1) The Artificial Fern
Sub atomically speaking
it’s impossible to tell
exactly what it will do.

2) Invitation
Everyone else brought such wonderful things.
I brought my impostors
and a box of darts that speaks French –
they’ll talk you into anything.

3) Whiskey Night
We ate eggs out of the pan.
We talked about all the bad sex we ever had –
what has it done to us?

Sometimes, I’ve been the leopard skin sweetie;
estrogen frosted sugarplum, butterfly eyes,
not enough smoke to sew up the pieces.

Sometimes, I fall in love with the poison doctor;
his mutton eyes, animal tongue.

Time falls flat behind me –
daisies flicker.
He calls a rabbit to my window.

4) Do you want to kiss a bunny on its nose?
Did you not survive the cruelty of your childhood?
Was it not necessary to snap from the beauty-gush?
The slow peel towards death –
and some flung themselves brightly towards bone.
Was it so cruel; everyone was banished,
arrowhead in ribs. Reach up my shirt,
feel the soft scar surprise.

5) Radio Night
I held down his wrists...
his eyes gone silver...
ain’t no sunshine...

6) At a Small Fire Near the River
I’m having the lover-dreams –
one by one they turn themselves away,
their fruit bodies, out of reach.
It’s not so fierce to say
love will be difficult for me.
With both parents gone,

I feel forever lost on a line
and the expensive love, the fragile love,
love on sale, love made of steam –

dear lover, you’re so young
and have no idea the hunger
when you tell me not to look back.

7) Rain Night
The pear tree’s fragrance.
Quiets my heart.

8) The Artificial Fern’s Lament
When I say I want cake
I mean chocolate hazelnut filling,
Lady Baltimore, triple layered.
I mean butter cream frosting you suck off the fork.
I mean velvet, coconut, carrot – your teeth shiver.
Lemon cheesecake, German, black forest,
saffron, almond, sponge, sheet, fallen.
I mean I’m walking back three blocks to the Lemon-lime
coffee shop where I can put both elbows up
on a milky-green counter, twist my seat
clockwise, counterclockwise.
I’m thinking one moist tall slice laid
on a red-rimmed plate. I’m thinking
someone has to tell me I deserve it – they tell me
get it now, before it’s too late – or
make sure you like his socks,
make sure you can serve it up –
I make a bad cake. I once made a guy such a bad cake,
had to use two hands with the knife –
he didn’t even laugh. Never again.
I want a guy already cake. With brown baked eyes,
tart turnover tongue, and when I say I want him
I mean bring me the special.

9) Ode to Diner Condiments (for jh)
Sweetheart, chrome-haloed,
you’ve eaten two chocolate frosted donuts already.

But a true sign of a vinegar soul:
how you’re deft with salt.

And still, you stir,
the trouble you infatuate.

Pepper, my dear, minced shadow.
Sugar, the snow of your childhood.

10) Blue Faced God Night
I was once an American tailgater;
– a string of bells around my waist.

People can be such heart–cannibals.
How you can stand on a curb, crowdless –
an old afghan smell rummages your hope.

He never ever comes again.
Or reads you the story about nomad rabbits.

Published in numinous - chapbook, Finishing Line Press

Urbanites can compost, the directions say.
My roommate feeds them food scraps and strips of newspaper.
They eat through the president’s haircut, last week’s
train crash, Macy’s underwear sale.
They’ve eaten the entire English language
and pooped it back as soil.
The dead worms, eaten.

Sometimes I’ll suddenly remember the box;
silent inside, a squirming dark heat.

Past midnight, I find the cat, Slink, vigilant,
aquiver, sniffing the air holes. This worm business
has him pretty shook up. They never stop eating.

There must be a point to Brooklyn worms;
I mean, for themselves. Maybe they have
a higher purpose than soil like… saving us from our rot;
that banana we forgot to eat, blackened,
our magazine fodder, the latest sensations
are now last week’s edition, the images, words –

Words. They’re eating me.
Aerating my silence.

What’s wrong with the earth? I asked, years ago
when my sister argued for the cremation.
Mom doesn’t want to lay in a box waiting for crawlers.
But it’s the natural cycle, to be born back into mud
the earth wants us back, craves us –
Trust me, Susan – she doesn’t want it.

Aurora.
Slink and I awake with the worms.
Why don’t they sleep, at least, dream
of their life-long shimmy, their one long hole…
I lift the lid (hold the cat back),
a slight musk makes Slink’s tail shiver,
mingle my fingers with their red-brown bodies,
and they are not so cold.

Published in Caketrain Journal and Press; numinous - chapbook, Finishing Line Press

I always forget what that rock is supposed to mean
Blue shock like a bit of ocean lost in the desert

Desert as in once a mountain of rock shaved down
By hundred-year storms, dying species, erosive heat

Deserts with their secrets
Bones, cactus fruit, shivery lizards

Even bolts of river that they weep up unexpectedly
Like when your own bodily flood

Seeps down the back of your throat
And you taste it. Part salt. Part sweet.

And what rock is that from?
In the middle of the night

In the middle of a divorce – what treachery –
I hauled heaps of my belongings

To the doors of a church. I left them there and
In one box, my mother’s turquoise jewelry

Thick heavy 1970’s silver flaked with greening blue –
Who can carry everything from one life through to another?

And oh, how she loved those earrings, that necklace
She should have been buried in those charms

Emblems of her desire to see Arizona
To tie a knot with some clipped bloodline.

To meet, she imagined, a wilderness
Of Native Americans hammering out bits of sky

Until chips shuddered down from clouds
And lumped like that in the sand.

How I knelt, lost and lost like a wave
Frozen in its dictated motion

How I held out the little box to the night air
There was a desert in that box

A willful dust, so I laid it down in a bed of grass
At the feet of a stone-faced Hail Mary

Published in HIV Here & Now

when we were her age
we spent the summers
floating in a cold blue pool

staring into dark green oak hands
hair drifting dancing
humidity wrinkled teen magazines

Dorito bags
Cheap Trick posters
gum wrapper collage

lip gloss sugared our whistles
we imagined how love
would play itself like a song our whole lives

ambition made us modern
floating made us ancient
we always said we would stay

but we wanted so badly to go

Published in Blue Sirens - chapbook, Dancing Girl Press

1.
On the late tram, silver pleated dress
she sits tall, the way women once resisted
slouch. Her gaze wanders the dark pools
of tram windows and then passing trams
and deeper into houses, the breath of families
and gold lamplight galaxies.
Tonight, she is silver. Lids flare
ultraviolet under fluorescents.

2.
Earlier, I stood beneath the clock, Predecessor of Times Square:
watch the Skeleton manifest and whack his brass bell
while Greed looms; both flank the dial
as if mother and father at the cradle. Even Time
needs parenting. Beneath its celebrity face
tourists, their eternal dominion of cameras
flick back at the miniature lunar affair of the sky
play out each hour, chase the centuries – who
could stop this clock? Not the bells; not even those
who were tossed from above.

3.
Give me a sky and it’s bound to happen. Crooked
drawings from light to light, I etch out a horse drowned
in blue dusk. I can’t help myself. The spheres lack
sovereignty and why not wear that orbit crown?
My two sockets are hot on a path: the horse
needs a story of stars, a language; she’s bucked
history and needs a new rider.

4.
Kepler can’t sleep. A fiery nebula births;
rumors of its burst finally reach
the hollows of his brain.
Is it Christ? Or some demon king?
Harmonics of the muse press his shadow
deeper into night. He drinks
wine, waits like a magi.

5.
Silver woman exits at her stop. Heels
shimmer like hooves on a carnival horse
broken free from its circus. Saints
darken on the bridge. Coal stains hold on stone,
the cold guardian to monuments or ruins, small bodies
of fire, and radio waves twist like wire towards
heaven. She backs away from the tram’s forward
motion, a red-shifted stellar spectral.

Published in numinous - chapbook, Finishing Line Press