The soul singer, she was shot and my father cries because she looks like me and I look like my mother, although he leaves that last part out. We drink red wine until we can’t help but talk about the way she had to crush the bones of love again and again until they could not heal and infection forced him to give up and let her go free. I will choose my lovers better I will not lose myself for them to be. I will not be my lovers’ debtor nor punish them for loving me.

Let the stones fall from my wet mouth in Gentle heaves, for They have pitted themselves Too deep, and too long Rotting out my guts to blackened soil Some even swelled and split with seed Took root, and climbed to curl inside my throat Like the rigging of a living ship. I purge the poison only, or I try- It’s hard to account for everything that’s lost When morning comes.

After three years of cutting teeth Unable to evolve, We sit in the river, trying To meet each other, Finally. On this, the last night Of our grand game Of House, which we have always Played to win. I mean to encounter you, To push through the skin of mind And know the flavor of your thoughts Before they’re shaped like words, but I am too busy tightening My stomach, making myself smaller, Easier for you to hold on to Even as the current Tugs me away.

I move to fill up space. I am moved to make full that which hungers. By age ten, I loved to climb down into the caves and press my body to the cool sandstone that has forever smelled of fertile silence, between the breathless black jaws of some unclaimed tomb no bigger than my own living vessel, I would rest. The earth himself would hold me within my body’s borders, tuck me beneath his tongue to smother my unyielding urge to gobble up stagnant spaces like a rabid dog who can’t bear to waste a drop of this free life. When you left I did not stay on my side of the bed. I swelled out like the tide until I took up this whole ocean of quilt I pour my blind and gaseous longing like wet smoke into the awkward pits at dinner parties, disguised in a charade of mirth, playing the hysteric fool to unite strangers in their incredulity- it was meant to be a gift. They say life is not perfect but the craving for life is Perfect. It was meant to be a gift but all too often I swallow up the many timbred voices that compose a well-cultivated room, exhuming and exhausting myself as a black hole must exhaust herself from kissing the mirror again and again until lipstick mars the emptiness that gazes back at me, filling me with her craving.

Published in Atomic Flyswatter Vol. 1, 2020 Withered and acrid are these stinging-nettle boys. Their shallow, blackened sneers cuff my ankles in red lace and my mother, pitiless, shrugs the blood away having clearly given up on my wearing shoes. I ran by night, from what I did not know. By that first pillowing of dawn I found my legs etched raw, as if by dying captive men that count the days on walls of tide choked caves, and prison cells and on the ribs of tombs when one gets mixed up in that unsavory business of being buried alive. They scored my skin to play a round of tic-tac-toe to pass their time incarcerate, and still I sing only of their thorns.

Published in Indicia Literary Journal, Volume 4.1, Winter/Spring 2020 The butterhung wind licks summer skin like sugar dog tongues, golden as the space your belly laugh once carved out of this very room. Now I rent it out at storage rates. Meanwhile, a man jumps off a bridge. he is on fire. These days you look like a grave that something is trying to crawl out of, and I am addicted to the darkness between worlds. So here I am, back to pick my teeth with perfect bones nestled among the corporeal undercarriages of my mother’s parrot tulips. I buried you, yet here you are.

It was Jung’s Red Book. The boy is irrelevant. Published in Atomic Fly-Swatter Vol. 1 You thunder, silver-tongued about your alien planet like a junkyard guard dog, dislodge thick snarls from your throat, taste the rusted air for fear. I do not know the climate here. I do not care to- this wasteland is too crowded as it is, there is no place for me to rest among all these damn mirrors that reek of restlessness and wine. If only I could close my eyes and let the ancient howl of your spirit’s storm engulf me, make me have to remember to breathe. But I do not know the climate here. I do not care to.

For Barbara. Published in the spring/summer issue of Newtown Literary Journal, 2020. My father beat on the walls like a prisoner, while his mother hung chunks of herself out to dry as if she were venison, a Hail Mary still wet on her lips and the maps God drew standing out blue across the backs of her wind-weathered hands. I memorized them baby-powder musk and all while she read me to sleep with her voice so small, when I was still The Problem, when I was still an accident made by someone else, and not yet by my own mistakes. Perhaps I am like her. She would shoot the moon in every hand of hearts, but still they say she was crazy, too. And beautiful in red. She loves God like an addict; she sings about it all the time. She loves me, too though she caught me stealing wine last summer at the reception. Maybe clean on the surface isn’t the same as perfection.

A poem in which I love from afar The ghost of your jaw still burrows, All teethskin and scruff Into my neck, savoring the milky velvet Virgin cove behind my ear, an offering That tugs a hungry purr up from your gut As one might pull a briny, netted crab out of the sea Up, up from the depths To splay luridly upon the rotting pier, gulping down The last of that insidious left-handed snack I used for bait. Your breath arches my back- Or should I say, the memory of your breath. It teases me with messengers, Coming disguised as the kiss of the sun Through the crowded bus’s window, As the heaviness of my hot shower, and as My own hands, tracing the effigies Of love you sculpted into that bit of earth That makes up my collarbone, seeking to stir Up some electric dust that settled there, humming When you pulled magic from my skin with fretted hands And washed me in my own surrender. What a relief it was to disintegrate Loosely as a smiling corpse, Cradled by the flaming pire Of the branches of your arms; I did not suck my stomach in. I sit in busses and in showers In ecstasy’s echo, Letting my head lol back indecently As an August peony, a plum And realize fiercely that we are still Making love, just no longer Skin to skin.