hieroglyphs  into yours. and i am a warrior. you are too noble to require tears. we can beat the panic back with our bare hands, we are  growing tougher than stones.

PREAL GOOD

the girl replies having been asked How’re you doin’⎯ rarely pretty or real ...princesses, however, are pretty daddy is handsome monsters is real

EROTICIZE (verb): to turn skin to water

ODE

  oh, to sleep soundless, to foster empty space like an orphan, to dream dark or not dream at all, to now know, to not know, the small valuable things of the night.

  TO FIND HIM IN THE ELEPHANT'S ROOM

To discover a heart in the middle of the floor in the middle of your heart. The inordinate

infinitives of discovery. The complementary color of the second person you loved. In the midst of

the illuminati. To remain a man, being the second person in her heart. She is the first

person. To retain your time on earth. Normally you get to say it isn’t the end of the world

when you fall out of love, but not today because the world will end today in spite of us.

I am not the first woman to come back from the kitchen, having made

a lie pie. In celebration. A pie of white elephants for this holiday. Maybe you can help me

pull it apart. I can see that you are the kind of man who likes to pull things apart

to see the way they work, who carries a woman’s trunk and bag to see

the way they drag him down to earth. Maybe you can help me come to grips

with the suitcase where your heart should be.

UNDER THE LID OF THE JAR,  A SCHOOLROOM

Unfortunately, a pole in the middle of the room.  Undeniably, a pillar, and beyond,

the podium.  We are building a structure of matter on a hill, and we are using

certain principles.  We are certain of them, sure. In the pipes,

in the places around the pipes, behind the walls, we are poisoning

the insides, but we will never go inside. We will be fine.

We’ll just never go inside.

XII. ON LYING

Olivewood rosary touched to Gethsemane

and Golgotha looped at my wrist.

Ache of lips chewed bright. My breath still

on this balcony, still overlooking train

tracks and coal cars. Your skin’s stick,

anise on your fingertips. The answer to every

question you have ever asked me is yes,

but I can’t stop screaming no.

  TO DRIVE A GIRL TO SATANISM

Always feels so much longer, the way back home. Tied your name up in my hair for a week. Cut off pieces of my shirt and tucked them into books, shoes, creases between airplane seat cushions. Ate oysters and drank whisky. Thought of you very little.

You are this flight – tilt I am strapped into, jolt at the end. It is in air when I know best time’s slip, oil-smooth hands.

How quickly you feel like fiction, darling. How suddenly I forget your smile. I am this ghost you keep breathing out – cow or woman on her knees, legs tucked up, tongue wide. We are wet all over.

When this plane touches down you slide away again. The farther I run, more you become a book. Tried to pray me out 9 months ago – now what? Love, you are enough –

    WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU LOOK AT THIS WHICH DOES NOT LOOK AT YOU

Hand's shake. Sudden shift of forest from deciduous to evergreen. Sky is cloaked by clouds, clouds hidden by mist, but eyes are closed anyway. Drop in air pressure recalls a nosebleed. Tongue grows numb. It cannot taste salt. Recollection of last brush burn. What a splinter looks like just beneath surface of skin. Heart enlarges. Takes over chest cavity. Squeezes between ribs. Splits sternum.

Two cars drive toward one another in opposite lanes. There is not room for them both.

DREAM 

All the drunks in town are throwing you a party. The three women you’ve loved float in the sky on separate chariots. They laugh in a lovely language seemingly free of vowels. Your tongue has turned to sand. Ants as big as dogs flock west. Most towns are run by children except Salt Lake which was won by the geriatrics during the slow-mo revolution. Adults roam the foothills and mountains, consuming and consumed. The cosmos turned out to be centuries-old snowfall that never found ground. Often in bars you’re set ablaze sitting perfectly still, still stirring soda into your glass, for no reason at all. You try to make sense of the bumblebee, the hummingbird, the women flying over your head. You’re working on a top-secret government report: The Workings of the Foreseeable Future. You are to scratch it out on every telephone post from east to west, all the old secrets of Earth set one after the other into the sun-line. On starless nights women howl your name. Everything you love eventually comes home.

    DE RERUM NATURA

On the other side of glass, the other side

of glass. The sky a boy with a pail

shattering mirrors. Across the plain,

horses spread like oil rigs. Every ladder in the world

clinging tight to its one purpose. You think clouds

have done so little. A man overseas walks around

his made little country looking at pictures of himself.

Nevertheless it’s spring and two lovers have

nothing better to do. Tell me

we’re worthy of study. Tell me

certain things work themselves out.

Let’s follow the dead through that door they’ve found

at the edge of the world. Short men in brown suits, apt

for this sort of thing, can record what happens.

Perhaps we’ll learn it’s best to stand still when a thing

dismantles. It’s a terrible waste of an afternoon

to count the number of people who might recognize

your face. My new stance: take everything

you’ve ever touched with you everywhere you go

and give something to everyone. Or simply don’t

walk around setting fire to dogs. Whatever you do,

it matters. Tell me again we’ll never be full.

Tell me there is something behind that curtain

besides another curtain: wailing gulls, a garden

where my friends sit laughing. Everything

spectacular, simple. The forest burning

in winter. The forest burning in spring.

      LA REINA SOFIA

                    “Art is a lie that leads us closer to the truth.”

                                             Pablo Picasso

Mister kitty is so pretty was a rhyme I sang to describe a childhood cat. El arte es una mentira que nos acerca a la verdad is what Picasso said to describe something just as elusive as cats. But what is la verdad of things? Guernica wasn’t made for horror alone. There is a language for screaming. For tilting one’s neck back at an alarming degree. The divine shape of a bomb versus the terrible bloom it becomes. Hands thrown to heaven, silent as knives. Surely there is a quiet, terrible language for screaming.

WAR/LOCK

under the old velvet, i am of warlock, pregnant with a second child—

after your departure,   [it] came out of me your black hole

& witches say i will recover

     my graces

but no time soon. it's still true. 

*

twin windows hunched over

my [only]  friends no one sent the postcard mi amor, no one sent the news

a funeral i am invited 

two

hands in a bucket of soot

my gown

*

i clean my face to present for you, a black water bucket

you come home & say nothing, warlock

you stumble in & say nothing, warlock 

and me, i am home waiting, as you like me

      your own autumn

bright and dead

WAR/LOCK II

the nervous heartbreak of your come-home 6pm each day

the breadbox filled with bone

your heavy      has bedded me & i am now bloodied as a child in fields of knees

to suck  the venom from your peonies [i was bewitched, i thought to love the garden far before the fall] and yes, my hands hurt to reap and feed you.

sometimes you, warlock, go to bed early

[sleep for evil]

and so you say kiss me as though you are human

* your divots fill and protrude against me, into me,       forcing a semblance of earlier days

[when black weeds grew from my palms when primrose bloomed from my mouth]

i should have known the signs, my darling, i should have blamed witchcraft

[nothing real comes from spellcast]

and so, i blame myself for turning into trees 

BAEDEKER    There is a field where wild horses  take your heart, the flute that whistles  in pitch black—it doesn’t know  what doesn’t send its wind through.  Stormy told me as a joke, but it was  the bullet’s path back from the tires  that made it a joke. Ask the Babylonians  how they walk through it  with their backs strung  across the country’s opening.  Stormy, I know of at least one brother  who died in the wind laid out  by his truck. I righted him  on the road from the sun.  The wild horses replaced with debris:  the whistle from my heart  and the truck doors beating like wings.  We passed two people drifted  by the wind. They were righted  by our own hands, put in our slipstream,  and we drove ahead to what you get  when you say marriage and don’t.  This land ahead is a badland, I can tell.

BAEDEKER    See how I believe this silent icicle  in the void.  I believe the bear grass  is dandelion to wishful breath.  Any ardor grows dizzy  at this altitude, I had forgotten  how airy I am.  At night I go to bed with a woman  whose hair is short, we wake  in a gel of stars.  I follow her through woods,  I seek a shirtless boy.  Timber mortality shows itself, I believe.  in walking into people,  their chests all wild and ready.  My woman puts her face near my shield  when she talks, I hardly hear.  I like to feel her far away  when I slink into bed with men.  I believe the glacier’s powder in the lake.  To the sun, how shallow the sediment looks.  She punctures it aquamarine.  In the valley, a father wants broadness  for his brown bear heart,  a brother goes without funeral,  backwards into the wind.  Forgetting his last Cree word,  the worker drives his truck into horses.  Babylonians stand rigid in gales,  the cowboy named Stormy says why.  On a reservation at the edge of this  windowless bar I’m a garden  in the earliest winter of my life.  I believe in the person missing  from the urine-soaked bed.  I believe in a good man who leaves   notes on my door when I don’t come home.  I believe in individual hopelessness  as a way of bringing people together,  that the mountain’s west side  is the wing of a less dumb angel.

BAEDEKER

Snow fences keep prolix at bay,

and hold away from us

some of our own words

inflate into night-writing.

In Wyoming they name their daughters

Skye, I inscribe, on the scrap paper.

Whose mind scribbles fastest

the better details of blight and bounty?

In Wyoming there is red grave dirt

blowing powder off my cheekbone.

This is about accuracy, Merriweather.

Train cars, the particulars are never finished.

Take this graphomaniac, the western wind.

It was the mountains in his eyes, not him.

There were the two places his daughters

laid their heads as infants. It was his chest,

not the Jasmine and Lilly tattooed there.

None of it was more mine than the daisy

I carried like a jackknife to the bar.

And when we toasted our wasn’t love

we were lost again to ourselves.

My lover and I had lied

out of our skin. Somehow I believe

this here-writing. Lonesome Dove, when you drove

your cattle across his bed, my own horses

trampled me. Sometimes, when I wanted

to leave, the road going to the sun would freeze.

Look how I can not speak it. I am all

these planks of wood holding back

as we drive over Oklahoma’s hat.

The old family farm is just burial plots

without headstones or pedigree.

When it’s summer the snow fences hold nothing.

What did one hippie at Babb Fest say

to the other hippie at Babb Fest?

Not a word. There was the sound

of a child chewing animal bones

and your ancestor leaving his name at camp,

We’ll forgo those names for Quip Quip.

Our lives would live for Jasmine, Lilly, Quip Quip,

daughters gathered like all the seasons in one vase.

We’d stay drunk in Charlie’s bar to cower

from the beauty which drinks from the bottom.

SANS SOUCI for Ariana

“I lay traps for troubadours who get killed before they reach Bombay” – The Rolling Stones

Epilogue: The day falls beigly on a corpse in a citadel alongside the sea. All night, the regent’s lips wax shut. Her silence is not free; people will pay good money for a missed train, to watch her fuel get leeched, and shimmer…

The kingdom by the sea is actually a screen. I am a queen I cannot decry. I am dressed, not darling; my sisters are coming. We are going to sand down the beaches like heathens. We are going to

plant kisses on handsome enemies. Little bower – you are a drudge, a misstep. I am going to take you home to fret. It’s not a pomme on a desk it’s an oligarchy. It’s how the masterful shine of our souls

bespeaks a curse. Tables of smoke grow quills like a dirge for tattered girls pressing lines in old snow. A coin is sewn into the lining of a cloak. Anathema quiets lambs on the breeze; they are licking up

blood from their bottles, decanting a language the populace forgot. And here we are soaked in a hutch of root & rot. Some rabbits I have known try to cuddle the book. They practice with crowns but it is useless; their crowns are buttons.

Their buttons are horrible favours of dread. They are holding out their necks for the priest with a fiat, fiat, fiat rex. A cope of sky, a vestement. A diadem won’t make you happy but it might stick a fowl for your table & follow faithfully          to rest.

IN:VOCATION from */apocrypha.  

this is the hour of erasure. this is the moment of the desolate commensurate. we are sorry, we cannot address your request at this time. we are sorry, our best dresses are already occupied. are you interested in trading in your body for apostrophe? are you a participant in the metalphysical scene? imagine you’re an omnivore about to make a line break. imagine you’re a hollowwhore who has to break a timesteak. there are infinitely many consciousnesses in which we could exist. a book is a freakout which deletes transition tryst. without strong static, who’s an addiction? a whole concentric verse of being. helpless throes of metacorpse, aprocryphallic dangerhoax; this is the joke of the century boys. this is the tome that creates a whole. how many drones get to hold you, my love? how many holes to mannermasque? I was a text & a trusted friend. the verse reversed my urge to hide. these hallowed minds rescind my pride and mine the hapless, heartfelt line –