Sounds like crucify.
My hands are bound by his grip
on the plank perpendicular to my toes
that start to curl backwards now.

I binged on memories
of the words words words
and when my ears burned
I imagined you cradling her
on your chest
softly brushing her hair back
and talking about me.

At the summer camp where
Jesus saved me
I picked up a pre-packaged
cereal sealed in a factory
long before my selection.
I peeled away the plastic film
and there where my bowl
of cereal was supposed to be
was a colony of silkworms,
squirming around like
a bunch of tied hogs
in a swimming pool.

I threw up because it grossed me out.
I had no control over it.

When I think about her hair
around your stubby, little fingers
I throw up because it grosses me out.
I have no control over it.

I'm no Will Shortz, but this poem is about you.
There's your clue.

Call me already
set me straight
do what you have to do
to get me to
notice
you
from across the room
with your
perfectly manicured
sideburns.

Out of all the thoughts
in the world
you had to occupy mine.
We're the difference
between holding hands
with fingers interlaced
or platonically placed palms.
I want you to know, though,
that I would leave
Victor Laslo's sorry ass
for your alcoholic one
in two seconds flat.

I
will
never
forget
the
time
you
bought
me
orchids.

Tonight I am missing:

the attention
that comes along
with I love you

the smell
of his neck

and the strength
to get over it.

I've never been impressed
with a member of
the opposite sex's
Member ever since
I was six years old.
It was just a hunk
of soft skin that I never
liked to keep my hands on
for longer than
ten agonizing seconds
but I had to do it
twice because it wasn't
right the first time.

If he knew
my first love
my first kiss was
My First Cousin
he'd never touch me
Again
And again and again.
Come on, baby, you can do it.

It never ends.
It's cyclical.
I haven't said a word
all day because if I opened
my rouged mouth
I'd moan for
Sorrow and Pleasure.
Those weepy, little bastards
go hand in hand,

Don't they?

The room starts to spin
and there's not enough
gin to get the taste
from my mouth
of your slobbery,
miserable kiss.
Too much.
Too much gin
too much love
too much of a terrible thing
can be detrimental to
the objective.
To survive.
To overcome.
It's hard to do when I'm
the reigning Queen of Crazy.

I loved him once.
I loved him and would do
anything for him,
but now I can't be in a room
alone with him
without wanting to
throw up
and up
and up
and up.
Please, God,
let me pass out before I can feel.

Will it ever stop
raining? The streets are flooded
and so is my heart.

I walked down my front steps
this morning on a
sweltering January Wednesday,
and across the street
a mean hawk
had in its grip a truly unremarkable
run-of-the-mill pigeon.
I couldn't tell if the bird was dead yet
but something told me
there was a life yet to be fully realized,
so I made sure not to get run over
while crossing the street.
When I got too close that feathered dinosaur
squawked at me
for interrupting his breakfast,
but his breakfast was still alive,
and I couldn't sleep at night
knowing this.
The hawk cursed me one more time
but I had taken a step too far.
He let the poor thing go and
I have never seen any living animal
fly so fast in 22 years.
It was something like watching
a man being chased by another man
with a chainsaw,
the anticipation and uncertainty
of whether or not
Herr Hawk caught up
with the unlucky bastard.

I've never eaten a salad so fast
as when my best friend and I
went to a restaurant where
a man with one leg
and a loud voice
squawked about
something artistic,

and since I'm still a little girl
in body, soul and mind
I sit on my feet.

My friend and I stopped talking
about something artistic as well
and listened to them.

"I gotta take a piss,"
said the one-legged man,
and though my back was turned to him,
I could hear how tall and broad he was.
As he passed me-
that's how I saw his one leg-
he stopped at my table,
noticing my insecurities
and said,

"I wish I could still sit on my legs like that.
Hey get a load of this,"
he said to his friend with
blue eyes and no teeth.
"hah," said his comrade
and the one legged man
hobbled off to take a piss,
I guess,
but now I'm left wondering

Did he mean before he lost his leg
or before he was that small?
I thought it was a relevant question.

If I could I would
If I could I would
says the most
sedimentary broken record
and my record player is
broken

someone tore the
chord out in the back
like someone tore the
piece out of your heart
and took too much Hope
from this little light of mine.
Hope is what is left
when he tells you he doesn't
love you anymore.
Hope is the smell of a campfire
on the coat you let me
borrow.
Hope kept me warm and
it will keep you warm
when you least expect it.

it's a namesake, not a joke
don't forget it

Hope doesn't live in Graceland
or in Ianville or in Joetown
but in your precious, little broken heart.

bird's wings will heal and so will you, Hope.

The flowers between our yards
were bleeding pink from their white petals

as if the pink were dripping onto the
dry leaves under my feet

when I plucked one out to remember you.
I told Brother-man it must have been

the most beautiful color I had ever seen.
Surely this has to be a joke,

you, God and his paintbrushes must have
hurriedly whipped up something in the dark

when I was up watching shows about
husbands and fathers who kill.

Then I spilled my tea in your chair
on Christmas Eve. How appropriate.

I even let out a yelp, not uncommon
for you, you dear, sweet old woman

who couldn't hear her own thoughts,
too stubborn to hear the thoughts of others

but always willing to listen.

When lightning has struck me
eighty-two times
I want to hear everything
and on the eighty-third
hear nothing but
the most precious of memories.

I hope I can recount stories
of our embarrassing proposal
and the angry Presbyterian ministers
performing the ceremony

because in twenty-two and a half
years I have never once believed
my grandparents loved each other,
but last night the second Julian
recounted he and Lavern's saga
of a marriage that ended in
four fuck-ups and decades of
disappointment
with the most agreeable disposition-
even for a man dying
of too much salt in his diet.

I only hope someone will love me
enough to eat bland food
and our grandson's vegetables one day.

You can sleep at night.
I have to take tranquilizers
to stay asleep and
I'm not the one
proclaiming to be
"The Jerry Sandusky"
of the correctional facility

and I can't sleep at night.

Lately I toss and turn
thinking about the
deafening silence
after a single shot
and the dogs
left in the house to
clean up the blood
before anyone else
finds him.

Congratulations,
that you are happy with
yourself.
Congratulations,
that you are comfortable
in your
pederastic, putrid
wrinkled and washed up
skin.
Mine is white and soft,
and I can't stand
to be in it on
Mondays, Tuesdays,
Wednesday, Thursdays
and Saturdays
because half of that skin
is your skin, your brain
but
like I said,
congratulations that
you've declared your
noble head
"Grown Up" at 60, old man.

Here it comes again
the water moccasin my mother shot
when I was playing in the lake
has come back to bite me in the ass.
She stands, there, in the photograph
she had framed to sit on a table
between two big, uncomfortable chairs

my brother in boots on the wrong foot
Maggie, precious little bird, was even
too young to have to wear a shirt
in this picture

and there in my mother's fingers
dangling feet away from my
warm, little body
was a five foot snake
who still wiggled a little
when his nerves
kicked in.

When we dance to no
music the freckles on the
backs of our hands match.

So goes love. That's how
you know the scales are balanced.
Come back now, you hear?

She drove from one coast to the other
with her contemptible co-Captain, Kenny.
One time in Colorado,
she saw Bambi looking for
berries in the dark
on a concrete highway-
stupid thing-
and all of a sudden

she felt a bump in the road
and kept fucking driving!

Kenny was passed out drunk on rum
in the cab of the ship
like the piece of slimy shit
he is,
and he didn't want to stop until
he could find some more heroine
by God.

A few days later at some half-star hotel
they smelled something rotten under
the front of their tag-teamed semi

and there was Bambi
with two x's for eyes
and his tongue sticking out
like the joke he became
to two pirates looking for
treasure, or pills and tequila
in this case.

I knew a man
with eyes so blue
you'd think he was blind,
and he had done
so much heroine
that he couldn't flex
his arms out all the way.
He had four teeth,
one in each corner of the front.
His name was Charles
but he went by Tripp
because he was a III,
but he's really a trip.

She says I have a "damaged goods quality".
He kisses her right between her blue eyes
and says

"you are not damaged".

Before that they had martinis
and fancy French fries
and watched a sunset so beautiful
it would make a
grown man weep
and she had never felt so special.

There's a freckle next to his
left eyelid that she likes to kiss
every time he takes one of
her stitches out.
The scar is healing, and it gets
swollen from time to time,
but on this day she is grateful
that he is there to help her
when her heart gets
a little sore.