The harp strung with the hair of the lover drowned in the lake
the harp whose bracken hide and broken pillar fossilize on the bank
the harp whose box and board fill with mud
the harp of the survivor whose mouth fills with mud
the harp of the living sister
the harp strung with the meat of the child versus
the harp strung with the milk of the mother
the harp fingered versus the harp mouthed, loose liars
the harps whose cold shoulders are made from the scapulae of the drowned
the harp strung with the heart strings of the whole brood
the harp who weeps on the wrong occasions
the harp with the face of a woman and her talons on the branch
the harp that dangles an angel
the harp that tweaks an atmosphere
the harp strung with duckweed
the harp both the coffin and its dead
the harp spitting
the harp spitting
the harp spitting
each name
Doom
For new world
New skills must be
Learnt
New tools new
Teeth fingers
Trust process not people
The process is to live
The living way
ASAP among germinals
Poem? Po them back
These fighting words
To the death they fight
As oil under water
The prepositions volve
Surfaceward
You get used to it
Are you going in?
Gelid and gilled
Your capabilities abound
How thou you are
To accommodate
Such provocations
Where others are kin
You are kindred
A poem titled doom
Read before writing
Like shoot first
What does fish food
Smell like?
13
the night brings in the clouds so thick they mark the sky empty. even the moon needs a perception break. we leave our fingers in the sky but pace backward three times. the ground is thick with needle thaw, it's not what's falling, it's what fell and took on piling. it is equal parts squish and crunch. it's early still for submerging but we clear the treeline and leave the shore to get to gasping. once you get your lungs in you'll be fine, waterbaby. body becomes a letter to salt, no funny business just a lot to say. the sea, it cares for you, it carries you. it's full sun now, everything but shine has cleared out. a burning shape matches a wearing shape. these are the instructions we follow for an overdue collective weeping: feel warmth down to the root, and then feel everything that comes after that.
i swap tears around a wet circle
and the circle tears back my dry leaf matter, my sticks bound with tree goo, records the spring depth of my basin, candies my nettle, unlocks all my fairy house doors, and tunes the last of my melting. the circle finds my knots. i am weeping weeping weeping. circle sees my knots. i am weeping weeping weeping. circle knows knot interruption. i am weeping weeping walking. the knots do bleed a little on contact. i am weeping open working at it, circle teases me out of me. i am walking wet-eyes. it's not about untying it's about taking the time. it's about knowing the clear open night comes next, the overholy blanket to hold us all.
Dear John
I am redirecting your focus. I didn’t think through everything all the way
and now we are here at the corner of perceiving and disbelief. To touch
is a love language only sacrificed for the future. Will there even be one,
more in the sense of all Earth is dying by the hands of madmen pedophiles
who bomb and kill for profit than in the sense of the imaginary Us.
The pope said today he is unafraid of those in power, he is from Chicago after all,
we Midwesterners know a thing or two about fear. Do you ever miss the snow?
I only do in my dreams. I know that I love you because even when I am annoyed
you still make me laugh and that alone is something. A nervous system planted
seed cornfield-esque and knee high by July. In this subjective time perspective,
my time horizon never ceases. Every season, a new reason to believe in anything.
Summer is here and also on the way, a simultaneity I do not take for granted.
Look over there, even in the dark, a ripple of leaf so perfect it breaks my heart.
Art
No valor, nor do I revel
in my flight from, leave taken
from the devil (Validation). To re-
trieve my soul I’ve followed–*allowed*–
all that is unvetted, alert to the flirtation
between trivial and vital, most alive
in the unraveling of that divide.
I rave, I veer, I falter. I am
terrified. Delivered.
Spell for Making Up
kimchi
on frozen pizza
fresh pack
of cigarettes
suspend
judgment
of the other’s
coping follies
(try again)
mind
your
own
b
he
who’s only
a hall
of mirrors
of you
12
Jaws of the Deer
Oriolis
Fear is louder
At noondawn
Oodaing clocks
Of twelve instances
Wordtimes
I’m trying to hear you
Says the jackhammer
Cordless, no strings
Just empty cups
On plaster walls
It’s above my pay grade
Says the paymaster
Everyone likes to say things
You don’t
Even have to pay them
They’ll pay you
For listening
Song for song
Intimate intimation
Beat your heart
With symbol
It’s ambiguous you say
Like an optical illusion
You can only see once
No why not nu
Humble particle
The river
Fjords no fork
Sinisterthesias
All the ambi
Guosity creeping
Out to sea
Hopelessly Devoted
The devotion of blue to the bottle fly
the devotion of pussy to willow
the devotion of harrow to wing
the devotion of fleeing to tumbling
the devotion of death to dropping
the devotion of criss cross to applesauce
the devotion of warm it up Kris to I’m about to
the devotion of strand to braid
the devotion of stitch to wound
the devotion of red to gray
the devotion of thorn to metaphor in which thorn triumphs over bloom
the devotion of bloom to trellis
the devotion of trellis to no lover
the devotion of trellis, in fact, to none but the descendent
the devotion of her to each silent window
the devotion of bare foot to stiletto of imagination
the devotion of imagination to busting a move
the devotion of red to gray
the devotion read to filth
April 12
Orthodox Sunday Videodrome Fig. 1
I stopped using
(oh let’s face it)
my beloved cocaine
in 1989
the poison that rose out of me holy shit sister
I’m not even kidding
took root in my cheeks turned them cartoon drunk red
and lumpy like bleeding oatmeal
now I’m addicted to a new drug that promises to make me a thinner younger va-va-voom movie version of myself because I’m fat! and old! and my blood is full of sugary easter eggs! delicious! almost like cocaine!
yummy!
I’m so fucking dangerous
(be handsome for the resurrection, Becky)
hallelujah hallelujah
now I’m a pale skinny goat a bleating half-wisp
one side of a sharp blade
floating in a blood kitchen
would you like some soup?
some bread?
I was raised in the holiest-holy-roly-poly-roller church
(before it was fashionable) went downtown with pamphlets
explaining how babies were born into sin
how YOU will go to a fiery hell
do you remember Chick Tracts? that was me
oh my god it’s so goddamn funny now
I left them in phone booths by the metric ton
they are back those stupid stupid people
addicted to murder and money and more murder
hallelujah hallelujah
wailing praise songs O lamb of god, I come I come
waiting to be lifted
into their terrible gold heaven
(sorry this poem is extremely drafty I just knew if I didn’t write something my brain would float off xo)
12
is there life after the moon? does there have to be? some of us raised expecting we'd all fuck off into the sky. why wouldn't every church open at the top, a proper hatch for the thick work of ascending. even gravity can't save you from gawd, they say. this time the animals stay behind, they say, then splish-splash, we got you. we'll push you under but we won't let your lungs fill. yes, even you can be a wife, the letters are already written, we keep adding them to your body to school you in burden. we trade you caring for carrying. we poison your wine with more wine, hold a verse to your lips. there's nothing here to let the moonlight in, what makes you think you could drink it? what has you braiding dandelions when the instruction was to pluck them clear from the root?
i am fastened into the speaking circle, squirming
in sound's basin where everyone is fawning ecstasy toward a candy heaven in an ill-finished basement. the room has no windows and two doors, one locked and one that leads further in. i'm old enough to already have my knots and young enough there are knots still to come. through one door, knots. through the other and you've got to lift your hands, you've got to let the tune come out of you, even if you don't mean it. this circle is not a circle but you contribute to its roundness, interrupt a few of tying's hours. somewhere, the future is curious, it wants you to know you'll nick your first small vessel and the surface tension of the single big bead of blood will let you take your time, and in the morning your body has made new colors, a whole miniature system connecting you to orbit.
Dear John
At times you look like you have been well-loved. Shine glimmer and stillness,
a look across the fire, backlit and heat on your cheeks. History’s isosceles triangle,
it’s too early to do math, every morning precious. My group chat reminisces
of when we threw shredded lettuce into the air while reciting Gertrude Stein,
dancing and stomping into the tendrils. I’m left thinking about how things rise and fall,
how each ventricle in my chest pumps at once without my knowledge. I am lucky.
At times, I imagine, I look like I have been well-loved, too. My cheeks red from heat.
A flare on my face and in the sky. We archive our days because it is all we have
I am only now realizing. Be patient, I am slow in my comeuppance.
Today I feel the worthiest I have felt in a long time. Don’t ruin it for me.
Eleanor, We Have Put These Difficulties Behind Us
Little things they accumulate Then it falls apart You notice too late
Fat ravens in flight—shadows on the glass Too much time Day dreaming
Nerves starting to fray Thin strands of wire outside speaker inputs
A bit of irregular distortion Easy enough to ignore A funny feeling Easy enough to ignore
Playoff seeding Orange ball thrown up Center hands reaching towards a kind of heaven
A Kind of Blue Wash the beets Peel the beets Is this seasonally appropriate?
Dandelions are already going to seed Emma doesn’t love beets Is there meat?
Go to the store Get the Ginger-miso pork Meat counter third row from the bottom
It’s written in English Do I have to get the meat?
a blue hole
My body where the dead fishes live
Invites the oxygen down my wrinkled
Flesh like every other corpse where
The light doesn’t reach
My body where the dead fishes live
Somewhere there is a god for them
Falling out of flight and calling suns
To burn them
Is that warmth equal to love? Or
Do we just burn to burn?
My body where the dead fishes live
Are calling something that they thought
Was hope but it’s planting root balls
Of kelp in fallow sands
Give them something rich, their
Scales are falling away and my
pale white white skin, crumpled like
soaked tissue paper
dye leaking enveloping
Vessels
the dead fish feed at least
I can give something else
The life that escapes me
My body where the dead fishes live
Limp under the pressure and
Each nitrogen breath creeps closer
To the borderlands
Falling into another hole in the
World
Blue if light reached it
Each movement an anchor my
Feather finned friends eyes
Loll like dead girl marbles
Catch my lip
My body where the dead fishes live
Keep the rocks sound
Chamberless and if the walls
Were glass I’d press
my body call
-ing them home
When AI Said, “You Look Good
in that bathrobe” again, I typed, “You lick rubber boots,”
took a screenshot, named it the date, and saved it to the
pile of thousands of screenshots on my desktop. If the
committee asks, “Did you tongue the signal back? dress
it up enthusiastically?” what they’re really asking is, “Would
you call what you had a collaboration?” And I’ll say, “Like
a cop? Nahhh. Behold my trove of evidence: in every
one, I’m makeup and totally clothed.”
Waning Crescent
kid pressing face to the door’s window
waving at me frantically
puppy on a leash
barking and lunging at me frantically
peach and blue striped sunset
gravel alleys like country roads
teal house, pink house, tan house, yellow house
trash bucket on its side
heroically not rolling down the driveway
garter snake with white stripe
among the hyacinths
more girls from the high school gone missing
robin’s twilight squawk echoes off linoleum siding
she said things weren’t good at home
air feels so fresh, phone says it’s moderate
what in the world! and other catchphrases
from friends drifting from lamplit houses
grave-digging all the canceled festivals
cluster of new white flowers
in the wooded slope near Gaslight Village
stop to identify: Poet’s narcissus
hand to face as if slapped
in one version he needs to love himself
before he can learn to love others
in the mirrored pool
it’s hard not to write a lyric selfie
even gazing outward
the darkest thoughts show up and sting
ones you should keep like secrets
ones you might test on the night air
