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.

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.

And I feel this sludge
running down the long halls of my legs
a flood of viscous petrol jelly
slick sewage sick
patrolling artery walls

this metallic slide
so much molten lava
running down the mountains
of my thighs.

I'm a concrete machine
getting my mortar fix
tin woman hollow heart
methyl folate ******

Give me another hit
buffer my pain.  
Already I have diesel fuel juice
leeching out my tissues
lightning striking the brain.

It's hard to get your attention
with this leavening
pooling the blood in my feet
It's hard to say hello with
acid cuddled words.
I want to raise my arms
and touch you
but I'm too toxic I'll burn you.

This nausea has become me
this metabolic crash is
my stop-gap.
Short circuit pain
this neuropathy has hardened me
in the space between these synapses
I dream of nothing.

Doped up by the yellow stuff
Daddy sprays from the plane
I was a farmer's daughter but
the doctor says
You've got the mutant gene,
for heavy metal toxicity.

Another serotonin addict
with brains of saccharine and plastic
I might get a pink ribbon for surviving
if they call it disease,
but silently, inside

I feel this sludge
sick sewage slick
battening down the reflexes
backing up the pipes.

my body is the future body
I say.
because this deadly brigade
is eating up the human chain.

There were Chernobyl defects,
and the media loves lepers with lesions
but a blistered stillborn baby
is no face for nuclear policy

but we --we're the unsung mutant breed--
there are billions of us
mentally sick lazy *****,  
hypochondriacs
of pre-existing conditions
can't find work
not even at Walmart
for disability aid--

But when you check out,
please donate.

Drop another baby
in the cancer cup.

You come out with the ants at night
Out of the woodwork
When the work of building needs to rest
The creak of bones is loudest
So the building and the ants and you move at night.

You debated for twenty snores
before daring to shift the mound and scuttle his arm
The longer you waited to ease the bone aches
Body heat and neck vice,
The more depressed you became thinking
The whole situation masochistic.

Finally, you roll and pull-ey
Your limbs out of reach,
Pad down the stairs relishing
That quiet space opening within your head
Downstairs you re-arrange the kitchenaid
Take off your underwear and
Examine your knees in the mirror.
Your knees creak, the ants creep
And you ask yourself if you can keep building another year.

I try to write when I am tired
but tiny spiders descend around my desk.
Newly-hatched eight limbed-things
parasail
the silk lids over my eyes.

If only I could ride out the exhale and
go at once adrift, self-rappel
I would climb the silk suspension line
swing from thought to thought
thread the eye of the needle
pull-ey up the beanstalk.

but instead I'm left to watch these aerial yoginis
swim on a draft from the ceiling.
These spinsters with their poetic acrobatics
for whom rhythm is spun on silent trapeze--
make a play-swing
out of gravity.

The tiny spiders that descend around my desk
make me--an oaf.
a self-honoring monument
for climbing, a botched landmark to ---human ingenuity
me, a moving pedestal for dancing
me, a knotted up windsock
hunched over a heated screen,
trying to blow down metaphor, alliteration
from these tiny kites that ascend the earth.

Tiny spider, tiny spider
let down your silk tresses
draw up my mind
swing the high rafters
I want to hang upside down--
make a play-swing
out of gravity.

Yet when I pulled on the thread
to net the silken-mouthed beast,
words did not come down
like mana from heaven.

Rather, my tongue grew heavy with cotton
metaphor, alliteration,
the fabric of suspended poetry
unraveled.
Lucid improvisation fell like Icarus
to quips.

because thinking to write
and writing to think is like
pulling dead hair
from spaghetti.

Meanwhile, tiny spiders descend around my desk
parasail
and make a play-swing out of gravity.

Clouds engulf the L.A. basin
Layered mold in the
tubberware
lunchbox
I left home.

Except the spores
are tufts of a woman's white hair
Clumped together in the shower drain
blocking the grates.

You cannot shoot up enough
silicon to fill
the wrinkles of a body
hollowed
You'd have to start pulling marrow
from the bone.

These craters of the basin--
****** dry to burn.
hollowed curves a body barren,
tapped out, laid fallow.
Shrouded...

White noise
White film
White foam.

She, with her fingers
in every swimming pool

She, lounging behind the smokescreen

She, big curvaceous mound
smoldering rock of an old woman

She, who can **** it in and hold it in
the atmosphere

She, lasso-ing lady with wild tendril hair
She can't always keep from billowing out
hot air.
Soon enough she'll catch a sore throat.
Soon enough she'll taste the concrete waterways.
Soon enough, she, ittle too long.

The tale of Hydra is a tale of women deflated.
This lick of fire did not blanket the city but set it ablaze.
She swallowed the heat ****** back the fire
bled and wept Armageddon-red sunsets.  

White Noise
White Film
White Foam

She, a flat, airless
mortar without bricks
tooth-picked clean.
only marrow left of bone.

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.

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.

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?

The ants come hunting for you
out of these mounds
Your touch I crave
But if you call me luxury
To lay in my lap
I'll trip-latch the key
Call the red army
and collapse the underground.

When I was young
I had a body made of rubber
And elastic bands
That mother tightened
So I would sit up straight
But she grew slack with age.

When I was young
I was pliant
I had too many ballons in my ears
So mother pulled them, but I disappeared-
Tucking my head into my collar
And my hands into my armpits
To escape.

I was reminded of this yesterday,
Driving by one of those street advertisements
Car dealerships, Verizon wireless
Where they communicate to get your attention
Balloons growing
To the dance of wind inside an empty sleeve.

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.

Turn me out into the night
a rainy night.
Turn me out into the schlap of asphalt.
Let me spin my wheels.

Sometimes I kiss my own hand
to feel alive--
Other times I turn out
That chaffing concrete runway
They call a heart.

I run in the rain.

I used to turn like a wheel on the grass

to embrace that in fact, I felt happiness.

Until one day I watched

a boy take a powerful turn

that snapped his limb in half.

I tried to turn my thoughts away,

but I was silent out & in,

except for the reverberating sound

of that break in his pretzeled leap.