you don't want to ***** this newness with yourself
you lie
half-woken, a story
slipping in vomitous avalanche
of nowness, mourning
on a stack of crumpled sheets

night-stuck whiteness, imagining all
the games you might play
if you were to forget
your age: shaking
all that powder into the cracks
of your muscadet
dry skin
notes of apples,
saline

weather-woman, with her green screen showmanship
had not portended this outcome
this modern diviner you hold in high esteem

you always liked the way magicians seemed
to make something out of nothing
(a rabbit from a tophat gap, coins out of earlobes)
and winter is sort of like that, too
you wake up and everything is blanketed, you don't remember
the process, how it all got there
a snowshoe hare leaps
like she formed right on the snowbank
paper that came pre-sketched
free of gestation

beneath the avalanche muscadet turns to claret
but we can't see it happening
for miles and miles a blank page
what dies under the heel of perfection
a magician never reveals his secrets

Pupils incredulous
with dilation
hang stalwart on diction
and circumlocution—feed and bleed
affixation
on gold star delusions
of corpus analysis
and physical education,
prurient practicum
and conjugal conjugation.
Introduction to body
paragraph to bang-and-shut
conclusion.
Passion, pursuit, neuter, second declension:
𝘴𝘵𝘶𝘥𝘪𝘶𝘮.

Floss popping through the crewel needle.

Pearlies on a powder-gloss 𝘛𝘪𝘮𝘦 spread,
China clay coating the centerfold.

Wet-slap thighs on a marble countertop, and your lips slackened,
stone-of-marl cuspates like the lake-rotted innards of a lockjaw-
tinged tin can.

Scholastic sterility decamped to a catocala
backwing dauntlessness.
You flicker in my hands,
mythic as the peplos
at your Prado stone-pooled feet.

My flint-flame Thalia,
I am the cautery under your brand
new fingers, the clueless mark
of your mad dash catzerie.

Tomorrow forgets you but for ivy in drywall
Jesus-toast imprints, your laughter in a hot slice
of ghost against my mouth.

What would the crunch be like?
My grooves in the grooves
of your deciduous molars,
shards of enamel erupting vampiric
into my gums, sinking
into dentin like calcite
spongecake, pulp splattered, cementum
like a magic riddle hidden
amongst stale white ******* Jacks.
The rest strung on a red thread
candy necklace
haloing vertebra C7
like the shark teeth adorned by surfers
or like how sometimes we wear
spoils of the hunt on our bodies
to remind our prey that they,
too, will one day wear our teeth
around their necks.

dip yr tongue it tastes like soap & sodium
clary sage & double bubble pink
threadbare silksheen specked w/ white anthodium
piggy chou & rosette colored sheep
sink! it feels like sleeping
in winter throw & length of flannel sheet

(mary trembles, moss logs twined & twitching
himalayan salt to wash her feet)

Black-plumed
cantors in formation,
all prim in three lines;
black binders,
ink crotchets writ black in their thighs;

sorc'rer
his wand at the ready—
he lifts it in time;
their spellbooks turn
and bleed
and the story reads:

Savior!
This glorious child—
this mother betwined
by fate—
this star—
these sheep—
this rémscela to
the greatest tale ever told.

This ****** mother—

The girls in my stories love to eat each other.
In one, Red Riding Hood lies back on her cloak
with her spooled ringlets falling all around her as
shiny and intimate and obscene as anything.
The Wolf says, "I'll have the heart last."
Red says, "Good, I've wrapped it as a present in
skin, fat, and ribs and I've been saving it just for you."
The Wolf kisses up to her femoral artery where there pulses
live communion and laps her way into carnivorous heaven.
In another, there are two characters
who don't share our names but you're not stupid.
They fly cranes across balconies
with ink-smudged messages folded on the inner planes,
the hearts and brains of paper.
The words are meaningless; the game is to divine intent.
When they talk, phones fall awkwardly from their mouths
and they pray to God the other knows how to unwrap them.
The one who doesn't share your name cuts
through the skin and fat and ribs of sound
and savors one fleeting drink from the well of me.
You choke on it, then swallow, and then we love each other again
with the biting curiosity of strangers.

In the new world, we stood across each other
and radiated the same curvature and vergence.
We kissed and it tasted wrong, like lime-soda
glass and silver; our tongues
were cold and limp like dead fish floating
half-eaten, swirling out to sea.
So we took out our instruments and began again:
my blade, your cup,
my cup, your blade,
refrain and refrain.
Look, but never touch; see, but never understand—
God spares the insensate this particular madness.
The scent of fishermen swims up city drafts
and a hungry dog whimpers.

plunging V of cumulus
hug-warm precious and
buoy-gold fishing line necklace noosed
around your curdled elfin neck.
Green like a star at the throat's hollow:
rhinestone the color of salt-liquor;
the color of the snake-drink—drink and be merry!—
rhinestone the color of the sea past sunset;
lick the salt from its bed, martyr yourself;
sea-bloat your body and hack it to fit
fifty-two years of woman
in a two-foot-tall
baby's coffin.

cretaceous, conjoined,
petrified, spectres arborescent:
another family buried
together and bound
by the mineralizing quality of time.

corals bob out
apple-colored from
the rhythmic income of
glassy tide and make
domiciles
for darting fish
the air has become liquid
a great vat of crystal
melts
in the soggy heat
tide-foam pools around
the beach's welcome ankles like
a lace nightgown at
the feet of
a beautiful, bareskinned woman

We watch the twinkling fish tank
from dry land. We watch
the unwashed
green algae encroach
on chlorinated blue.
It necrotizes. It becomes oil water.
It becomes licorice tea.
There's Venus, eyes stung, blinking.
We watch the swinging silhouette
on old boiled skin,
the true object of interest.
A rat scuffs her pink paws down
the plastic tube and clunks into the dish.
She eats. Black seed held to chest.
We're content, watching.
You hold me to your chest, too.

long licks from the
corrosive coronal

pale dogwood papillae wet-sanding
bare-necked baby girl's earth-salted skin

a square of silicon carbide
refining away dings and scratches

leaving acid streaks and worrying
mouth-shapes into the finish

diligent downturned crescents

to be touched is to lose

top soil to the clutching wind
another game with the warden

a finger to the table saw
dead leaves to the defoliator

she swallows her loot like a librarian
lunching on a primary manuscript

like the tide, i will not hush
when your gravity
brings me to tow;

if my facets in movement
blinker too brightly
then like the tide

i feebly reflect
but your own
blinding albedo.

Bell-hollow throat of
pomegranate aril sweetness. Toothsome
syrupy streaks ribboning down
pharynx and larynx, red-
burnished trachea and battered
lungs. Jugular pulse-point
metronome, Mendelssohn on windpipe
*****: andante maestoso moans
burbling 4/4 pharyngeal trills.
Writhing duet on the marital
dissection table. Composition on
the anatomy of love.

bajo la luna nueva
el antílope
se tiñe de tinta
celeste,
un bosquejo
carbónico
de oscuridad

entre colmillos
sabe al bosque
la cuartilla

Stoked back-throat cinders
supply sizzling slicks of foam—
spasmodic,
near-dry retroperistalsis.
Mother's gift! Cortisol for breakfast.
Then comes the rest of the routine:
remove the clothes,
wash the body; skin cinnamon
red with blistering
steam; redress; lecture;
down a long
hot drink of
chamomile tea.

You and I in the garden,
library of bookfoam on
lattice shelves, Dewey Decimal
inflorescence, logic trees on panicles,
delicate pedicel theorems.
You, juvenile, virtue hidden
in fleshy sepals, tantalizingly
callow calyx, milkweed-
suckling, chub-cheeked
and pointlessly adorable.
You, morbidity long floresced
in budding blunder,
baby feet feeling out
fledgling leylines to the mortuary—
which disorder killed your mother?
No matter.
You, lonely dividend,
left first to lawman daddy
and lost, finally, to me.
All this time for thinking, decaying,
the two of us consumptive, cadaverous,
phosphorus-starved and stunted,
fungally necrotic and
****** beyond repair.

The garden path
of your mind is lined in blue,
lovely vinca, probably
because you're a sad sack.
(Don't deny it—I'd be, too,
if my mother died like that.)
My side grows fireweed, fire sticks,
scarlet bee balm, yucca,
San Diego sunflower,
Compact Fire Red.
Ash for fertilizer.
I had a sister, not a mother,
and she burned to death,
and every morning I am burning

to death with her.

digital bedroom,
juvenile secrets whispered
'neath LCD sheets

the skin of your fingers
are her fingers;
the tongue's apex
a xerox of her own tongue;
she dappled your cheek's curvature with vulpecula
and you appreciate, despite yourself,
this loving sense of detail.
forgive a master sculptor if she feels
entitled to a private moment with her own
aphrodite of knidos.

Soft nacred wall of wool,
prismatic in newborn sunrise
—a pillow over the maws of godlings.
Their wet black arms yawn skyward
while they drown in their bed of brack.

Sawtooth skeins
of water candombe in
achroma, winds at
two-five, the water that
hits the roof el contestador
and the water that hits the water
la tumba. The procession leaves limpid
stipples on ***** plex and
renders finches pointilistic;
the peeling periwinkle deckwood
has the dewey quality
of a runway model,
glossed with the bay's blue sploshing.
Beyond this, deeper in the gray:
mountain striates
in harsh gradient,
spring to myrtle to a blueish-reseda,
redwood peak nodes
anchors for erratic heartlines.
The drumbeat pulses these lines
at their mist-vaguened edges
and moves all.
It's a flash, fifteen minutes of
California rain.

The moon’s a silver racehorse:
Quicker than the crier god,
And more clever on his feet.
From his horseshoes, I cleaved
Little spoons, to stir in sweets,
And set them near a lonely cup,
Dips bound by milk and honey.

Bedspread flung in crooked bents,
Drink steeped on the windowsill,
I laid his body beneath
Glass sheets, and heard—like hoofbeats—  
thudding stars, rushing along the east,
Setting bets on who will win:
The sun, or me, or sleep.

Sunset shrinking behind you,
the silhouette of your nose and your chin and the open
crook of your mouth chasing daylight
in reverse.