Aurora

She had seashells in her hair, and glass beads.

She is a beat-nik, a bohemian, perhaps

I'd like her less if I saw her more.

"What do you smell like?" I'd ask,

and her hands would blossom towards me:

twat, pot, and coffee.

2005

Difficulty

Faulkner said, (my father said,)

that he wrote novels because

poetry's too hard.

And that's why I write screenplays

(my father says,)

because novels are too hard.

It's too hard for me,

sometimes,

to even

speak.

2006

The next time I see my mother

is in the morning over the optimistic faces of fried eggs.

We sit in a booth with red seats; what she calls a greasy-spoon joint,

but the jargon i've heard is "area of neutrality."

I smile to placate her, showing teeth the way you do with animals,

making your intentions as obvious as possible.

It's been eight months, but today the clock runs in nervous circles;

an hysterical gyre, a relentless tattoo, and my sister says a blithe thing or two,

about a dress; a book; the dreams she makes up on the spot.

My mother is small, hangdog, sober and watery, her creases ancient cuts in stone;

she wears a funeral of clothes, and her mother's diamond studs, drooping

like sad jokes from her rubbery ears.

We are a family of early-risers:

(we are of debutantes and cowgirls, actresses, lunatics, prisoners, alcoholics,

disappointed lovers, strong, noble, terrified women, a staircase of

dying ghosts bound into my DNA.)

Through the window I see damp socks and bottle caps

sadly hugging the gutter; the sidewalk's wet from street-cleaning.

The bleak sky's like a white sheet stretched tight,

and I'm cold so I hold my coffee in two hands.

My sister brings up World War II; lesbians; celebrities.

My mother nods.

Her eyes are rainy, her mouth a wan, red line.

I ask her if she's eaten but she says she's not hungry,

and we look at the eggs:

yellow and trembling aborted baby chickens

who never got to tell their mothers that they loved them,

never got to leave and say fuck off.

My sister brings up the weather, but I wish she wouldn't

because it's my mother who taught me to hate the sun.

2006

Poppies

I’ve read so many poems about poppies;

Fields of them, red, girls in summer dresses

upturned, somersaulting, cartwheeling, or raped.

I never walked through a field of poppies,

but outside the train’s window from Munich to Vienna

I saw them, thousands of them,

red, girls lifting up their petalled skirts at me

flirting, or saying fuck you, hinting their sexes at the fast moving glass.

O, gentle opiate, I’ve unfastened my silver shoes,

I’ve walked so long and now I’m ready to go to sleep;

Coddle me, dust my eyelids, I can nearly feel the breeze your

fields imply—

I would sleep forever in and under you,

my right hand kept warm by my sex,

the left by my heart;

I'd dream eternity in the dark red iambs my

blood moves cleanly through me, and

each dream will encapsulate a lifetime!

The girls, aloof, maternal, will dust me with nectar,

and show me not their unknowable faces.

I will descend into dispassionate facsimile,

the flush of my cheeks, the moistening of my mouth,

response to my own mysterious stimuli.

Don’t look for me here, for I’ve found you,

don’t raze the fields, lest I wake;

I want to continue as an unknown ratio—

The Comfortable Coward,

the Innocuous Sensate,

the warm-bodied Sleeper, a girl whose

consequence is none.

reply to an email received on election day

I asked him to dinner;

little did he know I'd been invoking him in poems

for six months.

I miss you, I said, and he said,

well, don't think about it too much.

He gives me all my best one-liners,

contriving chapels from the air,

and then,

there are limits in nature, prairie thunder fire and it's back to grass, waxing and waning, overshoot collapse, chewed nails god

Who wrote that, I asked, and then he,

I did-- just now.

There's a word always on the tip of my tongue

when he makes a church for me of his arms--

(perhaps no one will love me as he does again?)

apologies are mere cathedrals. your kisses are mountains, your hands are hands of god, your mind divine, my transgressions infinitely palpable-- forgive me

Forgive me for this silly poem, anyway,

I am ashamed.

Untitled, Oct. 10th

I get a call from a California number I don’t recognize;

Something’s wrong with his heart.

That night I dream I am an airplane flying over Okinawa,

My silver body cutting through the air like bullets through water,

The sunlight catching my wingtips, I whirr.

There are boys in my belly and my heart,

There are boys in my cockpit, my cerebellum;

We are all going to die.

Pulmonary Ablation sounds like prayers and lemonade to me, but

Dad says I’ve got the heart of a poet, or something.

He’s got the heart of a dying person.

Grist for your mill, he says every single time, and,

Hemingway went to war so he’d have something to write about.

Then I am a sheet-metal lean-to,

Holding him in all of his sweat and ammunition,

A warped, corrugated chalice for his adolescence.

The heady smell of pot is riper in the jungle,

The looks between boys are more intense.

– Hey, Giamatti, you know what sound a helicopter makes?

– Wop, wop, wop, wop, wop…

I can keep it together long enough to hang up the phone—

And then the old forest floods;

Monsters and shadows emerge from the trees,

Men with hideous knives, with terrible guns,

Cancer gnaws at the floor where

The breadcrumbs have been eaten,

The compass spins infinitum upon its axis.

The boys from the bunkers shiver in their living rooms

Once they get back to the States.

Many die intentionally.

There’s something that seems to me now

Unbelievable, what I never asked him—

Did you cry, ever, like a child?

Father, did you ever break down?

what love was

mama made me meat

every day of my life

she asked me what love was

and i said salt

(2006)