wet thighs, wet eyes
gems from each orifice
paid money to open
them wide

but I have an embryo
rose petals inside

attracting maggots so
when someone
loves me it
feels as if I have died.

His waltz-walk, just added to loveliness
in a southern township
made a balled hum like a grown elm
sprung from pillboxes or a revved engine –
the tip tapping, centerfold pouring tea
and fertilize the carnal burn.

I have an afterglow from watching him,
he treats it like a sunrise;
it splits to a peak, and dissolves untouched.

We think of such moments as a fever,
I hope he considers my smile a moon jewel
a valuable pepper of pearls
she wept and they fell from her head –
but not I, no, I know that girls do not cry.

And there will be a moment I know
he is walking to me, he will waltz with me.

Your eyes **** me.
I am dead: I put dirt in my hair
now it lives where I do,
in owl bites.
I can retell the memory of
your body crying
to resurrect my dusty corners –
bent over, tangled in candy
floss I am shivering
we are in a war.
Your movements **** me, too.

I am not ill, but
covered in moss and milkweeds:
green skin. blooming hair.

***** 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.

It looks like a redcoat –
this bottle of pink fizz, and its cork
dug carefully from the peak.

I would drink to you some champagne
but you would tell me to have whiskey.

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.

If you love me you will touch yourself and fill my holes
with your smile, step inside me like
you are juvenile skipping through a rain puddle.
Pretend you believe it is tears from the stars that form
****** shapes and still are not full, if you love me
know that I need you to touch me or I will ask an army to.
Those lonely soldiers grasping sand dunes
in their sleeping bags, dreaming of ******* for vitamins:
sometimes your silhouette appears in sweat beads
of my showerhead and I am just like a veteran,
fill as much as I can of myself with my two hands,
I think that if you don’t love me I would rather be dead.

The food rots when it is already in my belly
baby mush, cinders from its graceless fire trail –
I dig my tonsils with ******* but
you will not return to our winter, the exterior.

So, hearts slip backward: a new abode
these intestinal earthquakes applauded in Hell
have stolen fruit I certainly could have froze.

In the woodshed, I discover a scalpel
and attempt to dislodge you from my hipbone
but now my stomach’s been kissed by Satan
I am birthing premature infants from a wound.

Another hour I shall give a funeral
for the apple core, swallow each seed so you
will grow once again safe and sound in my belly.

That is my favorite shade of red
how your eyes go when you roll them back,
tilt your head back, a little to the left –
hurting the leather and yolk of a chair abandoned
in the backseat of an alley, right of downtown
numbers impressed into the branches,
must code every time I spread your legs there.

Enough hours to decompose a body bag,
but I was alive the entire time
and you had enough blood in your face to supply
sisters in an orphanage, glittering privately.

We sipped coffee some evenings,
it became black sand slithering up your dress:
I did not add enough cream.

The mugs were left organized in an aisle
to be gathered later, overcrowded in the glovebox
maroon droplets fall onto my toes as I brake –
imagine a mouse having cut himself
and drowned in the miniature pools you left
of my not being good enough for you, but there
it is nearly my favorite color again
stained between my feet so you cannot fade.

Her figure, a fruit salad: little corks and knobs
jellyroll thighs and a smooth muffin top
unripe blueberries decorated here and there –
I would wrap my arms around her like a basket
protected from bruising or peaches robbed:
the perfect sphere unpeeled, pink honey bared.

Eyes, lethal
but a baby bird sort of mouth
tugging at sap for minutes
and frowning for seven more.

Tick, tick, tick:
the sky-clock haunts her hunt.

If one is not fast enough,
there will be plenty to eat for
those who survive

like aged gold
tarnished, useless, just the tip
of her cupping hands –
catch the glance of imps here.

Little plant, you cannot grow inside of me.
I am much too cold. Soon, you will be wilting.

Hook your claws in me like a kitten
and you promise to be good
not to strangle any organs, say a single word.
But I just cannot let you die in a place you

should not even sleep inside. Little plant,
you would not any rest even if you were dead.

I hate myself too much to ******* tonight.
I will not hide my hands down my pants, caress my inner thigh
but observe prettier girls with ******* like peaches
and wish mine were as dainty, fruits in a lined basket –
when you unclasp any of my hooks all you get is sadness.

I love you like you have the only **** in the world
and I say “I want to die” as if I am not dissolving already,
crimson buds sprouting through my gown
stain your lips where they suckle the infection, my poison.

Secrets are in my liquid and you want to find them:
know the other voices I have listened to,
the slick girls I kissed, whose form fumbled with mine.  

But there is a prize under your garments I did not see
with women who stood on me like a veranda
gauging how many splinters they could detain in their toes
and not sample my blood after they slit my thighs apart.

I was once full of myself, now full of you
someway a vein with no sustenance is not limp when held.

Scruffy thing, livid from washing
with the tip of my tongue
found hair in places I knew not existed:
it gave little track-marks, a buried belly button
sprouts in the radius of your private parts
and I scrambled your fur like eggs.

Matted with saliva now
but I find small locks in my ******* from
time to time, ones that did not stick
and were plucked from your pants-line.

They slumber in a box or are wiggled
between your comb’s teeth on my nightstand,
I want to find the torn follicles
and replace the black stems again
compose poems on you with my wet mouth
hide my name in your body hair please.

Gauze on your arm –
reddening, the skin a shadow you
call after and summon home.

Like sunrises, the big half-moon
has its purple flab melted.
I humanize everything.

I make it all warm
even death piercing a door hinge –
where children hide safely.

Ink is the blood of another being
not like us, but you write
with your own on a pillowy peel.

I have not looked out the window for weeks
weeds will break me to pieces,
they seem too much like weddings I’ve escaped
where the groom and bride are useless
to everyone but each other, then pulled away.

I think they look beautiful. I do.
The way females palely grow tousled with
tree limbs, cautious not to snap one with weight
and go tumbling from hilltops
dead blades of grass penetrate their kneecaps.

Neither are quite green or brunette
but in discernible loveliness when falling from
a girl’s skin, a satellite rained in cherry beads.
I must say I am in love with the gore of it
needing a heart to pump, but I cannot watch
               as their minds dive within.

There are arrows made for killing and
arrows made for loving –

I was oblivious to the latter
until my heart dropped and bled on the floor,
crying, give me over to someone please!

And I did it fast. I was given eternal love
all because of an arrow in the ***.  

One day I will die for the same twig –
wooden, pending, poked through my spleen.
Even open wounds have needs!

I beg like a girl, please oh please,
if you make me die I can live in a dream.

Moth-babies rock the window’s pane
but I see through their translucent bodies at night,
wearing a handful of dirt. It is the pattern

of paisley and unsorted laundry in a basket –
or ice having shattered azure.
Maybe these are butterflies so traumatized by the

Earth, its lackluster cocoon.
I whisper for them to worm inside my bedroom –
jump off the wooden Alps, get in bed

and munch on the hair from my husband’s head
for he is holding still. He is asleep.
They will touch like fairies scraping stars for

their dust, married for three years to a dull glow.
We cannot have opaque babes, oh my life stamped
freckles where lungs are intended to breathe.

The air is ****** up: it is a flower’s fault
a peony weeping and recessed
its creases looking like an elderly face –
I play dead, pretend to be aged than earth.

You count my rings as pine trees’
but I have few, if you’ll notice. You do.  

I would say your name if the oxygen was
not stolen away: instead, I tongue at
my teeth and breathe breathe breathe in
secret hoping the garden won’t reveal me.

A fairylike, but natural room I am in –
feel its rotten sap still giving sticky hands.

How is it that I can have you inside me
and it feels like everything, every wonder of the world
traveling from under my skirt through my throat

but you are nothing more than flesh and bones?
You are nothing more than me.

I feel you like I feel a pill dissolving into my stomach –
I feel you like I feel fluency in a second language,
we could develop our own, another romance tongue
using the reaction of pale skin being ******

by just-fallen snow. It has never once felt like you
were scratching my ribcage when looking for my heart:
no, just serenade my *******. Set your map inside.  

X marks the spot where I fell the hardest,
I felt it like an earthquake penetrating a beautiful place.

these photographs stole your soul for a moment
when I could have clutched it in hand,
I opted to observe you under glass
and right now you are in bed, I am in bed too
but there is another realm where you are
captured by pixels & we are sitting side by side.

I want you to hurt me

I want to be reminded that I am never alone,
that hundreds of bacteria are following
that plants are alive except when they brown

I want you to ****
every little thing that is wrong with me

I want the wallpaper to peel & drape over us
while we touch I want to
reveal the ugly parts of everything else

I want you to unzip my dress
and tongue where my spine ends

I want these moments to be enough for fairies
to permeate my intestines with glitter
so I can look pretty when you break my heart.

There is a place for me somewhere
and it is in a room
where your toes curl, retching
out of desire.

I envy the blankets that hold you
when you are asleep,
you crease their most innocent places
mumbled secrets into seams.

I feel I am an alarm clock
waiting to go off, to watch you rise
for morning air to bite
your skin uncovered once again.

I do not need a place in your heart –
rather, a seat in your bedroom.

you don’t face me when we sleep
and I lie awake, composing couplets of it
then you palm at my lips and mumble
secrets                   I wish I would have kissed you
that night in the rain I wish you would have
  
kissed my toes when I pulled them
from their dripping socks and laid in your bed.

we come up with a hundred excuses not
to touch but I see lost love everywhere and resent
not bringing it to my breast  
     the lonely hate the fulfilled because they

  are kind of dead          we pile our emotions into
the bathtub until water dilutes them to fine
powder                      we build concoctions of

not knowing what the opposite ***
feels like even they’ve purpled my heart with
a bruise and cannot sleep in bed with you
       he whispers        I wish we would have kissed
so you were not lonely I wish you were my toes.

I still taste like April in the month of May
and he crossed December as a state-line
long before I knew that time could be a place
but it is beautiful being ahead of the game:
catch the curls of autumn, snowdrop waves
make me prefer honeysuckle eyes anyway
they make me want to become his May babe.

made of tiny stars
the stranger held my hand and
         lit up the night sky

I mean to uproot your brain when I play with your hair
let it whisper on me like an acorn spinning in
the breeze and dribble gen from a puking child’s mouth.
His skull is a basket, his hands a corset on me now –
I can make you a man once I get the disgusting bits out.
We have different wrinkles outside but our veins sip
blood similarly, a vampire or cannibal or a passionate
fan of our hearts’ discography. I have come to
a fork in the road where your folds become almost pink:
as vivid as a guillotine, the brain is dispensed to me.
Finally, I call him mine! And in my hands is your mind.

I make my feelings into poetry
and you make your actions the same
when you lollygag in rainstorms &
leave love notes written on my face.

And two parts of my body you
make damp, my cloudburst eyes and
what lies between my legs’ land.

But in the afternoon, I’m reminded
that the two are not exact
because only one hole of mine can be
                                                   sad.

I want to turn you into the cotton slip I wear
under my skirt, suffocate you in my tight spaces
and give yellow perspiration to your pink lips.

Limbs wrapped around you like a head, the frill
of a sunflower flaccid in autumn moonshine:
oh, feminine stars, you say. I am in a dark place.

I have become a river and I will eat you up –
admire the open field, the sore meadow and if
you can’t sleep, remember you are in my dream.

Where you still trot southeast without being
connected to my dress seam. You could go back
home but I would rather you stay warm in me.

His body
   is a water tower & it holds
   gifts hidden in the bowels, wrapped in
   intestines like a cherry-colored ribbon

     our words fall into
stardust
  and he has black coffee hair
  
dark tea skin
     been there since he was an infant
spoke tongues, the language of romance
         but I was hidden under

   the bed
until virginity was okay
until he coaxed me out, a prophet man

       his fingers knead me
dough
to be a perfect flavor of snow & sadness
     fill his empty corners to the brim.

my hair is sticking up like weeds because of the static:
when god calls it sounds like white noise
but I feel my veins cramping
and a man shoves himself between my bones

sleep on the breast of dead shrubs
will they swallow me? I am
a lamb and my blood is holy to the ailments I have

will you destroy me?
just to see my bowels absorbed by foliage  

please know I am in a better place now I will be a tree.

said “I have to feel you I have to feel you”
and so you touched my nudeness
and you touched me again

until you found my heart whispering lullabies
to the other men
who found themselves under my dress.

The calendar reminds me I have not kissed you
in too many days
I am dissolving I am sugar in warm tea
or the herbal flecks drowning in a floral mug

dying in a pretty place.
Even when it doesn’t rain, you are
shelter

and I am a rack for you to rest your sweater
when it is too warm to wear it

or when you want to press our stomachs
together and
pretend I am carrying your baby inside mine for
a laugh, for some kind of wish.

I want you to touch me like less of a child
recognize I am fading
into an unkempt lawn where insects

will find me before you know I am gone.
I love bugs for letting me wilt into the scenery –
I love you for not
and will remember the last second we touched.

I want to exist in a month besides December
when the trees are not naked, but I am
and still my ******* are budding blooms –
still, the adjacent skin takes the hue of a rose
while sunshine arouses me like men do.

Tied your hair with my tongue
into a little knot, a twisty-curly braid
and your pores turn to flecks of
pink sand when I make you blush.

Raising your shirt, I see lace sheets
where the hair on your chest lies:
found an everglade of dark and light
transcribed on your body’s duvet.

The skin you pull over your head
every morning, hiding salt from your
dreams of me hidden in a blanket
and being leisurely ****** to sleep.

Looked like some creature ate
flesh from your shoulder, a bit of you
and dried the blood with their lips
when they were finished ingesting it.

you look like a rock
and your walk is slow as one
but your claws snap – ahh!

I never want to be touched again
not by you, not by maggots eating my corpse
but they do and you do. I am swallowed

like a jewel or the tiny voice that tells girls
to do bad things. Shimmering, my lilac eyelids
open and shut, separate and find each other again

but it will never be like the first time,
the best time. I can never feel death more than
once. I want everyone to **** me but I want

nobody to touch me again.

Gave me a locket with your name inscribed
there are little rubies on the side, a white gem in the center
and it lays right across the ******* you ****** slow
in my bedroom’s night.

The moon came through the lace
curtains, you came inside me. Both looked like a shadow
against the walls of something smooth,

untouched, virginal. It was Christmastime but I was
not cold when you slipped my ******* off:
felt like I had warm eggnog swimming around in my belly
and your handprints on my bottom was holly wrapped
around the tree, your ****** hair mistletoe hanging.

This locket says your name,
it says that I kissed you and you kissed me. It says before
winter could end, I knew you tasted like cinnamon
and you knew I come like vanilla gumdrops.

Thanatos broke the paradise and gave it yellow skin
but when slit, his peel hummed like an opera
just beautiful enough to make me fall in love with him:
moon set and guts gouged from death songs sung.
How his eyes are melancholy orbs, storm clouds
and his chest has not hair but scales that shed to stories,
the final sunset he found as a father in doubt
before noticing me in a scope and his son in glory.
Now he walks less ugly through esplanade and field,
singing through battles that eat him to wounds.
When he reaches me, on one knee he has kneeled:
a proposal has no purpose for us, so he passes his tune.
    Is death a mission to bristle our love?
    Thanatos, my one and only, is an angel above.