You are a boat I have rented by the hourand I steer you with my rage until you run aground.You are a glass that I have paid to shatterand I swallow the pieces down with my spit.You are the grate I warm my trembling hands on,searing the flesh until it’s nice and juicy.You stink like…
On the day of breasts and small hipsthe window pocked with bad rain,rain coming on like a minister,we coupled, so sane and insane.We lay like spoons while the sinisterrain dropped like flies on our lipsand our glad eyes and our small hips.‘The room is so cold with rain,’ you saidand you, feminine you, with your…
and built a house that was just a cotand built a life that was over an hourand built a castle where no one livesand built, in the end, a songto go with the ceremony.Why have you brought her here?Why do you knock on my doorwith your little stores and songs?I had joined her the way…
watched it swell like a new balloon,watched it slump and then divide,like something I know I know –a broken pear or two halves of the moon,or round white plates floating nowhereor fat hands waving in the summer airuntil they fold together like a fist or a knee.After that it came to my door. Now it…
You are still small, in your fourth year.We stand watching the yellow leaves go queer,flapping in the winter rain.falling flat and washed. And I remembermostly the three autumns you did not live here.They said I’d never get you back again.I tell you what you’ll never really know:all the medical hypothesisthat explained my brain will never…
to act out a whole play.The play is my life,my solo act.My running after the handsand never catching up.(The hands are out of sight –that is, offstage.)All I am doing onstage is running,running to keep up,but never making it.Suddenly I stop running.(This moves the plot along a bit.)I give speeches, hundreds,all prayers, all soliloquies.I say…
they cut off your hands and feet.Husband,you whispered to me,Now we are both incomplete.Husband,I held all fourin my arms like sons and daughters.Husband,I bent slowly downand washed them in magical waters.Husband,I placed each onewhere it belonged on you.‘A miracle,’you said and we laughedthe laugh of the well-to-do.
It was also a message I never spoke,calling, riser after riser, who caresabout you, who cares, splintering upthe hip that was merely made of crystal,the post of it and also the cup.I exploded in the hallway like a pistol.So I fell apart. So I came all undone.Yes. I was like a box of dog bones.But…
It lies flat, an old butterfly,all arm, all leg, all wing,loose as an old dress.I reach out toward it butmy fingers turn to cankersand I am motherwarm and used,just as your childhood is used.Question you about thisand you hold up pearls.Question you about thisand you pass by armies.Question you about this –you with your big…
The town does not existexcept where one black-haired tree slipsup like a drowned woman into the hot sky.The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.Oh starry night! This is howI want to die.It moves. They are all alive.Even the moon bulges in its orange ironsto push children, like a god, from its eye.The…
