We let lust lure us
To beds beside Belthus
Making mountains murmur and
moan for pleasures
Fulfilling the flesh follies that fills
us

There , there trample on suitors
Creeping like crickets on sea shores
Lit little lamps and lead us
Through these things so , so
treacherous

Sunshine shearing our skin sores
As we walk and work the wild soils
All ail has ended mid- course
As Home! Home! Hauls the voice of
Jesus .

Mumble sweets,
like the taste of a cigarette,
into my ear
while i pretend to be flattered.  

A wounded dog-
I want to give up.  

Spit on my grave when I am buried.  
I want to dissolve into your coffee.
Drink me up,
swallow me whole,
touch me when I ask you not to-
but gently.  
You ruin me.

For some reason
The error page
Is what broke my heart

It’s a sticky summer and I do laundry every other night-
I can’t keep clean.

Wednesday morning, early August, while leaning (not cleaning)
across the gritty counter where I earn a paycheck, I
feel the last deep pull of my lungs before they surrender to rust.
A calm vision catches in the coursing current of my blood
and floats, untethered, through ****** channels of vein.
In the way some women sense pregnancy before their body gives
them any clues, I know I am in decay.

It’s been so easy to confuse the materialization
of hips; stretching and grazing after a long hibernation,
with the steel-toe heaviness of my heart.

Both have me tripping over myself,
shivering and admiring the hem of my skirt
as it dances in time with the circles
I keep turning in; giggling alone
and taking stuttering steps down the cereal aisle
for the third time this week.

Hip and heart are equally quick to bruise
and when a laugh too high, too loud,
too insincere rattles my lips;
a staggered, cold gale stings
both my gnarled pelvis
and the grimy bit of light
that sits behind my sternum.

Every piece of me blushes and
pinky promises it’s neighbor it
will do better. Will be quieter. Will keep
to a light simmer and not erupt boiling and steamy.

The bones cross their heart and hope to die.
The tendons nod with big eyes and try not to blink
as the message travels through my anatomy like a panicky
game of telephone. The head bone’s connected to
the back bone, (we’ve got this) the back bone’s connected to
the hip bone (we just need to focus) the hip bone’s
connected to the thigh bone (we’re done speaking today.)
Dem bones, dem bones gonna rise again.

It’s a sticky summer and studying my hands
has become a national past-time. No matter how much
sweat has pooled in the dip of my clavicles or dampened
the swatch of hair below my ponytail, my palms keep
cold. Fingers shake consistently. Rings fit well, then pinch
too tight then slide off too loose in the lifetime of one afternoon.
I’m wasting a lot of time willing myself to stabilize.

It’s a sticky summer and the hip and heart within me-
the ones I never asked to be responsible for,
are expanding to fill the dunes of ice I hid under all winter,
which have begun to melt. My brain pulses loud and hot,
untamed by my skull and I have to sit down for a minute.

Following the quick, thin stream of my thawing winter with tired eyes
I realize how clean it is. Clear but comfortingly foggy like sea glass. Like the warming dashboard of a below zero drive through the night.
It’s decay but it’s also ripening.

If leaves didn’t crumple and fall to the ground
how would we know when to put our sweaters on?
Eventually the stream will dry up and become something of
an entirely different definition.
And so will I.

I will: sink my teeth into your
skin, I will eat you up, I will
shiver and shudder and find
my tongue on your neck,
licking.

Falling feels like slingshotting your body from metal birds
At colored patches, verdant, oceanic, supposed Earth
That comes so slowly towards you, at fifteen thousand feet
That falling feels like flying then, like floating,
Like dirt is fiction and what you know are only facts

Fact: your eyes were never made to be binoculars
You can’t make them focus on something so far away,
Can’t make them telegraph up the brainwires,
Shouting incomprehensibly about fear

It’s too far. They won’t do it. Sky divers call this distance illusion.
I call it sanity when an ending comes howling across the sightline,
Unavoidable, solid, unfeared
Inside your head is the lie that you aren’t really that far,
That this distance is tame space,
That you are impossible and airborne

the sidewalks are lit up,
sunbright, enough to look away,
into merciful shade

I keep thinking I oughta be using
this time to say goodbye,
soak in Santa Fe, burn with her

if this is my last home
if this is the summer of loss,
I should let it sink under my skin

but I dry out in the sun,
and browning isn't appealing
when I'm outside myself,
beside myself already

sugar, you know
i hurt just as
much.

Loginquitas*:
distance remoteness isolation;
separated from others.

No specification about how it is,
what it is,
if it comes as a wall between
or only a space, unrightfully empty.

Isolation indicates past ongoing,
a thing not just temporary,
but potentially permanent,
a sentence like prison solitary,
like a state of celibacy,
a vow of silence given under duress.

Remoteness means far away,
not just a length of earth -
an Everest of longing,
ice shifting underfoot and when the footing goes,
down another interminable edge,
there the freeze into narrow sleep.

Distance like roads in the Midwest,
seeing for hundreds of miles,
the knowing discomfort, the steady hunger,
a fact that is this:
lost, interminably lost, losted after.

Separated from others is the afterthought,
the side effect, the symptom-sick,
visible, wriggling nakedly.
Worm-like, burrowed into itself.

Sky soft-curling on the lines that matter, pale slicing down,
I find my front door and try the key.
Until I get it right, breath blown out relief powered, quiet though, because they're asleep.

These boys here, speaking branching words meant to welcome. The girlfriend, her name slanting from my reach.

I lock the door. Keys crush, hushed, silent in hand against the dark, the questioning downgoing, the black stairs. Downstairs finally my door is solid, wooden, and the doorknob slivers sound into the empty when I go in.

Still. Sound is my breath, heavy in my throat. Hungering for unquiet lungs.

Light raps at my window and I beg a reprieve, tongue my lip where I cut it coppery and accidental.
If I fall asleep now I dream up lost, loved, longed after, but if I don't sleep I won't find it at all, not here.

So my eyes go ticking down, languid. Light looks on.