Poetry
Your kisses
are mosquito bites.
They well up,
red mad welts
on my skin,
dots of precious fire.
I itch for them.
I want to scratch them
until they scar over
so they’ll never leave
my body.
The tabby in the garden by the fence
wriggles low, tweaks his whiskers to sense
the grey dormouse
by the red henhouse
but rain falls sudden and intense:
a bucketful of cloud drops downpour,
so the tabby, bedraggled and poor,
slinks off to dry
his whiskers and sigh
at laughing mouse in henhouse door.
There is a boy whose name
you’ll make yourself forget
but you’ll remember what he looks like:
taller than you, yellow blond hair,
a smile white as plastic silverware,
he’s the reason you don’t date
girls with blue eyes for years.
After gym class,
he saunters over to the corner
of the lunch room table
you are sitting at alone.
He cups his hands in front of his chest,
shakes them up and down,
and shouts at you: Hey! fat fuck!
did you forget your bra today?
His friends bray like donkeys,
and your face is as red
as the slimy spaghetti on your plate.
You don’t say anything.
You hunker down,
bend your shoulders in —
you’ll regret this later–
you hunker down,
and stare into your pasta
until he gets bored and goes away,
and then you stuff your face
and go to class, hoping no one
hears your belly gnaw at
the mouthfuls of shame
you just shoveled into it.
Your English teacher
reads the poems you write
and pulls you into his office. He says,
Look, you’re gonna grow out of this.
You’re not gonna be this way forever,
and you clench your eyes
because you don’t want to think
about how this bulk of a boy
can grow bigger,
how you can broaden,
he’s got to know that
growth is only beautiful
when it happens to flowers,
and you spend more time thinking
of how to mow yourself down.
Anyway, your teacher’s a liar:
this never stops;
you will always carry more
than your fair share.
You’ll sway with it.
You’ll wake up a man
with creaky knees
and red streaks on your hips
from years of tight waistbands.
You’ll stand naked in front of mirrors,
thinking about gravity
and the colors of stretched skin.
You straighten your back
until it aches.
The years give you something, though:
white static where the blond boy’s name goes,
the warm skin of lovers who teach you
you are not too wide to be cared for,
and over years of yourself,
you chewed the moisture out
of that belly full of shame:
it’s dry tinder now.
You swallowed a cinder called poetry
to try to burn yourself out,
but this big kiln contains it and roars.
You open your round red mouth
and birdsong spills out
beautiful, lilting,
I don’t understand a single word
but I would listen to you
until my ears forget how.
You shout like air
and my ears are full of it.
Soundless. Buffeting.
I am seven years old
and clenching my hands
and my eyes in the street.
Listening for cars
and counting backwards
from ten, nine, eight, seven
They avoid me
every time sometimes
sometimes swerving
close enough I can feel
their big metal bodies
from six, five, four, three
brush by
their tires crunch
on the side of the road
but it quiets you
and I never get to one.
From you, I learned the world
does not allow both
in single trunk of flesh,
no matter how many
sun-charred children
you gather under your
wide-swept branches,
no matter how many
crinkled leaves of gold
you rain down into their
hungry open mouths.
This kind of healing
puts a dose of poison
in the roots, it comes
with sterile soil,
with a daily loosening,
and they will never know it,
not even when the trunk
begins to list and groan
in the wind issuing
from their wailing throats.
It would be such a simple lust,
to ache for aching
like they do,
to just give in to it
and ache like they do,
to swallow no one’s pain
but gallons of your own,
to feast on yourself.
Forget this strange nutrition.
Even if it lets your roots
knot their worried fingers
deeper into the hair
of your lover the earth,
even if it brings strength
beneath the earth,
it withers the limbs above.
It shades no one.
It would heal you with a cost:
a shrinking ring of shade,
and the sun rises ever higher,
it burns ever hotter
and here it never sets.
It lays hot on your back, yes,
but it sears these children
of sticks, and they are
already smoking.
Let them huddle closer.
Stretch your limbs
to encompass as many of them
until your bark cracks
with the strain of reaching.
Bathe their bodies, feed them,
and grow dizzy with it,
feel the earth kiss you
even as she loosens your fingers
from clutching so tightly,
teeter and hunch and splinter
but never stop shielding
the blistered beneath you.
How valuable is a shade tree
if it could not
come crashing down
one day?
Call in sick today.
I need you to come with me
out to the waterfalls near
the county line.
Tell your boss
the accounting reports
can wait: there is green moss
that needs to be between your toes
and a hundred thousand gallons
of water crashing
over a limestone lip
into a ice-cold basin
calling your name.
In fact,
tell Human Resources
they may want to go ahead
and start processing your resignation:
I’ve found an old Indian hunting cave
hidden behind the cascades,
and there are too many flint arrow heads
for me to pick through on my own.
Way in the back,
the only thing you can hear
is the water crashing down
and the sound of your own
body breathing.
Dasypeltis scabra wraps
her lips around a plover’s egg,
jaw unhinged, toothless,
swallowing another mother’s
unhatched chick whole.
The egg slips down the
slick channel of her throat,
an apathetic anti-birth,
a clench and a crack,
she sucks out the yolk
and spits away the empty shell,
never stopping to wonder if
she might wake one day
to find someone has slunk
into her nest and swallowed
the eggs of her own belly
when no one was looking.
I could orbit you forever,
like you are Saturn,
and I am an ice particle,
a speck like the other specks
you ring yourself with.
I want you to reach out
and let me streak into you:
melt me, let me rain down,
drink me up, drink me up.
I only need to be a star
falling like a papercut
across your atmosphere.
I don’t want to linger.
Just to fall into and for you,
so fast you will only notice
if you keep your eyes on me
and never blink.
Keep a wish ready.
I can only fall for you once.
For weeks, I have looked up
from my writing to see you
walking barefoot through the yard,
your toes disappearing into
the grass and the dirt,
and in your hands, a small
garden spike and a bag of seeds.
You flit about, barelegged,
magpie thrusting your sharp beak
into the fertile earth.
This morning, I woke up
to find a mad painter
had spilled his paints
all over the yard.