Quiet As I Ought To

there will be this sprouting up against silence until I'm green

in between






shadow live through me I will remember you

NaPoWriMo9

The Waves

All day I was busy with rainbows. I tied them around my tongue and neck and wrists, a catalog of little softnesses, like, “I shall break up with the tedium only chemists can catch in light of meth.” Only not meth, it’s worse, but poem . Oh my god, the sky went pink before it sank and my nipples got hard because it’s not yet sixty. Oh my god, someone spray painted “God + You” with the “o” conjoining the arc between, meaning mirror the house inside. Someone else wrote something on Lorimer street and it wasn’t God, but god. There is no camera like a kiss. Frantically pursuing cardigans, I cannot imagine how the civilians live. I hear they put their pants on without metaphor. They need to get drunk in order to stay drunk. They aren’t Carl Cosmos Sagan insomniacs, screaming down the throat of ceiling galaxies like the guy upstairs whacking off is a relational aesthetics exhibit in training. He should beat off in SoHo and read Reconstruction Literature in a room with contemporary furniture. Libertine, I’m ruined like what my students think of whores. Dear guys, sex work is not wholly desperation. Desperation lines the crease of rush hour trousers brushing your banal out of daybreak and the stuttering silence of home. Kathleen Hanna shreds, “I can sell my body if I wanna” and I would, but for lack of tits and courage. Instead, my tits fence with an autumn that hasn’t happened yet. I try on my Elizabeth Taylor pose. I look at you like the moment before a bookend is shifted by desire for waves in waves. The first sentence of The Waves goes “The sun had not yet risen.” If I knew how to drag my fingers to the spine of this, I’d find a handle to the hold of intensity. All night I was busy with gasoline. See, I’ve been talking back to stars. They tell me how hot they are and I say, show me. When they start a fire, I say the name of a girl who shelters out of me like a Harlem. I don’t know what that means, but I know who’s inside the aurora borealis. There are these concentric circles that rise like gods and demons from days. I don’t have anyone, but I have this unreachable something that is one. The page is a field where I wait to meet someone. It isn’t a her. It’s this. It's this.

NaPoWriMo8

Collagen Time

Solitude is what I have
instead of pelvis, its
prism of shutters and
moonful sinister eye
trained to "what are these
fine lines of flight?" Remember
the lip of wine dragging
its hooks across my back?
Life, how you wanted me then.
Art school and the "morbid
glamor of the singular."
Now older, I can't stand
the fusion of fission and fuck.
End times, now, collagen time.
Even my punk is dead.
Hipster girls gaggle
over the lids again, drunk.
They run around nights
with the compulsive delirium
of greyhound buses,
high on granulated clocks.
Men are gasoline.
Shotgun my flesh to 23
and I'll reverse cowgirl
my way through an expensive
bachelor's degree.
Only this time, fewer
free radicals and penises.
Pass me the botulism.
I dream the moon to men
but only dream silence
back to books of bodies
written
like a prison sex
sequence of a former
life spent splitting
grapes into
conversation with a
hand gone light under
dead sea dust.
And that's how it is.

NaPoWriMo7

Country Grammar

I wrote poems when I was 8. They were called, here is the morning full of birds, now chase the song. The poem is called, Lines of Quietly Running. I am building a fortress out of rocks for dolls. The summer is dry so the well coughs black clouds. They are mad. We eat hot dogs every night. Why? No use putting on a door; someone will kick it down. I don't have a doll with me. I picked a yellow leaf instead. I am the leaf that lives inside the fort that no one sees but me. I cover the fort with leaves. This is mine. When I want it again, I'll dig it back up. The leaf's inside. I named the leaf. When I swim, I stay under water so long. I can breathe forever like fish. Look up here. I am so flat and nimble in the tops of trees. I am a bird. I can go anywhere. Look, I'm buried here, in the garden, near the compost. Leaves, my body, leaves. Hello, soil-smell back on leaves and char of burning barrel. Hello, cornfield. I am running now. This is the part I pretend I'm a pebble in the bottom of God's shoe. This is the tenor of how to get lost when the house doesn't want you. These poems were called, catch the fireflies in your hands and they will glow forever. They were called, someone pausing on the staircase before the scream. I can't clean it anymore than it's already been cleaned. A body pushed past. My name. Now nothing. I'm going to the pasture now. The swamp is at the bottom where I will step and be like water. When water waters you, you are water, like flowers or sunset. If it's nice out, I will sleep on a lawn chair and tan like the beautiful lady I will be. Remember when auntie threw herself in Twin Lakes and turned to gospel? She tried to stab grandpa but I wasn't there. I will walk as far as I can down Townsend Road until I find the place where they keep the bees. I will stand away from the boxes and fall asleep standing to the swarms. In the tire swing I will write my mom a letter and she will get it in three days. Her hands shake and her eyes turned off so a nurse will read my notes. There the sky is pink. I'm going to write a poem in the dirt with a stick. It will go, lonely now, 32, lonely. Get out in the ways you know how to get out. I am wind again. Arms out in front of face, up against the wall. Someone's voice is raising. A poem. Someone raised.

NaPoWriMo5

(This is only a test of April.
Were it a poem, lately then snow.
My blossoms would evacuate).

Fire, Again, Fire, Again

A mouth fumbles
its curtains for form.

How autumn it is
to wrap you.

In song, I command
the ship of dull lusts

as stars on thrones
in shape of north.

Country sheds cloud-clothes
to nipple back the stars.

Chance exfoliates tedium
with a hurricane kiss, and I,

a past life, rowing death
back to Venus. No one can

write the book except the book
that sits for lovers nude.

Run from me. I winter back
from silent boxes, bows

tied to an old friend's sky
that slid out of lifelines.

The edge, more brilliant than
tomorrow-shaped. Dream

your hands end their
search into flowers.

How fire again.
Now fire.

NaPoWriMo4

Love in the Time of Bedbugs

I'm ready to get intimate with the Nothing now. Hallway keys sound jazz fingers like playing the alto sax of my back. Strangers on violins practically court me. If a wind vaguely blew, I'd call for a kiss. I open myself to rain. Look, clouds. They want to fuck me. They want to marry me in a small handful of tolerant states and adopt children who will be sent to alternative preschools in small cities with bike lanes. Look, the green world and its children out of air. Why can’t I leave? Well, I reckon it’s because there’s nothing on the end that wants me. It’s a strange six year old in the pasture meadow, building an empire out of silence and stick. This holding does not want to be held. That is a lie. But this April does not want to be April and I watch a plant grow in another woman's suitcase. This panic calls for a series of small injections of botulism in my face. I am trying to get out of body, burning building like your hands attract exorcisms from a wet crease. I vampire sun from light. Falling down the elevator shaft in phases of the moon, my heart is at a resting rate of sunburn. This, the plane of my exposition, an altitude. My rising action is sick. This 32 does not want to be 32. The 20s knew how to cowgirl it. Dear you, I want to be someone else's mess. Dear you, I want to be the you inside your mouth. If you don't see me inside of me, I will take off my skin and striptease the bone. I will fashion myself into windows if you want August. Deep down, there is August. But you're not there, so I am here, precisely me, a fortress of empty green bottles that want to hold absinthe. I make myself absent of weekends and hold candlelit vigils for myself at the office. I write on a desk in which there’s a rat to pretend that someone’s listening. Maybe I’ll take an east river walk and watch sunlight’s death on a water tower. I talk to them. The woman on the 6 train said, New York should be more like our conversation. I scour for a smile until the sour makes its velvet. Cell phones don't have dial tones but there's a rotary in my head that whirls a collect call to a bearded hipster that won’t pick up because he’s God. Ask me about my time in winter. It’s learning how to bleed here.

NaPoWriMo3

Sophia



The bridges of Brooklyn on fire in her arms.

Your Spanish follows me into velvet.

Tell me how the subway looks in 1966 and I’ll teach you the sadness in freedom.

Remember the triangle shirtwaist fire.

The rose flames in a girl beyond the door.

Look to the second brightest star and you’ll find another word for mourning.

You point like you’re holding it.

It is possible to scoop galaxies and wash your face with them.

The power plant sputters its lies on far away isles

And suits transpose safety with cataclysmic highs.

I’m praying again.

Diseased water flushes the fish of its scales.

Nothing rings here.

There is, after all, still the erotic.

There is, after all, a field someplace.

I follow the wrinkled perfumes to sky.

We’re in a church that’s in a warehouse and the lights are out.

I am pressing the membrane of filth called window or skin.

I am pressing the window for someone like me.

Life in wartime asks for soft folds.

I’m scared.

The three syllable world still catches in my throat.

Silence chooses me.

Tell me a story.

You walked Washington Heights and told the world ‘friends’.

Why can’t our grief find a word?

Tell me the tongue’s arc the moment you sound out the key for want.

Tell me if you ever said the name of this.

Tell me when you say her name.

Who wore you when you were you, with her and wearing her life?

You can bury God in a trench coat but still hear the music.

One hand still knows how to react to its next.

Now row the ocean back to me.