The Lizard Queen
I’ve been listening to lizard music all my days
on a boom-box with antennae that extend toward the sky,
but can never reach heaven
I’ve been singing along to this sad lizard song so loudly—
the neighbors lend their complaints out their windowpanes:
idle threats, but not once have the cops come by
so I keep blasting this music
despite the yelling neighborhood and
all those stomachaches it gives me—
when the ache spreads to all of my points
and I even can’t stand
I lie on a bed of lizard tails that the cats collected
and let all the queasiness mingle with the blood
then it’s not my illness, it’s separate from myself
compartmentalized into lizard bones and lizard guts
& lizard tracks on lizard albums
this sadness is not my own
it is the song that surrounds me
The Man Who Does The Dishes
I’ll stay home with porcelain plates
‘til my knuckles are just dry enough
to crack & bleed all day
stain the dishes pink & all the silverware
tastes oh so metallic
I clasp these bleached hands and thank God,
we have just enough soap to get clean
this immaculate frothy mix of soft red,
provoking your sweet-tooth;
dreaming up a sink of Rosé
the thought alone pesters your liver
but I snatch the myth away from you,
I tell you what’s impossible
—wary of this year I have entered into,
the thirty-third of many more,
reaching a peak; approaching the great fall
I have no miracles to show you
& that’s how I knew the chore was done
because you said it was
and I let it be.
Overcoming Past Madness & Learning to Love the Truth
once, with one pale blue eye,
you looked at me
the other eye was and still is green
it pulled away and took the blue eye along with it
I swore I was gleaming in your peripheral,
but I wasn’t and that was fine
your pupils were sad, soft and underground
somewhere passed the tollbooths in San Francisco
somewhere sweet and beautiful and quiet
Unblinded
careless, car-less
hopeful, smoke-full
empty pockets; void checks and minds
and in my notebook I drew another eye
swimming matchlessly through every page:
that half-face doodle you try to decipher,
that inexplicable incompleteness and anopsia
but when you kiss my bird wing bones
and my neck’s striations
I am muted by unbelievable happiness
stunned, stung and tongue
tied—tripping over all this twine
you wrapped around my insides
and knotted in my hair and laugh
with your soft sweet fingers
that smell like honey and paper
—it chokes my vernacular
I am unable to read or write or think or speak
but finally able to breathe
How to Eat Soup
whisper a romantic language
to a spoonful of hot soup
being sure to conjugate
all the verbs correctly.
Presently perfect—speak slowly
and it whispers back
the Greco-Roman alphabet.
hush it, calm it & consume.
Repeat.
Iris
pupils, ready to learn
glazed with sun-sparked floaters
jumping on each cloud’s shape
eyes closed, recalling the contours
all my bare skin itching;
bladed and blissful
The Wanderer
you wear your home
a tee-shirt tent (a house of blouses)
your trachea, a piping chimney
desperate for sweeping
you stay only for
a quick locking of lashes—
leaving once untwined
your impersonal feet are too fast to own shadows
List of Colors
I tried to name some of the colors last night[1]
just trying to help, giving them form and function
but it began a pain in all of my pigments
it burrowed and rooted deeply; the infection grew
as I gave away identities
relentlessly baptizing every shade
[1] In writing a piece set during “last night,” the poet creates something eternal. The words live on the page, breathing into pupils for as long as graphite/ink/pixels can stand; yet it is all so vague and possibly fictitious—each word, an Elvis at Burger King. The words “last night” give the piece its own space/time continuum—an eternity of “last nights”—a last night that lasts today, tomorrow, yesterday in its own parallel (or perhaps perpendicular) universe, because every time it is read it is still “last night,” that ebbing and flowing murk and glow, always. Each reader experienced, and continues to experience, “last night” differently. The relationship changes but it is always “last night,” that same little thing with all its haze and colors, living and reliving across tongues and irises.
I have lived through many “last nights”. They are as beautiful as they are fading. I do not think it is healthy to live out one’s life through these last nights. It wears me down to my thin skin—I am stretched so tightly across the country like canvas, so that not even the small towns could see the stars last night.
49
Your fortune cookie tells you the future and your favorite number: 49. It tells you that you’re destined for Blonde Harlem, long after the hipster holocaust that broke and burned throats full of Creole. You’ll move into all that dust, or what’s left of bones. You’ll look so chic and beautiful and thin, yelling about the little black boot you lost somewhere along the road. At night, you’ll enter the air—full swing—with a blanket tied around your neck: the magic cape that gave you that 5’ 7” gift of dance.
You’ll howl and leap and be loved, same as it ever was.
Notes on the Arroyo Canyon
1.
From grey dirt
The rise of chalky dust
From heel to tiny toes ago
2.
Down the winding path
Bordered in cement secretions
Oozing from rocks in varying gradations
Dull crunchy leaves and leaves churn to dust and dust
Casting an arid smell over the green
And the dry bark
The sun dances with the branches
And the tips of my bangs that kiss my eyelashes
Until there’s a bright white prism
Just above my brow
3.
I remember footsteps past and how small they were
4.
The soggy plastic cobweb bags ensnare the black grease of the river, lingering oddly like vinegar atop oil, trickling between rocks and water-spiders into that cleave of mortar and sand, that dividing line:
nature vs. reality
5.
Chain link fence
6.
Shadowed by the dry brush canyon walls
California is a desert, and this place reminds me
cleaning up trash and eating trail mix
Marisa
in
and out
breaths of yogi tea
digested in our mother’s womb
churning in your development
our mother’s hair
so white and long
wrapped up in a garden box
with tomatoes
forming you
My God, you never stopped screaming
I saw you kick our little brother
as he lay there
swaddled in the fresh powder blue
with his big baby eyes that knew nothing yet
you were only five
and it scared me
but somehow I knew
the sweet nectar
of tomatoes and tea
was somewhere inside
I was scared of the anger, I think
with each tantrum
you’d tear off all your clothes
writhing in your red nakedness
losing yourself over
a borrowed doll or
the lint of your socks
you so desperately wanted to keep
and was not saved
I couldn’t comprehend you
this wasn’t the child of yogi tea and tomatoes
this wasn’t the child born
of our mother’s silver hair
but I knew I loved you
and I knew I’d wait
until you finally knew your nutrients
deep in the shadows of gestation
the tea and tomatoes
that live in your spirit
among the knots of our mother’s hair
that knew the morning well
but you then came to understand
your inheritance among the cherub world
despite your faults and anger
and the desperate child you used to be
and now you love and bless me
and wait
until I remember
for now I have forgotten my creation
I remain here shapeless
envying your ripeness,
struggling to elicit my completion
derived from the soil of our mother’s cervix
so true and bare
Bare
1. Capra Aegagrus Hircus
He gnaws on my shirt,
tearing the cotton weave.
I’ve never been so aware of my clothes;
I’ve never been so aware of my soft skin
as the goat imposes my nakedness.
2. Ursus Arctos Horribilis
I look into the eyes of a grizzly
He shakes the snow off his fur;
soft rabbit skin on his molars
But I can’t play dead
No one can make me play dead
No one can make me play dead.
13
just another teen-pop suicide; morbidly bored
her stream of consciousness had no Kerouac Kick
her oven dreams, no Plath Punch—
she ran her finger along her forearm
and it felt like fish gills,
lifting edges of skin to feel its breath
exhaling sOmething positive:
I live in a zoloft on the upper west side,
and on my walk to the 1 train,
I picked up a dime-bag of lizard heads,
hoping to finally feel well
I laughed and laughed,
my profile cooking in the sunset
and you were the only one who saw me
Blues
Oh darling, what a shade of blue!
taken from mold and tide pools and baby-boys’ wallpaper
unable to divorce the success of her famous last wounds
Somewhere in the attic, my ancestors
filed away half my chromosomes: 23 wasps & silences
buzzing so loud-–I am stung
stunned by my idiocy; falling over, lost
words, drowning in this blue,
life meant nothing and has yet to mean
just tasting the cobwebs she left behind
might make me enough
to follow her to the honey catacombs
covered in tulips
Loitering
we were so loud
living on stoops and cross-streets
the lampposts were our only stars
the nights sounded like
feral cats and trashcan lids
—so wild—my throat hurt
from all that yelling
and my lips cracked & bled
from all that smiling
