In my backyard, the deep sauce
of sun-gold air swivels lazily,
stirred by the occasional bumblebee.
I’m entertained by the idea of anything beyond this.
No continents, no glitter-splashed ocean.
The softened world settles into itself,
transforming from its usual busyness.
Squash lounges in the garden and
preschool train operators maneuver Thomas
through his wooden kingdom.
They move trees and buildings around their set and we,
still fascinated with the cucumber in the garden,
don’t look up from skimming our fingers through grass,
changing our own soil kingdoms with the sweep of a hand.

Windex mice squeak through the windows,
biting newspaper as it scrapes across.

Soap from a new age fills the kitchen,

sheeps' fat long forgotten,
the sod-house of Laura Ingalls Wilder left behind
with its crumbling Lincoln logs,
the ceiling that drops dirt crumbs like a gritty pastry.

Our world is shiny,
so blinding that even the cough of newsprint makes it brighter.

A bottle sneezes across the counter, spurts those
bubbles of ammonia, gathers with the
rivers and tides that surge with ethanol,

it bursts the air with a neon smell and erases
everything that has come before.

I.

I'm a growing polliwog,
not a butterfly--

pickled legs hang off of my fish body
and gills close off so rapidly.
A minute ago I could caress the water
and make oxygen bubble in my throat. Now

beating,

pulsing

lungs intrude
like pink bubble gum ready to pop.


What a sadistic word,

oxygen.


II.

After a little nap in a sleeping bag
butterflies are monarchs,
stained glass fluttering perfection,

symbols of luck,

symbols of
beauty,
Their wired bodies are scribbled together
like starving supermodels.


III.

And my seams are

!slowly!  

pinching themselves open,
a la Frankenstein.

I want to think these body parts are mine:

A tentative nose,

very green pointillism eyes
with lashes like brittle grass or bent nails,

These white playdough thighs,
and stretchmarks like remnants of lace
chewed up by my insane canine.

Pink.
Dainty and tangled on my legs,
I think they look like jet-streams lit by sunset.

Barnacles crunch like fast food under your sneakers,
my gnawed-on boots.

We pass over cat-eyed shards of glass
still spicy with beer bubbles
and still fizzy with teen rebellion;

It molds like an infection here.
In a town nicknamed "Little Norway." ~

This place hoards candy-colored suburbia in its pockets.

Houses like skittles weigh down its pants
and it belches out tourist traps weaker than expired pepsi,

yet it still manages these moments
where I can trot by your gazelle legs
and blast Julie Andrew's confidence.

And I want to heap myself on the oyster shells, say
STOP
Put this moment in a snowglobe,
sigh into it before we move on,
do anything before the wind whips it away.

Etch it into your hand if you have to.

But breeze dimples the water like a golf ball
and rips at the seams of the shore.



Please don't forget me when you leave.

Kindergarten

I don't know if I believe in God,
but I believe in heaven and angels
and the power of the vet,
so I mutter to them
in a sticky panic
when the rubber tire of the
UPS truck
catches your tail,

your midsection,

and irons your round belly
into the sidewalk.

I think this is the day I stop being a dog person.

I wish I could make one phenomenal leap towards the sky,

(whistling through the ragged collage of clouds--
it's so beautiful up here sweetheart!)

and catch the breath of your balloon.

But by now it's a red penny up there,

and my superhero powers are less than super,

so we'll just sit on the park bench and I'll say this.

Dry your river eyes honey, we'll get a blue one.


And maybe some ice cream.

The bread blushes into a golden brown,
lettuce whispering to itself in the bowl
and Frisbees of cucumber at the bottom.
Later, men will grumble satisfactory masculinities
(bertha bertha you’ve done it again)
while dishes in women’s hands
laugh their way to the sink and
the yellow light inside keeps out the pitch black
universe beyond the light splashed windows.

Gum is another tongue in your mouth,
taste-bud studded with sugar and pink

Hubba Bubba Double Bubble

Your jaw feels like expanding bread
when you rest from chewing
flatten it into a saucer and
let it balloon from your mouth,

it distends like an internal *****
or the full stomach of a frog
spilling from your lips

(When he stretches, you see veins
******* across his amphibian chest)

It hooks itself on your nose
and wilts into a pink tangle.

Humans yearn for a gush of sun to overtake the sky,
scraping and cracking us in red bloom,

or a cough of water to pour from an unseen throat
and slice through, like tangled hair.  

Nuclear warfare as vivid as second-grade sound effects,
every circle of hell that can climb into your mind,

maybe even a tattered zombie apocalypse.
It lacks class, but isn’t that the point?

Alas. We won’t get a dinosaur ending,
or a clashing of the gods.

Our insects and our imaginations grow smaller by the day,
and the meteors don’t like our kind of gravity anymore.

Instead, this blue marble will soup into itself.
The ice cubes will leak, and then skyscrape up again,

we drill up and down with our fingers
and the leaves will fall and eat forests in flames.

It leaves a membrane of smoke in the sky,
but don’t worry. I don’t. The world ends slowly.

Your
beloved feline settles into himself and
muffs his paws together,
tongue
sticks out slightly like
a wedge of grapefruit between his teeth
and when you call,
he murmurs
but only sometimes comes.

Like clustered balloons,
gentle armada pads
through the grey city.

I wonder if "writer's block" refers to a block like
a kindergarten alphabet piece,

or a

long

building
that slimes up the street
like an unsavory garden creature.

(you only have to walk one block...)

Sometimes it feels like writer's monolith,
a monument puncturing the sky,
collecting clouds like cotton candy

Mesmerizing

like watching a black hole devour a star.

Have you seen
how that happens?

First, the star inches closer

(not a smile from the abyss,
not even the flash of teeth),

and stretches its arms out,
strings of light pour from it's body,
reminiscent of silver spilling
from a fairy-tale character when
their soul is stolen.

It smokes and stretches
into the hands of the beast.

You blink, and a mere
millions of years later,
the star is gone.

Sunflowers bow their heads under a reversed tundra of sky. Their waterlogged faces are edged with dirt, old-age etchings fill in eyes and foreheads. Fever-weight lowers behemoth blooms of yellow into a brown-red shame, they're perched on stalks like the homeless on pedestals. They yearn for the gutter. Broad faces ease towards eachother,

feel grain on your cheek,
crumble, fall and
sink into sleep.

let's hang a ceramic rifle on the wall,
(blue and white, don't forget the flower designs)
next to my china plate collection.

We won't slam the door anymore
(imagine the noise as it shatters to the ground),
but at least our rabbit-killing neighbors
can know we're one of them.

I knew a boy who saw stories in the clouds.

he said,
some are painted on the domed-jar  sky
and some--like those popcorn creatures up there,
lifted themselves over the mountains and flew away.

When the paint licks down the side of the jar,
the creatures are crying, he told me,
that's when people bloom their umbrellas
and look down at the sequined ground.

But they should look up.

See on this hill, you look up and
believe that the world is round,
they would have known Columbus was right
if they only loved the clouds more.

You and me are special. We look up, he said,

and even then, when I could count my age on one hand,
I knew it was true.

a response to Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "The Man-moth"

Down below,
the Moth-man stares at his reflection
in a glassy window, sees himself flit
up and down like the head of a classroom sleeper.

Buildings sleep in this city, leviathans of the deep
that crawled on land before falling, their bodies
shoulder-to-shoulder and perfectly upright.
Among their feet a conversation loops
You’d never guess,
you’d never guess,
you’d never guess*
through the insect’s antennae.

It doesn’t matter, but he picked it up like
a lost button and turned it over and over
until he memorized how the moon slides
around the circle in slick patterns—

Secretly he wants to know what else the lady said
before she clipped down the sidewalk.

And some may sit in the dark with wide penny eyes,
river water filling the rim until it bubbles over,
but he waits for day. Because,
why orbit a lamppost when the whole world
is on fire?

Wind curves,
finds a place in my abdomen
and stays for winter.

It's either the airline food or the thought of you that's making my heart win the marathon.
All I'm waiting for is the plane to melt through the clouds and wash the snow away,
because sometimes ten days is longer than that.

The feeling presses against the walls of my stomach.
Its hands are on the inside of my chest
like a gulp of something hot.
Garish distraction might chase it away,
but I nurture it like the rising yeast on the counter,
watch the bread overflow and
suffocate its container in a sticky embrace.

I want to feel the heartbeat of the dough before it dies,
I want to bury my fingers in the life of the bread.
Everything we eat is dead, no matter how alive the taste
or close to its wide-eyed birth we are,
so I want to feel the life as it grows, browns.
I want to see its descent into the inanimate,
until its carcass lies stiff on my plate,
taking moist feelings with it.

You have lived too long under my bed. I said this a year ago, but you only moved to my closet,
and before that, the kitchen cupboards were heavy with your dust. I tried scraping you from the forks, but failed and ate finger food for weeks until you moved to the garden. Now I am tired of this knot in my back, and I am telling you to leave.

My child was eating dirt today—no, not you, my other child, but I thought of you. She shoved fistfuls into her mouth, gnashed it in her teeth until I saw the muddy smile ink across her face.

How can one burst of horror live on in the mundane? You’re in the paint on the walls and the clouds puffing past. I swear by the God I used to know that you are in everything, that you are everything.

I think of when dirt was shoved into my own mouth, maybe into yours too. I think of the mob
where I trampled others, and soon was trampled by those behind me.

I think of these things, but I can’t go on. I love you, but you need to leave.

I want to swim through the sky.
Right now it's a gulp of something cold and dark,
sculpting mountains in the distance
with clouds at the bottom like dropped clothes and plump toes.

Angels, do you look where the snowflakes fall?
Or do you just rub your elbows along the highest points,
brush your hair with the jagged pieces and let it loose?
I would dance in jubilation, invent words and reinvent unicorns,
drop a new language like a bomb and blow everybody kisses
if I were an angel,

I would tell people that words, paint and piano are the same thing in different bodies.
I would pet the muttering dogs,
show people trash on the streets and say, look, how beautiful,
and then I would fly off into the perfect water sky.

Hands filled with sand from the inside,
grating, stiff and frozen from the cold.