***** girl, she has veins that are vines climbing
down her lungs to her spine
then it gets paisley
her swollen belly, she has a pocket to hide

questions and tree stumps where
you laid her on her ***.
Now, I must ask: why did you **** her?

Was it for a memory?
Sometimes ***** girls just want to appear poetic
with the clothes of another
sprawled, opened like legs on her floor.

I have become even less than a postcard
stamped and dated more than two months ago.
Here, the slight echo of your existence
lives through your ***** swimming in my body
and I think we could have made a baby that
looked beautiful even when her stockings tear.
But she and I are only a hiccup
the wedding waltz you could not complete
a souvenir packed in cardboard: no one will find
I am only known as a second of your life.

September speaks in dull sand flecks
and billowing my stiffened skirt to kneecaps
rested on for prayer, grinded on for ***.

It pokes and I’ll awake –
I am just like a ***** in the autumn morn
first torn, the first born of a hundred
encounters of which I would not believe
it could be the opus of.

Ladies lose physical barriers, but they
do not evade a September when orchards are
trimmed and all that’s beneath is unveiled:
see it with my glass eye. No dust inside.

See it with your honey bulbs –
the foothills, the knees married to the floor
where stars first aligned, so I ****** you off.

I am your opal,
the bipolar dot tied tight around your neck
pretend pure gold can keep me close
when my pigments flash every which way.

I am no diamond,
not even one still warped in the rough
because despite the number of times I burn
no one can make me seem clear, just melt.

a mouth full of words that squirm like earthworms
dug from a drizzly weather place in April –
that month is for scraped knees & children’s toys
not the name of a widow I once knew, she killed herself
trying to remember the adolescent she was
kicking dirt from below a fence she couldn’t climb
and I was too large to follow her descent so I still
spit my larvae onto her back lawn & become a raincloud
make more to cradle her bulbs left lynched by roots.

An army of little girls
poke dandelions through the skin of
every man who could hurt them.

Blades in a briefcase, hide several
between their legs
until the wetness chafes her

right where the dark funnels
stop. The big people and his crosses –
armpits made of porcelain then dug

into little girl gardens,
a meadow of dandelions scrawled:
we do not give you ourselves

but we will give you our blood.
Their masculine fingers could not win,
too harsh for bald skinned little girls.

Our first conversation went like this:
*Let’s have a picnic, I bring the food and you bring
your body. You will take me from behind
while your tresses caress my face
and your skirt mingles with the hair on my crotch
brunette fields on light pink gingham –
our skin embarrassingly red against a jade prairie.
I will be like a teenager again, make you into
an adult. You will teach me how to tie
your cherry into a knot with the tip of my tongue –
if anyone sees, I can tell them you are my girl
& starting today you never have to be lonely again.

This hotel serves green tea on golden platters
I bite into it like liquid has a spine,
circular piston cradling a ladder to my tongue
the giant beanstalk, I sleep here and awake
somewhere else with morning meals
already stomached in a stasis –

just how ****** lucidly bled the rugged hand
he forcefully bled under her summer dress:
I am here, I am her with you
as I hike teapots and escape each new room.

For the next, it has squeaky cots –
you heave me to the breakfast bar prior to sun
so I do not whine when heat hits my face,
there is not tea here, bottles of Coke are okay:
a slow content because they’ll hear if we churn.

And unlocking the stall from an exterior view,
it is the wall that looks attractive for one
lollylike little girl, the old man warm & ugly,
insomnia only goes when he wants to fly south.

in the search for warmth, I put on older pants
that may have frayed rumps but feel
good on my hands

though you look better on me
I am just not the starched denim kind of girl
would rather not wear pants at all than
be flattened, smothered by your material.

spinning stars on my fingers, but they are amputated
before I could get callouses or cigarette burns
like daddy gave me when we hiked through woodlands
and meant to urinate in shrubbery not on my shoes

years we were consumed by the distance of each other
but he could not have scarred me on purpose
or I would have known it was meant to sting a little

sleeping in blackness but wondering ceaselessly
through conversations in which lovers are not obsessed
if I do not wring my eyelids, juice the retinas to bed
figures dance and they are ghosts of rifles he has  

us children **** the very barrel obsessively
until the trigger flicks our tongue, soon I smell smoke  

black and white and the disorder is somewhat colorless
there are sparks but rarely a single flame to see
just the bruises spitting **** slapped into skim milk
and now, some relief, I can do all the slapping myself.