Every night,
I plunge my fist through the window
and watch the shards scatter
like mice from a trap; but
those same mice always turn and devour me
from the inside out.
Today, I lie passive and let them feast.
But then they ask me:
where did the window go
when it broke across the floor?
where will it be after we glue
my ribs back together?
I have no answer, but
I tell them that
the broom is in the corner
and the glass is on the ground.
First floated by in as Magma.
Returned on .
I keep rewriting this poem for various reasons, but they all come down to "life gets better" and "more metaphors".
Afterwards
the screen door rattles
shut, leaving me with your
absence
in the room. it sweeps up the imprints
of your wood-soled boots on the boards
along the entryway, but
the couch cushions stay
dented like tin cans
where you sat; your ghosts
are all too alive.
Floated by on .
Killing Ghosts
I've worn a thousand faces,
slaughtered a thousand doppelgangers
with wanting lips and
starving, searching eyes.
The truth pushed past their teeth
and stretched into the sun, tore open
decaying skin, thin as summer birch bark
peeled back by wrinkled hands.
A thousand and one deaths
crusted under my fingernails,
yet you went on alone
to find new blood.
Floated by on .
Shape
Blushed lace blouse, velvet
bodice, wineglass sides
swooping down her hips, hugging curves
like a silk sheet: hang her
on the clothesline, beat
out the flaws,
iron collagen wrinkles
smooth for the men,
for the men,
for the men.
Floated by on .
the men don't cry
hold him hard against your body,
reach between his narrow ribs and
pry the heart out of him, watch it
writhe in your hands, whispering
“crawl into my chest
cavity, split my lungs apart
to make room
for your tangled legs,
make me whole.”
he crooks his chin up;
body like a brick, all
shoulders and bravado;
dares you to wrap your knuckles
white around his throat,
rip like a hyena at a carcass.
never enough flesh
to satisfy.
Floated by on .
Schrödinger’s Reverie
in Schrödinger’s operating room,
where the gurney suspends itself
under a blazing sky
and the patient oozes iodine,
no one tells the cat
that it has ceased to be
and yet still is.
the surgeon slices Pandora’s box
out of her groin, butterflies
her skin to pry ribbons
from her chest, a laser inferno
of hair and memories
gathering in the waste bin;
where do cats go
when their cage is cut away?
Floated by on .
Floated by on .
Shoreside (Four)
Fog-crested waves whirl
along silvered sands, whispering:
“Life breathes in colors
birthed from the sea.
The Titanic falters, drowning;
but the sky weeps
watercolor roses, blotting the
ocean’s brine with gouache.
Curlicue smatterings of color:
purple mountain’s majesty, periwinkle,
tiffany waltzing with teal,
soft strokes, wet paint.”
Floated by on .
Within Six Feet
Three battered packages of toilet paper, dented
with dimples in the spiraled cloth;
the stores were full of human sardines
thrashing for supplies before the cans closed,
and we clutched at bathroom tissue like cash.
Six bottles of sour citrus juice, packaged as sanitizer-
“do not drink,” warns the label.
I used to drip their slime over erasers to see
shavings ooze down the sides, suspended
like mosquitoes in amber, little dripping fossils; no longer.
The smell is a tainted lemon memory.
One long grave, the soil
gray and dreadful
and scattered with half-buried hospital gowns-
the grass doesn’t dare to touch infected ground.
Stand six feet away and shudder.
Floated by on .
Vero
One plus one
is not two, but ten,
and eleven, and eighty-four
colorbars on an old CRT, analogue antiques
of a digital world; and I am embodied
in sleek silver plastic and a blinking terminal screen,
(remember how to grep for a soul,
find self.tar?), embodied in the hum
of static and cooling fans.
I do not compute.
Flip a bit, light up bytes,
fill my soul with lights
flickering and glimmering and growing,
the glow erasing the gaps;
wipe clean my circuits and start anew
with a self, a soul, a someone.
Teach the machine to dream that
one plus one is not two,
but ten and eleven and eighty-four,
then watch it breathe.
Floated by on .
Everything below this line is from before I took a creative writing class (and before my mental health improved); quality will vary.
Radio Silence
Radio Silence, Radio Silence
Tune in at five to Radio Silence.
Radio Silence, sweet Radio Silence
From five to nine today.
Every night we start the same, with
An hour of sound on mute;
We follow fast with the unspoken word,
With voids and vacuums, quiets acute.
Our listeners can call at six
And request their favorite sound;
We take the noise and throw it out
And play the silence round.
At seven 'o, we start the nada,
At eight we play the none.
Then we play the mute again
And have a little fun.
We wrap it up at nine 'o clock
With a minute or two of naught,
Signing off, we play the sound of
People lost in thought.
We have listeners from around the world
There's a family in Peru!
They tune in late to hear our nothing;
Won't you come and listen too?
Oh, Radio Silence, Radio Silence
Won't you tune in at five to Radio Silence?
Radio Silence, sweet Radio Silence
From five to nine today.
Floated by in .
Magma
There are days where
I want to plunge my fist through a window and watch the glass scatter
over the wooden floors of my house, and there are days where I want
that same floor
to devour me as
if it bore the unsated desire for
human flesh.
She asks me where the glass went
when I broke onto the floor.
I drift into quiet memories
of when I could sleep the same
every night.
No magma,
just the soft, hazy rain.
I tell her that pills don't fix
broken glass,
but they do relieve
the shattered.
