Muriel, it’s been forty-four years and
I still think about you everyday.
I met you in the rain on the last day
of 1972, the same day I resolved to **** myself.
You were the **** store employee
wearing a chartreuse shirt. I was, of course,
the naked thirty-something with a few good teeth,
unafflicted by any social diseases.
You told me I had great veins.

a home of unrest survives in my old town where
madness seeps through jaundice colored halls,
lapping life from rotted brains.

grim photos of grandchildren
deform walls,
but old folks don’t remember.
they wear nametags.
who am i? residents wail
for mommy, their ’86 kitten,
a bus pass from chicago or
the wrong god.

her eyes are sallow.
tunnel vision, they say.
cloudy hues without purpose.
bags under gramma’s lids hang
          like dead gangsters
and bifocals settle around her neck,
in case she gains a pang
              of clarity.

Lovely Rita,
once a fat cook is now slender as a fang.
she forgets to eat.

my guttural granny, she stutters
incoherent, mostly.
but today, she babbles
        an omen.

watch o u t
      thing s are
    g o nn a
h h h appen
  
she retreats,
deteriorating.

My fingertips will never let me forget the scent of stale cigarettes.

I was a fool in London. All the friends I made had better accents than me.
I dreamed of Bulgaria and Brazil.

I walked through mud. I waited for French tides.
I trudged in heavy water waders.

My hands built a house with stones older than the country on my passport.
The etching of cement on my boots still reminds me what we carried there.

We drove along tired volcanoes and craggy cliffs in the dark.
I never learned how to drive manual.

We flew further south. I dried out in the sun.

The glands of Spanish streets pulsated
citrus mist into the air, my lungs.
I never did remember the difference between limon and lime.

We stayed in a haunted castel but missed Halloween.
The upper peninsula, where Napoleon dreamed of a better dinner.
We moved to Shangri-La. Even in Eden, people still snore.
But there were cakes laced with flowers. And I was over the moon.

Then, a dreamscape. The closest to the Arctic I’ve ever been.

We ate deer for dinner. I baked Danish pies. I slept supine in a smoke-filled yurt. It was all peace. It was all over.

mama carries me to the porch
tender, still with the glowing dampness
of aged rain. orange blossoms tinge the air as
my honeyhead savors warm scents
of marmalade nectar.

mama leans us against wood railings
watching the breeze hopscotch ‘round the trees
in an indigo playground. my arms outstretch,
trying to grasp the thick air
as her heart close to mine beats a nocturne tune.

mama hums love supreme, each note
a thread, that stitches eloquent webs
of gossamer galaxies in my mind.
hanging pines prickle my delicate skin and
through midnight’s wispy clouds
i see Her,

Her Majesty
dressed in white. she bleeds bright,
covering me in a veil of luminous beams.
there, i speak for the first time
*moon.

Daddy takes me to the greenhouse,
behind our rotted trailer, deep in sovereign backwoods.
Marsh voices, thick like tupelo honey.

The coo of a loon, hiss of a cottonmouth, shiver of a snapping turtle.

The silver of swamp lilies lip the land in wild haze,
a veil of ochre moss tickles my nose like gauzey ginger ale
and soil clings to my ankles like a lonesome hound.

Daddy’s greenhouse is a shed, a haven.
A milieu of magic and fleur-de-cannabis
where pixies pull my curls and gnomes dance
under mushroom parasols.

My hands dip into a hollow of muddy earthworms.
I feel akin to the yellow blood of a butterfly
or pale jade of perplexing geckos.  

Daddy is a shaman.

He trims holy blooms that come from spirits
who sing in the wind like the whippoorwill at dusk.
Snipping sticky bushels, he pads tufts into his pipe,
carved in the shape of a sullen armadillo.

I watch him inhale.

                          His breath
                                               stiff
                            as a braid of mangroves.

                      He exhales a ligneous cough.

                              I don’t mind,
                                                   much.

Night. All over his body.
Lithium lingers on the tongue.

Slow motion crawl into bed,
nothing for dinner except sleep.

His gaze. Colder than
the chill of a refrigerator.

He tells me he’d rather die
than **** me tonight.

Grabbing the fat that clings
under my chin, he tells me,

“Once I learn to love myself,
I promise I’ll love you next.”

Last night
I dreamt of
Picasso’s cat
slipping through 
streets like an evil 
spirit with rumpled fur

Hanging her head into depths of an oubliette,
the toilet bowl grieves inside muddied ruin.

An early avocado and piles of bile simmer
inside porcelain wastelands. Her face, a dark fillet,

fat like a flea questing on skin. Fingers joust
her drawbridge mouth. Cavaliers cannot rescue.

Tiny talons scratch the back of her throat,
distant organs heaving during the battle

of the bulge. Nothing tastes as good as thin feels.
She tastes it twice. Flecks of spit singe cheeks

like undersink chemicals. Her imperial
belly wails, a damsel distressed.