The magentine and orange yellow garrote of the twilight has yet to strangle the youth of Princeton, but it soon will. Sun sets over stockton and delphinus sits on the shelf of the sky next to the half moon ready to maurade over Marquand. Most of the store fronts, they shutter, a year closes in like a train in a tunnel and most do not know anything yet. Cannon and Tower boys do not go to Town anymore they go home to their Bay and Gables, their saltboxes ready for suburban consumption, for the dirt world of finance and brokerage, ready to pray their scandals are quickly smothered and they will be- meanwhile here sits youth, which drools in a corner, never to be invited by a bickeree again, watching the low shrubs and mafia graveyards of Linden parade through the train window, a melded scene like a watercolor. The  limestone walls of Princeton sit up straight in vigilance, the heavy doors shut along with the adolescene and the stores. The sun sets over Stockton and rises over Beekman.

1/30/2016

there was an age
where I discovered that I had a face.
It happened all at once-

everyone tried to tell me
how they thought I was hot or cute or are you down to hook up girl?

Virginal me, i raised a pastoral finger to wag and say no no no,
I wish I had that kind of leverage now

but I am a blood stain on a sheet
a cataract in a cornea,
a nick on a peridot

but mostly
the blood

-

2/2/2017

to vivisect the reader,
to bleed all over my paper
the one great poem i wish to write one day.

dead plath would be happy
my life with you a fat diseased rat.
for once, i think about what i write

taking slow breaths and thinking about meanings
there is something i am trying to say and i do not
know how to

clawing inside of me
an incubus's baby, what is it?
only dead saints know

but here's the thing,
and it is:
i did this to myself

i don't know what an apostrophe is
but i would if i saw it.
my past is full of ulcers and

the cold February cuts into me
it is my butcher
i have been that girl

short story  i wrote in 11/1/2014*

Decomposing sewer rat- that's the smell that will always remind me of her.
A tow colored ponytail, pulled back tautly with the smallish bobby pins holding down her page bangs, would greet me every time I walked into the cafeteria at lunch. She was a new kid, a sophmore, and I didn't know her name. She sat alone by the big red painted double doors. Everyone in the school wanted to get out-  but she seemed to always be smiling. It was my second semester of senior year, after winter break, after weeks of seeing the same girl sitting alone and never seeing her hair down that I decided to finally sit down next to her. The way she ignored my varsity jacket was striking- though it was my older brother's, the football team's logo always seemed to impress new girls who didn't know any better. She just kept on eating her yogurt. And then she looked to her right. And she kept on smiling. 'Hello, and your name is...?'
'Mike,' I offered my hand. And you? She just said her name was J.
I took it but wasn't satisfied. She went on to tell me she was new, from Burlington, Vermont- that she hated Scarsdale. And the bell rung. I went home that night endlessly calculating what the J could've stood for- Jennifer? Jessica? June? Jessica had me by the heels and she held me upside down. It took me days and days and finally a week and finally even a month to convince June that we should see each other outside of school. And then it took me that night taking out the trash to find out that Jennifer lived three doors away from me in a huge limestone manor. Then it took me the next day to convince her that- hey- tomorrow is a Friday, why not do something?
June said yes, put her sweater sleeve to her hand. I read once in a European studies textbook that in Elizabethan playhouses, they would sell orange rinds in little tea bags for people to hold up to their noses- the smell of all the people who didn't know about washing was so nauseating. It was ten pm when she called me that night and told me her parents would be in the Catskills and she hadn't seen my parent's cars in our driveway- so why not go to the city?
I took it in careful consideration that lasted approximately 5 seconds. I said yes si and da in every language possible. Something told me to go with her. I thought of the way she always smiled whether it was wide or wan and I could hardly wait for Friday night at 10pm.
The next day we drove to the city in her Audi cabriolet. I played New Order- but we didn't get to the city in the time we expected. The woods seemed to go on to the tune of the Perfect Kiss.
But by Face Up, we were in the city. We'd parallel parked in front of some bar  and made our way around. Then halfway through the sidewalk she asked. "Can we ride the subway?" I nodded. I supposed a Vermont girl had never seen New York City anyways. We took the R train at Rector until the end of the line. Then we went home. After that day, She went home after she dropped me off. I didn't find out what J meant or was and then it took three days to see that Jessica's house was actually just a forest. There was no limestone. It felt real, the riding the R train and the music in our ears  and even the yogurt she had eaten. But it took the next morning to monday to see there had never been a girl named J and the table was empty. It hadn't been a dream but I had to wonder if it was even real. But the other day I was on my way to Lexington  and I had sworn to god i'd seen her on the rails- on the rails! I cried for help but everyone just stared. Then I grabbed my briefcase and decided to go home instead of work for the day.

4/8/2015

Lying within the breadth
of le petit mort
i, accustomed to being

escorted out, sat up and out
of bed, the golden glaze of the
whitman skylight probably
shining around my brazen cheekbones.

"Come here," He said, the student,
and I was filled with a tender repugnantion, I was reminded of how
post coitum I would not let my past

lover even touch me for a while.
and so with this resignation I
crawled up next to him in the
Old beige wallpaper surroundings

The prestigious institute.
"You know," I told him, burying my nose into his arm
"I was named after a seductress. She would poison her father's political enemies after ***."

He shuddered a bit.
"How long does it take to kick in?" He feigned concern, eyes blinked on and off rapidly then

"Ah!" He clutched at his gut. "I feel it! The poison!" he closed his eyes and went limp. I laughed. Then he laughed.

It was a scene tender with beatific memories of vague sentimentality, quaint regard.

"It is time for you to get going now though," he stood up. "I have a paper to write."

5/6/2016

     The doctors- they told me, said I was sick. But I told them you were sicker. That it your illness- it's too much. I tap on the wallpaper and hope you understand where i'm coming from. I adjust the tin bars that won't move on the window plates.  I wanted to thank you for coming over to visit me firstly. Secondly- I want you back. I guess directness isn't the best way to someone's heart or maybe it is. I don't know why we parted. You,  you are so sick- a sick little girl, you need a nurse or perhaps some care. I never realized this- I only did now and now i'm locked in this hospital, i've caught it myself. I'm as good as dead now. I am sorry for being such an important part of your life- maybe if I wasn't, it wouldn't hurt to see me like this. Maybe if i wasn't i would stop disturbing you-  leave you alone. But i need you back- I don't  know why we left eachother.

-and why?

            Why not? You don't  remember all the good parts of us? Do you remember how the Blackgum trees in the park  smelled like after a good rain while we walked through them and tried to get a good bench by the reservoir, you know, the one that always smelled like pondweed? I'd told you about how they're called Naiad weeds. I told you what Naiads were. You remind me of one, all pink faced and watery. You were always sort of ephemeral and wavering like water.

-why are you telling me this?

            Because it's you.  You're wavering jumping pondwater  and you're the kittens that old woman who lived near you kept. We used to feed the ones that wandered near your terrace. I thought they smelled bad,  but you said to not say that because it would hurt their feelings.

...

No- please don't touch me.

...

It's as if a corpse touches me when you reachout that hand.

...

Don't touch me! with your fetid finger, your moribund edge. You make me want to cry, you make me want you back with me- mostly you confuse me. How could you have so much respect for life? It was my favorite thing about you. You should've been a ****** Aryika. somewhere, in India. How could you care so much about a life, from a person's to a cat's feelings and even to a little mite's? How could we have sat and listened to Chopin's Mazurkas during that one big hurricane with my old battery powered radio, and how could  you have made me cake when everyone forgot my birthday? How could you? How dare you. How could you have so much respect for every life except your own?

4/29/2016

I smile dumbly
and blink my grainy
eyelids.

The sky looks like a
Monet detail
of mallow,

grey and
baby boy blue
tepid and

As we make
our way down the
avenue with

lighters
I give her a
pallid glance

and it is not
our beautiful day
and they are far away

the peonies,
laid,
grow out of the ground

and the people out of
the town
I go home

and lie in bed and
I remember talking
to myself once I

recalled
"I love  New York
Because there's so many bridges to jump off"

after anne sexton*

12/3/2015

Here is a vivisection,
my dull operation,
  cutting into my epidermis,
pulling out maggots and rat pups,
scuttling across the scalpel,
Armillaria inside of my tendons
this itself is: a deposession,
a sort of pneumic
   inquisition, the
paucity of the gold striking someone
   sick running down my shoulders
quadriplegic in motion,
  temperament boiling
hissing now stovetop unattended
foaming at the mouth falling into the hot ,
  moving and finally
over the edge the foam sick bile like
Sliding onto the voided floor

stitch me back up.

4/11/2015

Today I woke up
after a long tribulation, got up
found my way down

and remembered how to
make myself coffee.
I couldn't help but feel

a longsword in my lungs
when I looked over the ridge
and started to see green colored oaks.

7/22/2016

yesterday
a buck moon
the pregnant off white rock
hanging heavy in the sky
everything on the ground painted luminous and grey
i accidentally scratch my self,
draw blood above my lip
the brilliant garnet roiling down my chin
leaving a sickle shaped scar with a story to tell
the velvet pushes through the skin,
growing off the skull
for competition and for ***
and we laugh together hahahaha just like humans
but it isn't really the case
and the human skull is so ugly itself
once all the skin has rotted away and melted
into loam
my buck moon will come
one day

11/4/2017

third floor balcony the highest it goes
we stood– he said earlier
the top staircase is good luck

just her and i smiling leaning on railing
talking about everything:
who gives a **** but we did and we do

the night was brand new- sitting
joking the apartment was an ***** den
smoking your lucky cigarette, you paused

and i thought is this the best we're ever gonna get?
you hand it back to me,
i breathe remember last time i was here

we walk back in,
they laugh and talk about how they're out
of beer

she asks if i want my makeup done
and how the others will be here soon
i can only think of the dead leaves

i saw on the courtyard from the stairs
and wonder which one fell
first.

“’Have you ever seen a man?’ I knew he meant naked. He disrobed.Then he just stood there in front of me and I kept on staring at him. Then I felt very depressed.”*
- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Afternoons while the dog sleeps
turned over on the side and i wonder what organs i push on
liver? spleen? clean the bile for me, please

and then I  shall leave extra gratuity.
Please don’t cry, I feel a hand on my hipbone
my eyes pressed against the olive cushion

The green and the wood of the trees blur into one outside my
june july window
much like the book of Esther i look for a place inside

myself to stop the killing of decency inside myself and
i cannot muster it much like anything else.
I wish i had never asked that December night to go

I stop the disgust cut it at the bud
find a way to necromance up my personality
the outside is smelling of charcoal

i stare at his flesh,
then at mine then
at the floor.

he says we shall wait all i want and
now he is looking at me with doe eyes and i
nod. I nod. I feel i am ok now.

1/18/2018

i used to be sentimental,
i declare like some sort of achievement
like it is something to be proud of

that i feel nothing
nowadays.
and i do, i think

but i have always been told
my writing is analytical
corpse cold, to the point

the car's quiet in the night
and, moving to the corner
and crossing my arms

i entertain the notion of what've i done
but life doesn't mean anything
and that's the good part

i laugh but I'm not smiling
as you confirm this idea
the fields are

evil and dark
but how do i explain
i can't it's not like i have ever felt it before

with a smirk
i
play with my hair

and remember
what being a woman's
good for.

"Because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air."*
Sylvia Plath

And we sat dumbly on his too big mattress
a cigarette stain here, there
his pants still on the floor

we stared at eachother through the mirror
oh God, what a recurring theme
in my life
and maybe his.

**** water,**** water
******* nosebleeds and
cracked knuckles

our little litany
but please, he'd beg
don't do any of those til

college.
Walked back to the theatre
where i would tell my parents

we were.
"Honey baby,
i'm 21, not 16"

and for a
second i almost believed it
and then he smiled.

"Oh honey
baby, you know the
expression."

Honey baby
Honey baby
He'd

grab my hair like
a ragdoll then
remember to stroke it

in the four thirty pm
sunsets of december
I was reminded of a

sort of sentimental tenderness
and he asked me in the
cigarette perfumed room

"Honey baby,
why're your eyes
misty for?"

I wanted to say
the way he held me
unabashedly

reminded me
of
oh, nevermind.

we sat in his room
staring dumbly at eachother
twice maybe

me trying to squeeze in
just a little debauched
moment

last of the year.
He put on his glasses
then his pants.

I told him i felt sometimes
as if i was living with a vitriolic
air round me.

The wool spread slept dumbly
at my stolid crossed
underwear legs and he just said

"Are you kidding?
do you even know what
just happened?"

12/15/2015

"You, doctor, go from breakfast
to madness."
Anne Sexton

The engine of my amygdala:
                   so burnt out
I needed coolant, I needed something to prevent my
   immolation
a sort of precautionary measure

***'s flammable
  I'd soon find out
In a crowd of hundred dark and
smoke crawled through my shoulders
    social little parasite
apologize for being an interruption to everyone

   "Wish I could've been there"
Sucrose altruism,
back at the mental hospital id relived
every single second with you

thinking of your anger I read Tennessee William's letters
I loved you

I even loved your hatred.
A girl across the hall screaming
about Jesus and her ****
shouting singing Shenandoah

"But I don't need to be here,"
   I turned to my roommate,
a strong figure I still admire,
"Everyone says that, even with a Thorazine needle halfway down their ***."

They'd had a name for it
Something about kisses, I don't remember

"Yeah, it leaves a huge bruise on
your ***," they laughed in the
tv parlor

there we were
The tristate area's teenage
girls too unstable for the world

a step above "oh, you know how
teenagers are"
A girl with grey eyes

Came in my last night there
"Is it normal to cry on your
first day?"

I wasn't allowed to
even touch her shoulder
and so

with the alcohol and the
Lamotrogine I tried to figure
out where it'd all gone wrong

but it'd been hiding in me
psychotic seed,
a virus carrier a patient zero of my own

tepid insanity!

7/30/2016

everytime I open my eyes
in the mornings or late afternoons
i begin to writhe in anger and contort
and my blood is roiling and I swear
I look at my pink skin I can see it steaming and foaming and I am manic again and ready to ruin some relationships again,
and I am awake again.
And when I wake up alive I feel the world has failed me
a little more every day

-

i found a draft of a letter i wrote 5/2015*

an embittered ugly facade covering a deeply hurting human. in this facade the wall looked like apathy and one day a crack appaered. she figured the best repair was debauchery- her hair was shorn and she lived like caligula. this only created more cracks among the buttresses. then you came. you knew how to fix the cracks and then

[fragment]

7/14/2015

"I mean I just don't get excited
anymore, you know?"
but even that
statement drains all the life out of me,
grabs a spot in my ribs, twists it, pulls it out like a dandelion ****.

I decide walking on 3rd avenue in
a Brooklyn neighborhood that I don't
need energy anymore
or, I've been doing well with the scant
supplies I have of it.

The day before, blow dried hair sticking to my neck because the windows are locked,
I had listened to the radio
Billie Holliday: oh lover man where can you be?

I know **** well where mine is,
unfortunately across the hudson
but I think I am happy for him because
any sane person would be otherwise in
princeton after a while

I count and recount the oaks and pines outside my house and the cardinals and bluejays and mocking birds, try to find something, don't find it,

Read a book, and I yell to myself:
"'That’s funny! there’s blood on me.'
- Frank Ohara."

9/30/2014
Manhattan, new york city, new york

you got to wonder
September saturday nights
walking down church street.

the man on his smoke break
gives me a smile on the corner of 9:30
at night and i return it even though it
isn't wise because
it seems kind,
a smile i’d like to get to know better.

in the taxi
i think uninspired thoughts,
running along the sidewalk’s lining
sidewalks i’ll probably never walk on
and this is when i realize
Manhattan is a small island.

back on the train
i think that monday mornings wouldn’t
be so bad if I lived in Manhattan
crosby street or wall,
but then i think of all the
manhattan schoolkids
that seem like they know everything
and i think: do I really want to?

back in Princeton
i think that i am bored
and i realize far too much has changed
from april,
the raw essence still the same
seeping at the core of the stem, however

and i accidentally step on an ivy league
cufflink. I think to myself
i probably wouldn’t think so much
if i was in manhattan.

5/6/2015

may 2nd,2015
Lying in the dried gutter with White
by the 11:30 light of the
may moon

  It seemed, to me,
a quiet sylvan scene
the dried out cat tails in the mooreland
bordered by the soft tufts of forest grove.

I drop my cigarette stubbed now into the half empty Heineken
"Yeah I finished it" throw it at the cemented bank
its ember stained glass church body
shattering into pieces
"just a smattering of a
headache," she says, her cigarette finger pressed against a bottle (multitasking)
"the surgery is next week," we lie down on the grass now which is cold.  

Since when do we care?
"i kind of hope i die." a million stars
dangling over the heavens
I envy the ones who burn out unspectacularly.

8/13/2014

"The cicada's dry monotony breaks over me.
The days are bright and free.
Then why did I cry today for an hour?

I stood under oak, while autumnal fog
eddied around my feet, waiting for the bus
with a dread that took my breath away.
I stood at the side of the road.
This summer- it was the only life I had."
Jane Kenyon

A Sourland night with some tylenol at my
side and a black shirt that smells like Pierre Cardin
doesn't sound half bad,
and if it does, let me know. Do you remember telling birds at 5 in the morning to shut the hell up?
That was june and time goes on. And now you flinch as if hit when you see the first gold leaf, huh?

The end of an era we could not say goodbye to came and it went. We sat sullied in our sunken brows like children who'd misbehaved and silently regretted. Our mouths
tasted of sunflower fields and henna birchs. You realize summer is over when you feel it was minutes, not hours that you killed off slowly.

Don't worry. Nothing Gold Can Stay, this time you can't stop the gold from staying, but the feeling of a hell hot afternoon layed out overwhelming like a blanket is gone.

12/6/2015
"Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence."
TS eliot, the wasteland

I am amberbeetle,
  stoked fire,
medicated ditz

I ramble through the wasteland,
hook foot and slackjaw
and go south in the winter.

you gave me asters a year ago
now they call me aster girl
memory almost always mixed with

desire,
and I
should've been

a pair of ragged claws
but that's a different poem.
We talked for an hour

maybe more
in the summer,
and he said

hold tight,
and I was was frightened,
and down we went.

Swiss instigation,
broken video tapes and
grimacing at sweaty sunsets

sunrises, and
there was no Japanese maple
no silver leaf,

no silver lining,
I read much of the night.
roots that clutch me in

metropolitan
rubble,
and these days

the broken deadtree gives
no shelter, no consummation
no conjugal embrace,

I don't find,
nor am I
the hanged man

"And I'd do it any other way
but when the hell am I gonna get a gun?
and you can't OD on clonepazam

without it being ugly of course."
Dorothy Parker–
I planted a corpse in my yard

Who am I kidding,
we did,
me with some assistance

It was carrion
found in the corridor
did it sprout?

it did,
but not in the way I hoped-
no carrot flowers or crabapple

in fact it was held up
by fruit vines
that illuminated it for all to see

including me.
In the sad sad light a
carved seraphim

melted into the laqueria
my nerves, they're bad tonight
and every night

stay with me
Speak with me
breed

in the rats alley
and lose your bones

hellopoetry.com/poem/1106978/witherspoon/
witherspoon
3/7/2015

I've met a few good men,
a few good men, this is why
I am so vexed.

The springing pantomines
of careful youth rings around
the green, as it always has

the campus store sells
cigarettes and muffins and condoms
as it always has, and

although the mood is different than
the one on early semester Halloween
night,

The grass is as green as it always
has been.
I need to learn to let people

and things go, but it doesn't help
when you live, when half of those memories

happened in towns where George Washington and Witherspoon got
drunk off their *****,

and Madison lied about men in the woods. Sitting dully alone in the stadium

the vast Powers,
I am one in 23,000
and I do not know how I feel

about that and the lost
days when I used to chain smoke
voraciously in the parking lot

in a car that smelled like
burnt tobacco
and run through

the rain in Murray dodge,
write on the walls at the Pyne
arches and smoke

drugs with friends
in the freezing rain on Wilson's
grave.

This is all gone now
and
I need new trivial distractions

now that all of mine are gone
and I see the summer sun getting
closer to my bruised memory.


i've met a few good men
key word:
few.

the quivering ghosts of our
salad days runs around the green
do you remember? are you sure?

i ran through the campus store
laughing til my liver hurt
posing with antifreeze, asking friends "anyone want shots?"

i don't know, wouldn't know
what princeton's like now
because i haven't been in six months.

i do vaguely remember
strips of it, the cheesecloth that wrapped around
the ides of april, freezing and shivering under my arms.

i still haven't learned how to let people go.
it is difficult when
you live in a town that is made by its history.

what town or person isn't?
constant talk of Stockton, Witherspoon and Washington's
crossing damns my existence.

i used to go down to the stadium
freeze my fingers off or pop open bottles with
White

i remember when i lied to Lacava about my first time
smoking cigarettes that is
he bought me my first pack

i sat in the front seat of the car that january
trying to coolly inhale
begging to god to not let me cough.

i didn't.
i remember i ran through the rain with someone i loved, once
through murray dodge

he'd told me he never forgot the way
i looked with eyeliner dripping down my face and
my soaking hair slowly curling into snail shells.

i'd written on the arches at Pyne
then i'd written on the walls with our spit
joking - why's it called PVNE?

I sat serenely with my friends one February day
that year, i must specify because one  has passed already.
smoking bouges on Burr's grave, so bougie.

i got new distractions
i don't have any way to keep them, though
i'll find a way in the summer

or maybe not
maybe.
maybe.

10/15/2015

down by the ravine twisted woods,
By boxelder and sweetgum,
a timber rattler in the field over,

you say "those are dangerous"

"Mhm" all I mumble, stifling in the memorial of that sticky sunny summer in the forest

you say sooner or later
"Barely is enough sometimes"

warning: suicide, graphic descriptions

"I forgive you for what you did not do."
Anne Sexton

    The sterility will crush me. The whiteness will **** in through my nose and ears and consume me when the room implodes, if it could. But it cannot. I wrote to tell you it is so lonely desolate and so cold. There are people here but they are as lost in death as they were in life. All the jumpers go to rooms where they are eternally falling all the squashers go to the crushing room where walls like the southbound 1 train during rush hour kiss constantly and the ribs are broken, contorted put together again and there is no clean up crew that isn't getting paid enough for this and no cynical commuter fathers telling their children they are sorry they were late but there was a suicide at the 66st stop.

    The drowners live in a soggy blue haze where they gasp for air and the pill takers have it easy. They always have a stomachache nothing more; and they faint over and over again giving them rest what they wanted anyways. I wanted to let you know you have probably walked into my room and seen the stupid polite carrion of myself. I trust you have read my note and I trust you have told your parents screaming on the phone and this isnt happening.

     I trust you've delayed to call the paramedics and ended up calling them 20 minutes later than you should because you knew I was dead- the cold paste of my wrist was just too true blue and it reminds you of that ring you got me when we were young and said it promised something.

    We listened to I Left My Heart in San Francisco that night in my suburban American Craftsman. Neither of us have ever been but I liked the line about being left alone in Manhattan because that's how I felt often I never told you this once I got there though. You've combed my hair that you always said reminded you of gold-leaf and you've punched out the wall because you said some stuff or maybe didn't that one time and you're ****** about it. The neighbors have heard your keening and wondered what is going on.

   You've stiffened my collar so as to hide the marks and put my body down but nothing will hide the marks even long after my body attempts to rot but can't by way of embalming as I sleep in the graveyard I told my mother I wished to be buried in when I was 15.

   The victims of garrote are constantly choking and our necks break constantly. Our throats gasp but we cannot get air. To get into heaven I must make my peace with the life I had on earth. But I will not. I  wish I had not thrown out my pills.

null

2/17/2015

last Thursday, the snow came
down on Nassau street
and the ludlow alley
by the record shop

It came down in flurries
goosedown down on streets
where, in the spring,
students balance 12 packs

help us out!
And in the fall
they're not to be seen.

"Sir," I ask
stepping out from where
my friends drink flat whites
and chocolate lattes.

"Can I *** off you?"
i grab the Marlboro and walk away
It's funny how people suddenly
notice how cold it is outside

when you're out there alone.
"****, little lady
it is cold outside isn't it?"
and "aren't ya cold, girl?"

a David Bowie leaks out of the record
store when someone opens the door
to leave or go in ? I don't remember.

"yes, it is cold," I reply, ashing.
"aren't you outside too?"
"Well.." The men
have no business talking to me

of course.
"Do you have a ride home?"
"Goodbye," I twirl on the stomped cigarette

go back into the café
say hello to my friends
and watch the pedestrians

scurry out like weevils
in the goosedown, which
I can only see because of the
Orange lamplight.

8/15/2015

This girl and I, we'd settled
In the dark corners and grimy alleys
of Princeton (where? People would ask)
Sitting on our ***** yelling at college players
thrown onto the briar patch with the
force of a bird at flight
we'd delay death by persuasion
the cigar cutter had already lopped off
our knees.

9/15/2016

the first confirmed case of cannibalism in the Jamestown colony has been identified as a 14 year old girl, possibly from a wealthy family

they found you with
lamb in your bones
and said you had a good diet

I am trying to think of
what kind of person you were
before they put a hatchet to your

skull, assembled you along with
skunk, peat moss, dog.
you were from a wealthy

family because of the
protein they found embedded in you
or maybe you were a servant

and ate well.
maybe this is why they got you–
the first two blows were shallow

and meek
the one that severed you into
cuts for meat

broke your tibia
like you would slaughter cattle
maybe, the archeologist said, if she had

someone to protect her
this wouldn't have happen
she didn't.

but then I read you were dead
before they even
started

"said my muse to me,
'look in thy heart and write.'"
-Philip Sidney

1
"i have a song to show you," i said in the late morning
but did not play it until eleven that night.
your eyes seemed blue when i met you
i realized they are green or maybe temperamental.
as the train swept past the neighborhoods and the forests
in between them
and the white delicate soot of the snow lifted in the air
for a second, or two or three
one couldn't see anything from the window
on one side, this
on the other, you
one ethereal
the other, just frozen rain

2
in the museum,
the serious straight lines of malevich stared me down
i walked towards the other side of the room
when i turned around, the back of your head
ash blonde and head tilted
i looked at the art, then the floor, then the white walls
you looking at your favorite painting
you implied it was an honor and
i touched your shoulder
and called you the prettiest thing here.
you smiled. it was just the truth.
i said i would see my favorite painting
but i don't know where it is
you told me, with a laugh,
you did not mind traveling
i later found out
Portrait of Maude Abrantes*
is in Haifa.

3
"where do we go?" you asked.
"good question. i don't know,"
figure out for yourself what i meant.
The subways were all closed
and only the 7 was running
who gives a **** about the 7? i'd always said
guess the joke was on me.
walking to the station, whichever one we could find
i looked up at you with snow dusted hair
and frostbitten hands
feeling something i hadn't felt in years
"let's hop on a train and get off wherever"
it took 15 minutes
but the D train rolled in
and up to 59th we went,
then the E down to west 14th.
We laughed at the incompetency of bureaucracy
and hopped from the train onto the platform,
watching the gap as we did.

4
there,
on west 14th
the Chelsea streets were wordless,
sleeping in on a saturday night
we walked past snowed in cars and i laughed at the
ridiculousness of it all
this is how badly i'd wanted to go to the city with you!
but i didn't mind
i walked a bit ahead
turned around
the beaux arts townhouses
on either side of us
strategically planned trees
and a pair of lost gloves
it was so quiet i couldn't hear my thoughts
just my heart's rhythm
in the station that night
you had told me you wished i had a place in brooklyn to go back to
"yeah, if we could even find a train that went there," i laughed.

1/25/2017

the sky melted, sweating glass
for three days straight-
once, we marveled at the inexorable and eventual

at
the drop that makes the bough
bow.

i remember the ache
of the sunlight on my
crooked nape

one May day . We sit in a January cafe
"It is springtime," she announces
except these days, it's no emotional pantomime, not a hopeless mantra

"and why?" I beg a question
"oh, because something's starting"
she mixes milk into her honey

it is too sweet for me
the umbrella opens in the shop
"put that away, it's a bad omen" oh, as if I care

imagine me so treacly?
she talks about pregnancy and politics
about marriage

and something in me,
i realize
wants to be, is disgusted by my far future maternity

at the supermarket
there's a jingle
hey, mom, what's for dinner?

"Uh, hey, I feel like Plath... marriage is oppression and all that"
"Well, join the club. Oh, domesticity-"
"O'Hara said : There is only one man I like to kiss,"

I misquote, intentionally.
"Heterosexuality!
you are inexorably approaching!"

perhaps we can't wait
to be thirty and bored
with three kids

watching them play at the Minetta
wondering where the hell our time went
and there they'll sit

polish- to her irish, italian- to my puerto rican
new jersey mutts
i laugh

thinking of drunk days down on
53rd and Lex
we're not ready to live like it's 1953

*oh, johnny promised me
and i wear his
ring

12/7/2017

The month was over
heart in my hands
pulsing, bleeding

crawling down and off my
fingers
ruby, garnet

all over
the muddy riverbank.
the summer night's air-

still, holding.
it was unknown,
so were you

remembering the
look you gave me
as i walked away

you thought i didn't see
days turned into weeks
soon enough

like always, of course
and again
i watched you walk away

forever and ever.
you did not look back like I did.
I did not expect you to.

December I sit on the top of the slide, looking at
playground monkey bars

I laughed when
you hopped on
looking at the brook we

flung cigarettes at.
I wonder why no one has killed me yet in life

With something as simple
as- placed firmly in
my liver- a knife.

the biting air freezing
the tips and tops
of my fingers

the lights of the cars
pass over my head in lines, through metal slats

thinking of you:
a brick to my face,
to my brain, please.

so I can start over,
comatose, new and
unknown to the world.

In three weeks
New Years
will come

you will laugh with your friends miles away
i, sick sad abandoned

will frown deeply
at the television
and make myself empty promises

that
others will
break for me eventually.

3/10/2016

"It was rumored that Lucrezia Borgia was in possession of a hollow ring that she used frequently to poison drinks..."

i 'oughta honour my posterity, namesake
i'm just the plainer version of the papess
nightshade? what's that?

i am the bad assassin.
either I let them live too long
or i don't know when to empty the hollow ring into the silver chalice

so i empty into my own.
here i am: lying in a gurney, which holds
my pooled throwup.

it seeped into my soft cloths, my white sheets,
it sought a purpose, removed from a place it held so dearly-
that held it...

i find we are similar
i never once thought of myself as *****
in the past

i smoked a cigarette i picked
up by the side of the highway on a dare.
"oh god, stop!" my friends laughed. "disgusting!"

they didn't know i
inwardly agreed.
i hit the flint.

11/15/2015


i am fetid and
spewing rabid motions rapid little

impulses
I want to debase
I scoop my iris out with a spoon

1/12/2015
"There is no woman living that draws breath
So sad as I, though all things sadden her.

Alas, Love, what is this thou wouldst with me?
What honour shalt thou have to quench my breath,
Or what shall my heart broken profit thee?
O Love, O great god Love, what have I done?"
- Algernon Charles Swinburne

Utility boots set down stolid on the asphalt
of the Powers field
by the power vested in me
as I sit in stadium seat 547B

In the cold, bathed
in the antifreeze holding
it steady in my mouth

a fat orange plum on the metal
mandible.
as soon's the safety's off with the
fork it's a

crack light, crack light as my
friends would say
and I think who the hell would
ever do drugs?

You've come a long way, Baby
the box says
and all the ones serious about
their tar intake

make fun of me
girl things, girl stuff
where's your love for camel?
but really. cancer isn't a competition.

it is cold and colder.
i think of ******, i think of you
most importantly

of how i probably wouldn't be staring
dully at the bright orange paint
PRINCETON

and throwing stubbed out cigarettes at
the turf.
the next field over was the one he kissed
me in that night

and i'd thought of you then,
thought of you always.
and why the hell?

it is funny. I know why i do this
i told myself i would never smoke
because i get addicted too fast

procrastinate far too much.
i throw another dead little Virginian girl
at the grass chambers of hell below

and I look at my frostbitten fingers tips to
see if they are still there.
because it is my fault,

and it always is;
debauchery's been my best friend for
so long

and i do not know why these boots are
so broken in,
so sturdy and so very "here"

when procumbent you'd
say to me i don't know what will happen
but the future's going to make us happy

and i guess it worked out for one of us.
i haven't talked to him in three weeks,
the almost father of my almost child
(thank god. . .)

the sire of my sense of
restlessness
his words of "i'm 16 going on 21"
ringing on to me

and making my tongue bleed
as i reach for the bottle of tea
i had dropped somewhere in
the "B" seats

but where was i?
oh yes, where you are  not
and i'm going down the stairs to
where i'd throw down the goodness

on saturday nights in november
and i can't feel my toes now too
so i go down faster

my head reeling
and the marlboro boys and the
camel boys tell me that virginia slim's
supposed to not make you feel anything.

i am the obituarist
and still am shocked when they die
a sort of dull plodding preparation
dressing the dead presents itself in memories
of you
as dead as you.
I loved you,
O, how I loved you! And you to me.

snow covers sod farms, it reminds me of purity.
Sickly i want to burn it with cobalt flame
so that i may wash my torn up hippocampus

with the rain water.
and the question i sleep to and wake up to:

i used to be like the snow
so why did i melt it for you
when i knew i would be washing your corpse with the water?

3/1/2016

"* The river is rising
      over the thawed ground
   and the banksides. When you come you bring
      an egg dyed lavender.
   We shout along our bank to hear
our voices returning from the hills to meet us.
   We need the landscape to repeat us.
[...]
      In the debris lay
   starlings, dead. Near the park’s birdrun
      we surprised one day
   a proud, tan-spatted, buff-brown pigeon.
      In my hands she flapped so
   fearfully that I let her go.
Her keeper came. And we helped snarl her in a net.
   You bring things I’d as soon forget.

     You raise into my head
   a Fall night that I came once more
      to sit on your bed;
   sweat beads stood out on your arms and fore-
      head and you wheezed for breath,
   for help, like some child caught beneath
its comfortable wooly blankets, drowning there.
   Your lungs caught and would not take the air.*"

wd snodgrass, 'heart's needle'

here it is and here i was
succinctly woman,
growing into my title as one
never deciding whether or not

to be the one to upturn her nose cruelly
or ground her feet into the dirt shyly.
i revel in my past

and i believe it happened, yes
reading back at old letters
two years prior to the day

looking for any
auspicious auguries,
anything that would have alluded to

this swollen self.
winter this year lasted
maybe a day

i cannot decide
if that is good for me or
for the earth,

but i have never been
an
excellent oracle.

10/4/2014

noting that nothing
much compares,
i get up in my bra

while an inamorata
lies behind me on the dormroom bed
their dormroom bed

and i look in the mirror
but i do not even think
to look at my face

like they are doing.
they are studying the curve
of my ears

and the way the shoddy
window lights
my browbone.

but they cannot see my tailbone,
because i must always
keep my skirt on.

they ask me to come to bed
i think about it and checked my
missed calls.

i tell them we are cinematic
and they say well I love you
patting the bed.

i shake my head again
cold as i was when we first met
grown cynical.

i do not look at my face in the
five times i get up to observe
the shape of my chest

while they lie behind me waiting
for what?
i only make eye contact

with myself when i am fixing their shirt
in the bathroom mirror
and we look at each other

through it. A hand on my head.
I cast my eyes down to their
shirt collar that needs fixing.


How handsome are you now?

2/13/2016
"notice how he has numbered the blue veins in my breast.
he is building a city, a city of flesh.
he is an industrialist."
anne sexton

i've seen god themself stirring
subzero confectioner's sugar around this place,
you are the dried up ***** on my face

something acrid that i fell asleep and neglected to wash
i used to cut down swathes of brambles, and the bees
they'd run away

when i was a kid they followed me everywhere.
"you're sweet, kid" my father would say
now he just says i am stupid, so droll

as if i've never known that before
my bulbous arteries run with the notion of
him, sweltering, pointing

"bowie's on sale again,"
the same stamp on the telephone box
there, rotting, gentle

two years later
i say this: there is nothing in princeton
and everything in manhattan

that princedom where you stumble on
***** sidewalks and run hands along bubonic
subway railings

where, really
wanting to throw myself on the freight rail
would just be wanted to throw myself off the Veranzzano.

sylvia said it best, i guess
my own bell jar sour as ever
no matter whether

i'm in Bremen
Lesotho or
in his bed, again

i'd find a way to do it,
i told her
the only place i am willing to.

2/9/2015

"every unexpected change," the ******* continued to drip from her
plum painted cupid's bow

"is an opportunity for something
great," topped it off with a terminal patient smile.

I drew on the desk with a
pen that didn't have a point.
"No such thing as nice surprises,"
dragging it across the dade pine.

1/14/2017

one in the morning, champagne drunk
KNL INW and I
steered uneasily down the sidewalks
of an uppereast side street,

the January wind whipping us
into a frenzy
smoking rolled cigarettes
a homeless man stops us:

asks for food
she gives him a cigarette
lights it for him
looking back, this was not good

a drunk bougie boy out of many
says "it's alright sweetheart!" as he passes us on the sidewalk. we complain of exhaustion

it is quiet.
i will move here next year
i pause.
I think, stop

and we laugh
and wonder if it's really happening
and i think my poetry is uninspired
and frankly, ugly

my state does not settle in
i almost step on a puddle
i say where am i? the answer:
realization enough to strike me sober

12/28/2014
for ES

the dictionary definition of prospect is
"outlooks for the future"
and so this i ponder on a train platform.

once walking between the larrikin
of halls Class of 1903 and Jones,
i'd come across the gardens,

prospective ones or so said the
namesake.
i stepped over the leaves that were

on the ground but not quite
off the branches
read the bronze penny

stained black tablet
the roses and blackeyed susans,
cultiviated by class of 1850

gentlemen farmers
and named as the
view of the sight

filled one with such
good prospects.

now i don't quite know
why the trolly dodger park's
called that

and i've never quite been
so, thinking about it
i'll have to rely on

going with you
but of course
you say the same about the Gardens

so take my hand and follow me

9/2/2017

Now johnny hartman
using the same excuse i do:
i just dropped by to say hello

oh but how destructive
a few words could
be!

two and a half at night
god should i be asleep?
should i drive into oblivion?

i'd like to disappear into the mountain
driving, turning into a ravine, melting into the night's rocky tiers

god
id rather be anywhere
but here:

East Maryland, or Narrangansett
you know, whatever it is i  want
i'm not sure this place has it

1/30/2016

we spoke in the darkened auditorium,
waiting for a dance,
waiting for stories told wordlessly

I told her about that summer and how
although I didn't like you I remembered it vividly,

and how you woke up at unbearable hours and i did it for you,
so I would wake up every 2 hours just to make sure I didn't

sleep past my 7 am alarm

I was home alone that summer
most of the time,
we laughed when my parents told us

we didn't spend enough time together
it was extraordinarily hot that summer
i remember, it was like breathing into an oven,

We drank a lot of rootbeer, sat on the porch with sandwiches, and you brought me blueberries and tried to make me laugh,

And you usually suceeded-
I hadn't yet succumbed to
tearing my hair off and sitting
in the white room like later

and I swear I've aged so much
in these two years
but I got carried away

and I told her
I don't love you at all
but rising  those chlorophyll mornings

I've never forgotten that,
I know not why-
maybe it was the light. maybe it was the heat, maybe it was my youth.

8/4/2015

"It's,like, the Jersey
theme song," he bubbles out
excitedly

conjuring up images of
driving through the parkway
Down the shore

where they'll say
"Hey, buddy! Whadayya think yer doin!"
Well they blew up the chicken man in Philly last night,

I wish they'd blow up my house, too
on the steps of a granite building called Clio
Princeton's lost its golden air as said before and

the Sourland crepuscule
of rock and woodchip
under my feet seems

to be just woodland landscape no
longer some powerful nature scene or something
i have friends, but they are in cities

looking through high still air i say
and declare the sourland scene dead the
vague Appalachian terrain the parkway by Princeton

i go to sleep.

2/6/2014
the third poem I ever wrote

You were playing with a cloth napkin-
what was it you said? I loved you before?
Yes, I acknowledge that.
What was it you said? Back then
When we were young?
That you were sixteen going on seventeen with the body of twenty and the face of eighteen?
What was it that you said?

My sensitive romantic Byron soul's bruised like a peach.
You are a caregiver- Lillian to Gerard.

I am a person who cannot believe what they are seeing.
I am taking a drink by a window.
I am a sociopath looking for love

The unspoken union we held
in the past with shaky fingers
god, man, do you have to bring it
up in front of my friends?

It is the twothousand tens and it
is easy now to know the blood
behind the rind and then meet them for the first time.

2/3/2015

January 31 2015
"Look at this: the young girls giggle at nothing. The boys are after me. Nothing ever happens. They don't laugh hard and they don't yell. They don't get hurt or die and they don't laugh either." -Anais Nin

how many weeks are left in winter again?
the sun decided to come out today, did it not?
streaming half heartedly through the window slats of
the bathroom.

i am flicking the lighter sitting on a mattress
just going through the motions it's just standard procedure
saying to him "listen i'm probably going to write about this"

and thinking if i'm stupid enough, show him the finished product
anything you say or do can and will be used against you in a court of law
lots of "nice kids" i spend time with i feel sort of inflicted on

or for?

staring at the ceiling and
"hey this feels like a Bukowski poem"
and then, trying in my best impersonation of the drunken Fritz:

"met this girl today/we sat on a mattress and smoked and- um,
we just met today, and um, you know."
then standing up afterwards

with the gross marlboro gold inbetween my mouth
don't worry, i won't smoke it inside.
throw my pack on the bed,

lots of nice kids i've written about
that are just that
and i frown at nassau hall coming up the

steps.