The monster in my closet is not the
Lord of the Flies or the way I hiccup at
the mention of tombstones like picket fences
or the Bible I have sitting on back burner, waiting and
turning to ash as I switch my focus elsewhere;
it is my freedom, it is my voice, it is my vulnerability.

I have found that the true steps to being a woman are
        
        One:
To never say “no” to a man: he is right, he is infinite;
Man, with a capital “M,” is Right with a capital “R.”
I must find my place beneath his boot and be
grateful for the attention.  I must offer myself to him
on a silver platter and ****** my wrists back when
he latches on like leeches in ponds—
innocence is necessary but experience is a must.
I need only to serve him and serve him well.
Dinner will be ready by five.

        Two:
After snapping my fingers and throwing on an apron
I need only to make shopping lists and fold laundry
and wash dishes and dust coffee tables and
***** train toddlers and begin the ironing—I must
become a less troublesome Lucy, and as Sylvia said,
become the place from where the arrow
shoots off from; my husband will be the
        arrow into the future
        the bright light at the end of the tunnel
        the brains, if you will,
ask him all your silly intellectual questions,
goodness me, how would I know anything
outside of homemaking?

        Three:
While living in the Valley of the Dolls,
it is important to play the part precisely because
anything less than the best is a catastrophe—
this isn’t suburbia this is su-Barbie-a  where
women are beautiful and poised, plastic in shells
with skin as cold as the freezers they keeps their words
in.  Your businessman of a husband will come home from
work at quarter to five and say,
        “silence is golden,”
as he pats your daughter on the head,
and you will not know to which one of you
he is communicating with because,
yes, of course, he is in charge of the vocal cords, being
stronger and smarter than the two of you; it is only
logical to accept his words as law.  Besides,
neither you nor your daughter really deserves the
right to not only speak when spoken to; girls have
silly and inconsequential ideas anyway.

        Four:
I must give myself up for love.  A woman without
a single altruistic bone in her body is
not a woman at all, but rather a shadow.  In order to
prove myself, prove my loyalty, prove anything, I must
first prove my heart.  At age eighteen, I will go backstage
for a costume change: graduation gown to wedding gown.
Don’t worry, Mother, he told me that college is overrated;
he told me that the only other education I will need
lies within homemaking skills—the easy life, don’t you see?
Love is my biggest flaw and greatest weapon, and
I must learn to wield it.

        Five:
But without a man, nothing is possible.  Catching
one like fish in nets is the goal, but in order to do so,
it is imperative that I realize that
beauty is not deeper than skin; beauty is pliable like bamboo
and is only prevalent when it is in paint.  I must become
Wendy, I must stay in Neverland, I
must
          not
                  age.
It is important to look young but not to act young.
It is even more important for my ribs to break
through my flesh—my beginning will be my end
but at least I’ll look good.

I am not afraid of the dark or of heights or
of storms or of doctors or dogs; I am
afraid of time reversing, I am afraid of
returning normalities.  That  fifteen-year-old girl
I saw post online about how she was
“born in the wrong decade” and how she would be
a “much better fit for the ‘50s” scares me to death.  
If I was expected to choose between
career             and             family,
I would sit at the bottom of the
fig tree like Sylvia;
              I would stick my head
                                               right in the oven.

The yucca plant from my mother’s garden sits
unattended and on the verge of death next to her
eldest rose bush, now wildly overgrown and lightly
blushing in the cosset of the midmourning sun.  Its
withered rosettes droop down to its bed of maroon-stained stones
in crisp, harum-scarum patterns as if the plant is spending its life
like currency trying to touch its toes.  I oftentimes
find myself wondering if the reason behind this
slow rotting of mother dearest’s garden is hidden within her
five-year absence.  If I didn’t know any better, I’d say
her nursery missed the d
                                              i
               ­                                  g
                                                     g
                                                        i
     ­                                                       n
        ­                                                        g
of her weathered hands.

She was the biosphere of my world; I suppose that
it only makes sense for the earth to match my thirst.  We
sit side by side, that yucca plant and I, as we struggle to
nod our heads towards daylight while we rise on
the side of the house that is more or less
cloaked in shadow; the side that she would sunbathe
on during scorching late afternoons.  Perhaps without her
body giving shelter, all her garden is doomed to
atrophy like muscle in the sunlight.

I find irony in the way that my mother’s favored plant
was the “ghost in the graveyard;” a perverted parallel
to the game that she never wanted us to play.  I think it to be
sort of sardonic that her pride swallowed the possibility of
a cure being found within that ****** plant’s roots. She,
a third generation American girl,
had blood as muddled as the mud
that buried that yucca’s heart.
The boundary line between Mother and
nature coalesces into one:
                                               Gaea
                                               six feet under
                                               melting into soil
                                               I hope she becomes seawater.

GEMINI:
The creases on your palms are
valleys full of quicksand; your hands
have sunken through my skin and
into my bones.  You opened your fists in
mid-autumn and by mid-winter, our heart lines,
our lifelines, had fused.  Dear Pollux, sometimes
I wonder how you could not know that

on those cold February nights, it is not
puffs of air that escape your Cupid’s bow, but rather
wisps of fetal star, swirling and curling up and up
into new constellations—ones depicting
Cleopatra and Antony
                                           Paris and Helen
                                                                              you and I.

The looking glass in my mother’s washroom no longer
displays emerald orbs; they have been melted down
from a solid to a liquid to a stacking, twirling vapor
that I can no longer see, nor feel.  But the thing about you,
Dear Pollux, is that somehow, though it is beyond me how,
you have captured her scalloping memory and turned
everything to smoky quartz—
you reflect the placidity I hope she found.

The sinkhole in my abdomen that mother dearest created has
been gorged with your quicksand, and I am gluttonous for you.  There’s
a part of me that thinks you to be the eighth wonder of the world
with your wide eyes and your slight dimples and your
ability to generate earthquakes in my bones with a
snap of your fingers.  But Pollux, sweetheart, there’s a nagging
suspicion I have that deems you to be the eighth deadly sin—
         your lips branding my neck;
         your hands burrowing through the flesh of my hips;
         the pearls you create from the grains of sand I carry.
I oftentimes wonder how you figured out the secret of
melting my amethyst crested core.

Your horoscope will tell you that you are wishy washy, but
I will tell you that you are dynamic and paramount.  You
will be told that today “you must wrestle your past before
communicating with your future,” and I shall roll my eyes and
tell you that the only thing you must wrestle is my affection.
Your fate is not in the stars, Pollux, darling;
your fate has nothing to do with the Year of the Pig or
the Gemini constellation that is so ruled by Mercury—
the fortune tellers we made in elementary school were
accurate representations of coincidence.

You will find your destiny in
the palms of your hands and I will
find my destiny within you.

I am a kaleidoscope—shapelessly shifting, and
dominated by colors that I cannot change
without some sort of grandiose outside force
granting me a helping hand.  I might as well be water.

But my reflection insists on creating dissonance.  She
and I, although we look the same, do not coincide
as neatly as
           yin and yang
           Adam and Eve
           my hand in his.                       Perhaps because
thoughts and feelings generally
do not mix like paint.

Human beings are full of hypocrisies; I am merely
one of seven billion.  My doppelganger knows that

I will never be harmonious, and I am but an echo
of Sisyphus, yet still I wonder if she also knows how
sanctimonious I can be at even the best of times; how
wolfish my attitude can turn; how
downright wicked I can become.
                                                        (Perhaps she is overlooking it.)

Oftentimes, I find myself wondering if those ugly,
impulse actions I grudgingly stomach are really my
own choices, or if they are hers.  I am the analytical
one of us, and she, the fervent, the hot-blooded prima donna;
I think of how easily I lay down my neck to her will, how often I
throw my frontal lobe at her, belly up,
as if to say,             “this is my
                                              white flag.”
I allow my duplicate’s hands to twist and turn my paths.

She makes me self-conscious of the
           coffee splotch birthmark on my shin,
           my flummoxed feet that flounder about;
           the mausoleum I keep buried
six-feet-under in my backyard.  Her sentiment
bleeds into me and permanently dyes my bones red
like the red meat I am; she tries to coalesce us.  
                                                        Perhaps it’s idiosyncratic of me to
rip myself in two, but being made of water
makes it hard for oil to blend into place; it makes it
hard for logic to have any room for a
seemingly clairvoyant heart, though

sometimes I wonder if my sophist thoughts could
possibly have any consideration for my twin’s
sibylline yet affectionate disposition.  I
wonder what the
           secret is to being whole, what the
           secret is to ending civil wars, and what the
           secret is to placidity—
I wonder why all my answers are kept under lock and key.

The internal bloodshed within myself might not
be as abnormal as I think it to be, but if it’s not me who
I see when I look into the mirror,
what is it that others see?

You planted galaxies inside me when we met
and now they're pouring out of my mouth,
stretching their curled limbs skyward from
the abyss of my stomach; they travel
up and up across the expanse between us
and down your throat like some sort of
invisible (and magnetic) parasite.

One:
Brown eyes remind me of Chernobyl,
                        but on you,
I see the Wilson Park Ice Skating Rink where
my mother first taught me to skate.  I see my
tiny hands wrapped around my first dog, Kelly, and
the Beluga Whales at the Shedd Aquarium
in 1999.  There’s a six foot deep hole between us
that makes me wonder if cataracs eclipse your
perception of me like they do for everyone else—
I wonder if you worry about
teetering over the edge
                                          like
                                                   I do.
Two:
If I’ve learned anything from math class it’s that
a negative times a negative equals a positive so
I guess it’s a good thing when it comes to you and I, because
how else would two equally bashful people ever work
together in harmony?  But then what about science—
positives and negatives attract, so I must
be the latter of the two in this electrical charge
         electrical attraction
         sparks fly
         fires rise
other cliched forms of saying that I just like
when your hands are on my hips and your
lips are on my neck and somewhere
in the back of my mind, I hope to God
that this new age romance is not all for naught.

Three:
I met the devil when I kissed your lips.
God was pushed out when the space between us
shrunk and shrunk until there was not enough
room for air nor biblical commandments nor morality nor logic.
We fell together, tumbling over the clouds like the
awkward first steps of a child, unsure and panicked;
our clipped wings, like birds in captivity, did nothing to
prevent us from ripping the pages of His thick book
and mixing and matching His words—
“burn[ing] with passion,” “two shall become one flesh—”
we folded them into fortune tellers.

Four:
When you first told me that you thought I was beautiful,
I did not believe you.  You looked so unsure of yourself—eyes
downcast, bottom lip tucked between your teeth—that I thought,
“How can this this wide-eyed boy think that he can
spot constellations that the Greeks and the Egyptians overlooked?”
Then I realized that the words that spewed from your
blood stained lips were stars of your own creation.  Somehow
you compressed and fused your perception of me with
interstellar matter and birthed a new stencil in the sky.  You
created a cynosure of me.  You look at me like you’re
gazing at Polaris, a perfect doll like Helen or Marilyn;
something I am not.
But I like it.

Five:
We make up Sirius, the Dog Star—
you, the primary, and I, the companion, we are
the brightest in the heavens.  Canis Major would
be nothing without us.  Circling one another in a far,
spread out pace, we take our time in dissecting
one another’s intentions.  You are my horoscope and
I am your zodiac sign; both born in the year of the pig
we display the raw, open wounds of altruism to one another.
I wonder when you look in the mirror,
if the reflection that you see is that of the Milky Way;
the barred spiral that contains
our solar system
our planet
my
      home.

If being with you would mean spewing galaxies
from my lips for the rest of my days, I would
gladly regurgitate a whole new universe
just to hold your hand.

I can feel you
in the cold winter air,
nipping at my cheeks
and freezing over my toes.  You
are the bloodied and broken
skin on my hands that
just
         won’t
                      heal.

Breathe in,
breathe out—
you are visible in my
sub-zero breath.

I can’t stand Christmas
lights because they
reflect your eyes and I
can’t take holiday
songs because they
parallel your voice.

Mother, neither of us
ever really liked the winter.

I sat side by side
next to my dog upon
the burgundy leather sofa and
followed his line of sight
out the great glass window
into the desolate,
snow covered forest.

“What can you possibly
                see?”
I ask.

After a few moments of
silence, he looks to me and
says, “Sometimes it’s not
as much as what I see
as it is what I
                        find.
This woods speaks the truth;
you just have to look for it
in yourself first.”