These berries are bruises
Fading birthmarks I have still
Fresh from that morning you opened my curtains
Rolled down your window
Promised me honey and a candy-colored life.

These berries are bruises
You made me breakfast in bed.

Too early you lifted my tent,
brought a full spread:
Fruit, toast and black coffee--
But when I tilted my lips
You drunk first of my womanly cup.

Pouring out hot, bitter slick
My lips swelled blue blister
I stiffened under your dead weight,
I killed my tongue.

I tried to keep dreaming of
Hands to knead me
And butter the softness of these
Blueberry scone hips,  

But instead you picked all the berries out
Your greed a mouthful,
The growing woman inside me leavened--
Watching you stain my girlhood,
Popping one fruit bead after another
******* the seeds from my teeth.

I go out for coffee
to see the display.
A dozen glass cases
Faces polished,
gleaming wares-
People eating their gaze
to divide the public air.

You must be polite when sharing space.
Beware of sliding eyes
too slow, too fast, sideways.

I come to these places
to be seen
to find coy reservation

But mostly I come
to steep ***
And brew tension
This my coffeeshop menagerie
Where I wish to be the voyuer
And you the view.

Perhaps it is the caffeine
but I feel a quickening,  
a fogging of thought
sensing you there.

So I'll test my tea
boost immunity,
Break glaze my glass shield,
burn and remember
I can't disappear.

Yours-
an earnest stare
refracting
my glass-eyed fear.

I stroke your skin like a leaf
and hold it up to the light,
allowing fingertips

           to go slow from root to tip.
           to sew the lining where two unlike materials meet.
           to code this friction into tactile intuition...

And yet--

                                                      I am afraid.

With this and all acts of temptress divination.

                                                I, I...am afraid.

I want to read our intersection.

I want
            to see               in your life-line.
                        myself.


First, I will find the highways of your pulse-

watch as they
                           give way to country roads.

Dissecting life-ways into bi-ways

where I can go slow from

root                         to                             tip.

                                rise
Feel the land
                                                       and fall.

from grass
to hallowed knoll-

Throw me dirt and blow out your windows.
                           
Take me slow
                                        down the side roads.

Next, I consult
the creases of your open fist.

Gone are the fine blue lines
                                                         -the tomographic
Heat, and its rhizomatic
                                              beat.

Instead, you hold me in this underpass

[the clamminess and opposite-land of passion and speed]
                                          where
                             [shadows cling and relationships keep].

You hold my hand.

To leave, and blast!
                                                 - to stay, I will need a map.

Hide me here long enough to find beauty
in the fine etched lines
that paint the walls in broad swoops of graffiti:
those cryptic tag-lines that advertise your witty, poetic celebrity.

from finger to wrist

                   arc
             the      to the thumb

the pulse that could run
on and on.

[our] distant reflection
                            -a mirage in the rising sun.
where

the earth line cuts off the air line

to fuse the heart-              and the head
                                                            ­                    -line.

Father of my father
You taught me to drive
But I only drove barbed wire
Through your skin.
A median of blood
while fixing fence.

Intersecting your lifeline
It broke ground thumb to elbow
Blood trenches killing the grasses
Like the one you alone survived
A man too lucky to die
You mentioned at lunch.

Sharp points bent for
Hide and fur
Become your thorns and burrs-
Like Jesus Christ and mortal sin-
Marriage of farmer
And his implement
fortifying, dividing
prime cuts of Earth.

In the chapel of Monsanto’s fumes
Incense of diesel fuel
I prayed for a stall in the engine.
Reverse, rewrap the spool
Unfurl, go back to the beginning.

Look at her now.
The mattress, speckled Marborro-black
seized Grandma up again.

the paper sheet
rolled tight
like her Virginia Slim:
ultra thin

Her hand pokes out the sheet
clawed nails ***** the air and release.
"Grandma?" "Anne?"

When Grandma comes to--
out of that liminal space
between chocolate talk shows
and scotch on Fox News,

she labors to plant a rouge tattoo
on each of thirteen grand-kiddie cheeks.

We, her progeny afraid
to find an empty bed
or worse, the growl of life
mummified in paisley pink--
wonder who is this ***** who fell through sleep
tucking life away for sweeter dreams?

There's a cricket inside our room
but I'm trying to sleep and shouldn't
think about cricket legs
how it used to be
running real fast
in a cornfield your perspective changes
faster and faster
the rows of corn sprout legs longer,
much longer than your own
just watch them hop from one row to the next
velocity put to melody that
winged beasts sing for
fickle corn-ears...
soon, the memory drift'd asleep.