You hold pink peaches
in the corner of your cheeks
Only in moments
where your words are withheld
I dig deep into your eyes
for the pit of your
passion
What a hypocrite I am--
shovel sways from root
I lay next to soil,
cradle grit and bruised apple
I am inner core,
mantle, lithosphere
the cliche words "I miss you"
orbiting around the sun
All different earths of myself
I hope when it rains
you don't find shelter
that your arms are the roof
I have waited my whole life

I was not ready for our encounter.
You caught me in the midst of
tending to my own crop
of seaweed,
Trying to farm a plant who thrives underwater
Hoping it would die above land,
along with the cobalt of my sorrow.
I tried to continue
to bury tear.
ash aching algae.
kiss goodby coral.
You took my hand and used your sleeve
to wipe my grieving sweat.
You asked me set down my sow
my sorrow
and put my farm to fire
Start anew
I feared the black rebirth
but you promised me
I would never have to cultivate solo
Ever again.
You reached for my fist
and finger by finger
the freedom of soil and seed emerged
There I stood
As I was always meant to be from birth
a mother
of nature
a snakeskin of anguish
a forever lover of
you.

"Just Intermission. Be safe. Be kind."
Our sunset view for 18 months
My home is made up of windows
and I don't want anyone handing me a stone
There are exactly  3 crosses around me and a 20 foot lit up Mary holding a baby Jesus I see when I look out my southside window
I get an email stating that they will be birthing

My ******* are
raisins
faucets
grape bubble gum
chewed and twisted, masticated into purple milk
That resurrect into lactose layers regurgitated on the scoop of my neck where I used to sweep wrists over with the latest from Dior—
Now nape exudes a hint of expired Greek yogurt with a hint of sweet snot
Dior Dior, make something that isn’t swimming in alcohol
Or can I swim in alcohol?
Instead of bobbing above with engorged ****, ankle weights of an open gummed mouth
While I close mine and smile every time anyone asks me how it is to be a mother
Of course love her, open mouthed and all
So unapologetically in want
I envy the way she sprawls open
Screaming and ripping, demanding what she deserves
When do we learn to be hushed, silenced for what we hunger?
How I learn from you, sweet Audrey

We force ourselves to stand
Three feet apart
hips hug both sides of my stove
This is the only way we can exchange words
without clutching jaw
and drinking down
the longing on our tongues
without inhaling goose bumps
and locking fingers,
palms and tips--
our roots
twisting around an angular world
Our words might as well be our pores
touching and igniting into the night
They dance around our mouths and
tug at our stories
It is our pause that holds me,
Where silence steps in like a sister
Nodding and approving
of the way
we look at each other
like a night sky
bursting with bright
You are my light.

My bed is only messed up by me,
Diagonally.
Sleep is an ambush
Soldiers gunning at my eyelids
They quiver while natural light
stuffs iris barrels with daisy
If only I could create my own field of weeds

Will man remain my enemy?

I dare a mustache to balk
at my bush
For there are no eyes
No kiss
No tooth
In my world
Declaring how a woman should be in her *****
I grip the shadows of every fold
Every eery layered mattress
held in nuptial tandem
Right side of the bed or left?

Stinging and menacing, they remind me
That I am stone
Only the most desolate sleep on me
No crack in the river? No mother?
I remain gray and bayside
Crack me open to find lavender clouds
drifting above sweaty skyline
An agate,
A gem of a woman
Treated like a skipping stone
That is me
I will become the ocean before that is my identity

I inhale the Perry in your lips
You turn me to liquid pink
Let my rainy eyes
Make you forget you ever experienced pain

Your skin is thousands of surfaces
First layer, a leafy carpet of green
I step softly  
I could not bare to
crumple any of your bursting life
The last, a bed of molten mystery
I beg to be burned

You hold me
like you will never be close enough
A python of pleasure
harder and harder you squeeze
Until all that I have bottled
Comes pouring out

Will you be able to wade in all this woman?
Or will you wave goodbye from the shore,
always wishing you could have
more.

God lurks under my bed
A devine monster
Spike backed and venomous
He mouths in my ear,
Lips like daggers to lobes
I beg for silence.
He whispers
Non-sweet nothings
about how Mary babied better
Her stain glass eyes scorch me
I burn like an infant bug under magnifying glass
Jezebel girl
You: feminine blasphemy
Why will you not let me save you?

Because
                                                        .Hallelujah.

I became a woman
My eyes peel back to black truth
You are father nightmare,  not a holy savior son
Break my bones with Psalms
I will mash them into soupy indescretions
This is not my purpose driven life, pastor
My breath is
To die unconsecrated
Cohen, keep my marrow
Turn my white into lyrical salvation
I beg my mother
my father
my brothers
Never let anyone save me
I am death and devil
But Jesus Christ, I am free.

I always believed
You would not let me fall.

It began April of last year

My limbs whipped through the air,
Tresses swirling, a day old tumbleweed
Blinding any access to holds

Still, I Lurched for

Your crooked smile
Your magician's hands
Your whiskey slurred "I love you's"
Your sweet tormented eyes

How could I still be shocked that none of it was rooted
None of you was planted
With your swinging knife blade you had slit all that could create
growth

I plunged
My heels digging into air

You threw me a rope of flames
A garland of grey
Wings of a sleepless angel
You reached for me but your arms were a shadow
A glazed eyed ghost
A haunting option of pseudo safety

Collapsed, finally free from gravity
Landing in another's arms.

Was I okay?
I searched among my bones and laughter
behind ribs and under the cracks of my smile
For anything damaged in the crash

There you were.
There you always are.
Within me, never around me.

like a fool in love without you
and still with you

Grief is a burly man
He has been shoveling manure since he was ten
His shoulders carry the **** of the world
His nostrils smell earth's fertilizer as rose
Even when we are plugging our noses and declaring offensive
Not me, though
I will sit next to him and braid **** in his hair, and then mine
I will be tempted to have him put wildflower petals on lumps of excrement
Am I a lady clothed in rose

It is too much
and never enough
I seek you in Bukowski rants
I let his refrain boil over me
and scald me
the same way I let your apathy light me
on summer nights
my skin, already crisp from the afternoon sun

and how many pathetic lyrics
of
must I French kiss
until I no longer see your curled cigarette lips?
and worst of all
my dreams
You are standing right there
a cigarette bit between your curled lips
I can almost hold your face in my hand
Only to awake to
my arms squeezed tight around core
When I dream of you
Why do I always wake up cradling myself
gripping the you in me

You thumbed mute on my mouth
Pushing buttons on all that I shared, so vulnerable
Stapled words on the inside of my molars
You with your silver gun
Metal bent ends punched through enamel stating:

CRAZY
OVERREACTIVE
BAD MOM
WORTHLESS
FAILURE OF A WIFE
DESERVING OF BEING CHEATED ON

I take tongue and unclip your frantic grasps at control
I push my lips like a dagger through your thumb
You will not hold me down any longer
The women I come from and the woman I am
Is stronger than any man of your men
Pathetic, you cling to your photographed ****
While I wake up clinging to my core, lovesick
The mask is unveiled
My daughter, so pure
As much as you try you won't turn me frail
I will always endure.

The sun as my witness, my heart rising up in my throat
Reminds me that my truth can never be evoked.

I birthed a lotus  in rare form—
Ringlet petals,
orchid like dimples on gorged cheeks

Then one day I looked in the mirror and all I saw was mud
Dark grit under finger nails
A mom that double checks automatic payment notices and
“Goes to the bathroom” just to breathe into her ribs
I ache to be the garden.
I am the manure.
The pathetic reality tv show at midnight
I am the fiction book that I used to gobble up as I did nonfiction for thirty minutes
Digest to remind myself of the masters degree kind of woman
I used to be
The woman who used to be able to dialogue and synagogue and debate and have an adjective for everything
Here I am.
soil. and clam. and contrite.
With nothing but seeds in between my teeth

WEEDS.

A worship or a song or a conversation waiting to be watered.

These days all that grow are EOB’s, needy blue bubbles going unanswered: conversation flies that don’t flinch when you swat at them.
An empty canvas.

I slam the door just to feel my pulse again
I see him kiss her forehead with so much more love than he has for me
I see my heart breaking skin
I see myself as sludge.
Baby blooms
Daddy dances
Mother wilts.

He is an old soul
Who adds years to my life
When his smile crinkles to his cheeks
My core becomes the first time I went too high on a swing
He is the most original person I have ever met and still a novelty
I love to see his soft cotton t shirt whip around core
When his board slices through people and places and time
When I give him a hard time or “get on his case,” as he would say
I can always tell he’s holding back a smile
He secretly loves the untamed in me
It is a warm hug
He kisses like he wants to vacation on my lips
Set up umbrella and sand chairs
I drink him in like I want to swallow the ocean and become his antigravity
He does not have to comb his hair or wear fancy jeans
He is organic beauty
I love how he hugs me into a slow dance
And turns my body into his favorite song
He sleeps like he is a different part in a play every night
Monkey. Tin man. Zombie
His eyes are a time lapsed sky
And his hands are clouds that I can always make out to be a bunny or a dragon or the all of me
He is always worried they are not bright white enough
When they always are.
My cat adores him
We both break down around animals
We turn to mush and comedy
When he cries the mountains and the carpet crumble around me
I yearn to be his fortune cookie
Break me open,
You will find that everything will be and is okay
When he looks at me he really looks at me When I talk to him I become a novel he cannot put down
Ferociously flipping pages
Not ever wanting to get to the end
He is not aware of how  rare he is
Like his old man loafers that he pairs with gym shorts
I cannot tell if he is as truly free
As he seems to be
He is multiple ages at the same time
A wild little boy growling and gritting his teeth
A teen sneaking tequila  
A senior making the bed for me  
He is a gorgeous lover
I hold my breath sometimes when he puts his hands on the pads of my heels
His skin is salt and milky smooth skipping stones
I beg them to bounce and eventually sink into the blue of all of me
When he is tangled in my sheets and resting his head on my shoulder and eating in the morning with me
I often imagine the two of us
Untainted by life and society
Color is calm with him
And noise is melody
What would it be
If I was a different person
And so was he?
I, a mother sweeping up wreckage, rebuilding my own captain and ship
Him, a salmon swimming upstream
Pink and powerful

It is the fiftieth "mamma"
The fourth hour of sleep
a tiny heel drives into chin
it feels deep
a three year old kiss to the elbow
fervent fingers wrap around thumb
before succumbing to slumber
I refuse to be numb

Mamma is all I want

I want to mother
and be mothered
and for others to be better mothered and mothers

My father left me
a cold egg in nest
My mother
like most mothers
forced to
hunt AND gather AND hold
My wings frozen unrest
Forced to help everyone else around me
to learn how to fly
surviving in jest

The moment I twisted out of womb
I was prepared
for this

missed kiss
lost bliss and
effortless forgetfulness

My first breath
I inhaled the gust of the door slamming
***** carriers are great at goodbyes
My mother swaddled me in her strength
Her arms
Turned me from flesh to muscle

You think that you are the first in this
But you are nothing but a playground fist

No one held you like they held me

I christen my apartment walls with the *** I have collected
Since your embrace became a family of fire ants
And your words became a cold room for my sadness to fog up and draw faces on
I beg for the day my heart is scooped out
With the cold cream fingertips of
Ryan’s and Bryan’s and Licky lipped lions
Who reach for ******* and nape and *****
This whole wide world is my sugar cone
Topped off with a syrup of 3am Merlot tears
On Wednesdays my weeping transforms into lubricant for long haired boys to drink off of.
Thursday mornings
Drown ribs and power pressure brain cells and any memory
Of the doe-y eyed romantic I used to be
When I saw pink
Now, colorblind
How many times do I have to play black and white Johnny cash songs on repeat?
How many times do I have to gulp down photos and moments and memories you prostituted  
You turned me into a dollar bill
Even Good ol’ Georgey is blushing
You clothed me in scratchy objectification like a mannequin
Now my heart is as plastic as you are
Tell me you love my display
You created it, after all.
Arched heel, vacant eyes ready to **** a stranger off
How did I survive this long as a woman?
How are there so many drag queen  David’s among so many misogynistic Goliaths?
How am I still smiling and nodding to life’s nod?
Probably because my bones are made of bruises and my thumbs are frozen on triggered trauma
Dare me to thaw out and pull the ******* trigger
Paralyzed
I keep smiling
Like the men on the streets tell me to do.

If I swallow my heart whole
Will aorta pulse as it twists through esophagus?
Down Small Intestine,
Down to Large Intestine too?
If it does not
and my heart was not all I believed it to be
Attest for me.
Tell them how I would hold my breath underwater
and dive down to the quiet of the ocean.
How I would trace my finger along  
a grainy gold carpet
Mapping out thousands of
Portraits.
Portraits my heart will never. stop. digesting. of. you.
For anyone who asks
In this desperate life about you, unlucky lover
Who ends up with me.
How the story ends with I end up purging back

I, a steal heroine
shielded  
by past sorrow
imprisoned by
cuffed misogyny  

Softened by you

Just. One. Palm. Holds. Face
All silver and sharpened divider
Erased
skin and tangled hair
no longer armored  
Every tear drenched pore
Effaced
I stand bare,
happily unbuckled with love

Pillars shudder at our words
Pointless,
they melt
Surrendering to
The noncompete
of your shoulders
They hold my daughter to the stars
Her head crowned in light
your hands stable small ankles
She is released too

Golden Gates moan
Great Walls invite
Cordially wait for RSVP's
Nets and hooks and barriers all succumb
to you and I
thriving as two and loving as one

We are
moon ocean currents
ancient stone arches
pink chalk on black hot asphalt
stained huckleberry fingers

We are more than love
We are the pulse
of our lives

I will never harden again

Lights lulled
Minutes and lifetimes and adjectives go pale
like the way the winter clouds rob the sunrise
Everything peeping on existence except that  
hungry inhale of yours
The second ****** enters inner cheek
I have only one focus--
lining each gulp
with all of the white nutrients
I've collected during the day
like grey oysters shoved into sandy pockets
greedily suckled
with such force and
I pray to every God that ever existed
that she finds pearls
capable of brimming her tiny tummy
with rare antibodies and satiates and
prism beauty that denies any kind of hunger
that could exist in (hopefully a slumbering) 2 month old

You find out
It gurgles to the surface
bubbles,
pops
You wipe your eyes
of the residue of my ghosts
The later it gets
Every face of pain begins to show
a haunting felowship

I succumb
roll around in graves of
vampire
monster
men
soils of  a strangled me

Flesh and all,
you pull me out of shallow ground
Resurrect and remind me
of the before

I sigh in your ear
Thank you,
my dear
I forgot about the her
Who is so near