I am not usually frugal but
I hand you guilty slips of the fingers
Niggardly.
It is wartime and I am rationing touch.
I chew the pen you gave me; do I
Taste you?
Do you see my tongue and wish
I would lay it hot to your flesh, burning
Excuses in stealth-sweetened luxury?

New Mexico stretches her calves against too much sky.
Her mesas are polka dotted and she’s only wearing
Red and green in her hair.
She opens her palms,
Gives us graveyards
And we kiss the dust from her palms.

I'd like to know the sum of your parts,
Palm a heady discontinuity and mouth
The loam below your womb not wanted.
I have kiln hands; be clay for me, boy.
I glaze my fingers for you, sitting at home
And pumping my bellows,
Lips loved by one and
Hair petted by one other.

Derelict highways, these arms were and
Unused to the fingers skidding now down their lanes.

Now
Belly long empty grinds glass
Ears long deaf vibrate bass
And leaves long green bleed red in your yard.

In New Mexico,
My toes never tasted the red mud they
Craved. Four souls in a ton of tin
chased storms
Dreaming of warpaint but
I only breathed dust.
I ran at everything with twitching fingers
and choked on dry lightning
that tasted like highway tar and ***** *****
futilities
But I licked my lips and asked for more.

It’s true she’s been cleaning her closets.
Sweeping was never her favorite, but
Her fingers have been caressing
The handle of a broom for some time,
Chipping splinters and flinching at
Closed doors.

It’s true she cried when dust
Bloomed from hinges unmoved.
It melted black down her cheeks
And has stayed there since.

It’s true she’s been walking alone,
Trailing her splinter-laden nails and
Wading through sunshine.
Night is cold but closets are colder;
She wraps up in city sounds furred
By the dark and billowing like smoke
And thinks only I know my body now.

It’s true she could have stayed fondling
Brooms and dreaming of housewives
Straining bellies with chunks of aorta
And muttering songs over the dishes:
Il m’a attaché à ton lit/
Une jolie petite pute soumis.
But the throat sticks, the tune
Tasting worse by the day and
There is hope in an empty closet.

It’s true she’s been trembling less
With the world’s turning.
Winter has let go her hair and slumps
On her back with a chilly satisfaction
But she wipes the fog from her
Eyes and whispers to her flesh:
*Swallow your heart
Relish the burning
And watch spring blooms turn to jasmine.

Amongst canyons I want to throw my body to,
Red river hunkers its belly to the ground.
I count roadkill and think
I am *****.
I am wrapped in the Beast and beginning
To understand.
So I save my soil and think only of
The hills.
They open their palms and give me
Graveyards and I kiss the dust from
Their fingers.

I’m gonna make me a woman from your garden flesh.
I’m gonna sprout from your ribs.
I’m gonna **** your marrow dry and grow
And I hope that my bones will know your mouth too.
I hope that you taste the fertile dirt on my tongue;
It is silent, soil, and better
Than the words we do not say, but not better
Than your ribs under my flesh in Eden.

How can I wrap my weak bones around strong bodies
Forming rivulets of salt across my sheets
And down steps that will dry as soon as we stand
And leave this Indian summer air?
I am womb-fresh and shaking.

How can I tame lions when my own finger-claws
Hold the whip that flays my belly from inside out.
The back of my throat has nail marks
From all three of us.

I am a beast too, when I dare to stroke comfort
Into your hair with palms that smell like victory;
My dry cheeks are red with the upper hand.

Has my **** swallowed both your prides
With your fingers?
One month ago, beautiful,
You were spitting fire that sounded like:
“I don’t like anyone.”
Now you have laid on my floor.
You have counted three words off my claws.

And you, beautiful alchemist,
Do you know that the death under your skin
Has dripped onto mine and turned it to gold?
Please
Search the truth you crave in this flayed belly,
In this marked throat.
Dig my veins from the ground.
My gold is spent; it does not cry.
But it is so nice to be needed.

To be his slow-kissed painted Jesus;
To breathe only frankincense and
To **** the cross from his fingers;
To drink his Amen and answer Hallelujah;
To hang my head towards high ceilings and
Sin.

It is hard to be unhappy in sunlit skin
That’s bare on bright red fabric.
Pistons pump and wheels roll by below.
The radio’s
Downstairs, chattering and muffled.
You are cradled by a noisy silence.
You are suckled by aimless
Nostalgia and spoon-fed by the present.
Don't clasp at the future but
Let it hum and dance before you
Because then
The past caresses, and does not sting.
Motes twinkling above your eyes;
Sigh and they swing shyly
From the beams that wet your carpet.
Swallow solitude, baby and
Let it drip down your chin.
You are ok.

You tell me I know it's wrong
and I feel good.
It feels good,
your resolve slipping through my fingers.
So, here's your lips.
Here’s your hand, tumbling in aerials.
Here’s my horizon opening, mouth broadening in
silent gasps and she’s there, love, the other room.
I’m falling please God not “for”
So stop saying my name so low
once, twice (I hush you)-
phrase unfinished.
Rumbling ellipses drip onto my tongue.
Get your voice out of my ear.
Pick up your lips.
Fold up your fingers, hastily,
Because there’s a taste rising
in the back of my throat at seeing
what you dredged from my ocean floor.
It is hell, it sweet
To taste possibility on new lips
Once the thrill of unfamiliarity
has been rubbed off hers.

Yes,
I know it’s wrong.

Chew me fifty times, and I will go down easier.
Chew me one hundred times and your mouth
Will not remember me.
Show me your teeth, and I will not choke on my ‘bye.

You must have sown me with cocoons
When you licked my lips and filled my throat.
I flutter, buoyed by tiny iridescents
With every billowing fleshy thought.

do not spoon sweet between her lips;
only string her from barbs left behind
by the trawl of tongues
in her throat, yours
And yours too.
tuck her in and leave her marred,
metal-mouthed
and dreaming of matadors

I left you last night
For a pad of paper and a pen.
You took your tongue from my mouth
And every orifice spewed words
That had been crammed in
The space behind my eyes,
The base of my skull.

You were humming from body and I
From brain when I leapt up
To scribble so hard my ******* shook
And my fingers ached like a happy
Heart.

I finished quick but shook still,
Bones echoing groans full of soil and stone.
I sat and bathed my sore hands
In the remembered rhythm of you and
Your muddy whimpers.

I didn’t much mind the cold;
I had a better view of you curled on the covers,
Eyes closed loosely, chunks of my wall
Underneath your nails,
Little flesh shell on my beach.

And I do not much mind now
Being the territory
Of a cartographer with such sharp nails.
See, you came and,
Conquered, I love your little red lines.

These days I reach
For everything, mindless
Of the hole in my finger.

What is one more opening,
exposing new flesh to light?
I am hoarding my scars like gold.

These days I reach for
Everything.

These days my fingers
Tremble with verbs.
And smell like matches.
They’re useful for picking
The Paint from my hair
The Past from my heart
And my soul from the floor.

night blind but mouths
can see
i will swallow
you whole and burn your body
into my mind's eye

It is early but I am drawing the blinds.
The clock is turned to the wall, my ears
Taste fiddle that burns sweet like whiskey.
I am calling out the wrong name and
Painting my belly with old blood
From what’s hers all hers
But I call out the wrong name.
I feel my ribs rise and see
My hips crack and
And hear my flesh ache
And I can’t stop.
I smell iron, food
That was good once.
I was good once.