At 23 (for Bob Green--not the famous one)

Our mutual friend

had told you

how I used to be Queen of a very small tribe.

"It seems almost..." I said, hesitating.

"Like it really happened?" he asked, eyebrow raised.

"It did happen, but now

things are so different that it seems

ridiculous."

I sat there,

shot full of arrows like Saint Sebastian--

like him, not dying

but split and empty like a dead pew.

There are more gospels than they let on, you know.

This man loaned me two records--

Joni Mitchell

and It's a Beautiful Day.

Like poetry, it was love for life for me--

Hot Summer Day and Sweet Fire.

I left Illinois not long after

to Gypsy it in a small car with two teachers

off for the summer.

We read Richard Brautigan,

and wandered the bars in New Orleans, then Galveston

where I left both my crown and my grave in a coin laundry

on a Sunday morning.

______

Mother-In-Law's Tongues

 

even

as the edges grow

cutting open my body-womb

spirit sheath,

I speak the wound called poetry

blooming dying leaning to

the light.

_________

A cameo poem for What's Going On?-- "A Cameo Appearance".

Aberdeen

 

Here is the vine that weakened the wall

that dripped with rain in the shrouded dawn.

Here is the touch that tenderly kills,

and climbs so slowly, on and on.

I've forgotten the hat that I wore in the wet

and the path to take to your black-latched door.

I only remember the cardinal that kept

its perch on the pine, and petrichor.

Mornings are early, dusk comes late

and the wall is gone beyond the gate

but the fallen bricks still hold the green

of the ivy, cruel potentate.

__________

the photo is mine, from my yard.

Beauties

There is no reason for us to fight.
Here is a ticket,
exempting you from fighting.
A ticket
out of town, praise whatever gods there are.

We fight in the town.
We sell tickets beforehand.
We call each other bitches and all sorts of things.
Every woman is a god(dess.)
Don't forget to tick the box.

Whatever.
There is no reasoning with you.
God knows why God(dess) made a great honking bitch like you.
I exempt myself from all this.
Let us now praise famous men.

Men like us when we fight.
In the town, by the fountain, glittering with coins.
Fight, fight, that's the ticket
to a life filled with famous men swooning over our dumb butts.
Whatever god(desse)s there are
can't cope, they lie down in a bed made of doves
as we fight, under the imprimatur some bitch, in a box, atop a pole

That the famous men have put there, and we appease, to great applause.
_______

for Weekend Mini Challenge at Toads.

Internet Date

Out in one of those western states where nobody lives,
she clawed her way out of the dirt where I had buried her
during a desperate fit,
under a vulture sun.

Everybody out there has got a gun, and so did the lonesome rancher
she first kissed after spending the night in his pick up truck.
She fed him his own bullets like candies
and charged him for them, too.

Sweet girl.

She has your barbed bones, but her heart is a rattle gourd.
Out there, she got fat on the stupid and the slow,
then starved herself down to a focused edge.

Today, at the bottom of a drawer, I found the kimono I bought 
in the hopes that you would like me in it.
I never wear it anymore, 
not after the anthill ceremony you call fun.

Returning home, I took love out to the yard and chopped its head off,
fed it to silence, to injury, and to hopelessness.
It refused to die, but became something else--
this girl-- so I poisoned her with your every word and 
left her in the desert.

Now she's awake,
headed east,
one lung full of stacksmoke and the other collapsed and dying,

but still able to articulate her wild hatred and intention
for both of us.
_____

for Mag 278.

 

Immunity

"I love too hard, my friends sometimes say"
--Can I Get A Witness, written by Holland, Dozier and Holland

For a while there, I kissed every snake in the basket.
Such pretties,
So persuasive,
every time they catch a girl like me
searching for lost sheep beneath their tree.

I got a reputation--
not like you think.
People thought I did it for love,
or did it for Jesus, letting those vipers crawl all over me;
but I did it for the thrill.
I did it for me.

I never knew there was a real devil,
and she bit me sick deep.
The wound went white, my blood dire thick,
my life-light low; but I had babies at home
so I refused to die and refused to sleep--
you should have heard that bitch-wicked devil thing shriek.

Now I'm home, my babies grown;
looking just like I used to, when I had that strut and those careless ways.
I walk around,
I shuck and jive,
but I just can't let you close, babe, even though I would have loved ya
back when I was alive.
________

Isadora Gruye says write about a zombie apocalypse.