I Had a Name in Blood's Absence

Five years old, there was a day that I bled
and told no one.

I squeezed my finger into a paper towel,
soaking it deep. I was a painter’s daughter
cleaning a brush. And I was red cinnabar.
The stain was a portrait of myself. I tore it
out of the cloth
and, pressed in glass,
made it into a slide.
I had a child’s microscope,
and in it saw myself
as an image. I saw my insides.
I could have written my name in silent blood then,
awed. The word in my own hand.

I have since tried to write
in images. At seventeen I squeezed red
cinnabar onto my palette beside a pile of yellow ochre.
A painter’s daughter,
I cleaned my brush on a paper towel, careful,
but never made a canvas.
Sealed shut, I wasn’t menstruating.
I couldn’t even
prick my finger then, so my guts stayed within. I held myself tightly
and searched for the truth—nothing
else warranted being written in blood.
Nothing else could touch my open hands
without profaning them.




A long time later I noticed that I had been in pain,
a child that had chosen to look at herself
magnified 10,000 times
instead of crying.

Dialectic (Hive)

You are weak and tired.
Did you hear me? You are unfed.
You may ride out your loneliness, but
I give in to desire.
And I am happy.
I live in a garden and I grow my own sweetness.

You want arms wrapped around you?
Go harvest them. Go honeymaking,
wear your lust like a beekeeper's mask
and visit the apiary of drones,
of heartless work.

Spend the day wandering
listlessly through smoke
and heavy-lidded, prick yourself
again and again
on the abdomens of the dying.
Venom is an aphrodisiac
and you are empty. Go sex yourself
fuller, force something to bloom
in the black soil of your chest.
Chew on legs and stings if you like
and glut yourself from the pollen sac;
collect the powdery semen
of dandelions on your lips.

Come, my garden is for the bees. Find me
here in the grove, resplendent
in white and covered in failing bodies. Witness,
smell the damp in me and know me
as I am, standing here
hollow and spoilt.
Feel the nectar congeal
inside even as it lands.

*

I know you, but you won't find me
near your garden
or the pale bloc of bees;
I self-taught the evils of domestication
and value careful slowness too well.
I have no veil of lust
to thin the heat of alien hands,
and I am shy of being further altered.
I content on liquid smoke and stay far--

for through cultivation
the keeper became the other: amended,
scorned and stung enough without request.

I am a terrible gardener, and yet
I know what constitutes the seed of Love
I know what conditions it needs to grow--Love
is a shade plant in loose soil,
a succulent with night-grown flowers
and a vast network of stunted roots like a lattice
or a fisherman's net for stones.
I know that I must plant love
in the southwestern corner of my garden,
water it sparingly at the start, and always
turn my face away while doing so,
gluing my eyes to the rising moon.

I have read Works and Days.
I know the rules must be kept
if one wishes to appease the gods.
I know that I must rely on the divine hand
in the tending of my crops.

So I must never spit in the Garden
and ever reap only half of what I've grown
in a blindfold
with a scythe. It can't be known I sow to glean.

And last, to glut the seed of Love
I starve myself;
I live on chaff
for the first three years of winter
and content myself with weeds the rest.

Yet Love is older than Hesiod
and to live
requires an even stranger
arcanum of tasks:

To yield desire one must work
while knowing
that Love, once harvested, cannot last.

This night is a coda to a summer,
to a city in equilibrium.

With britches dropped in the wet grass
on the Oak's Bottom lookout,
I am pissing downhill in joyous abundance
at the lake, at the amusement
park's dark stars, singing
with frogs in my ears and and naughty soft
touches from the high marsh reeds
and the cool wind.

Everything but the lake
is reflected in the lake,
and tilt-a-whirl screams roll
across its sheeny surface like excited ghosts,
mingling with the peepers and the moths
as they climb the cliff where my ears
breathe the shaking spirits in like smoke.

From up here the carnival is cradled in mountains,
but I know its illness and delight in the lurch
of the careening evening.

The crematorium sits to my right,
its dread face blankly
overlooking the rites of the median strip
and the ghoulishness of neon
at midnight. Soon I will rejoin its dead world
and clamber into a dumpster
to scavenge bread like a raccoon,
but for now I am content to time the roar
of the screaming lights
to the leery frogs
in darkness,
my words made equally visible
by the street-lamp and the stars.

tongues

I am filled with purpling desire
that expands like a bloom
of vermillion ink in a clear bowl of water
sublimating the fullness of experience
into my light body,
seasoning it with the gravity of helplessness.

I am full of sex as Medusa
is of snakeskin.
The vermillion tongues of serpents
are what comprise the ink of lust
and the lucent water of my guts
roils as it is rippled through, vainly trying to keep time
with the flickering hypnotism of snake handling.

In excreta, in another world I draw the line of life
from the blood of these red tongues in me
and use its languid flux
to connect create the constellation of eggs
that will someday become my daughters and sons.

In lust I become a constellation of ashes
in the dust of ashes, the constellation of mercy
drawn onwards towards benediction
and the sinewy noose of God,
the circle in red blood,
the ova and the love.

In hunger I touch you gently
for stalking is the province of the silent
and only in the limblessness of snaky desire
can I hush.

anarchy long form

you believe that private property is theft
and you believe that your body is only yours
so perhaps it fits
that i can only have you
in a dark cave
and i can only have you
when i steal you from yourself
and in the dark carve
into your flesh
on the hunt for bones and your skin
totemizing you when you're gone
stringing your ivory on sinew
memorializing you in song
and hoping that my misdemeanors
will call you home
that my imitative witchcraft
will call you home
that my petty magic
will call you home
that my song of your stolen body
will do what I cannot
that my defilement of you
will do what i cannot
will call you home
will tug at your heart
strings til they blossom with longing
for my mystery
and full-throated themselves
respond
in song
in a love song
til they respond
in a longing of their own
to that which has gone
until in a longing of their own
for that which is gone
they respond.

I hope you know that because
i've done these things
because i have carved you into song
because your long bones are holed
under the lost island of my bed, in my home
your body is no longer only yours
and I have committed a most natural act in theft.

for in loving you
i steal from coveters
and redeem the poor

for in loving you
i liberate the property
of your form.

all light is the moon

you told me that moths follow moonlight
and so moths fall into flame
because in their minds it's always nighttime
and all light is the moon

"what if i held out a match?" i said
"what if i was light?"
"what if my body became covered in moth bodies?"
"what if my eyes were covered by wings?"

you said "well, when they settled onto you"
"they'd think they'd found the moon,
and they'd never leave you.
no, they'd never leave you."

"and if they got too close?" i said
"if they flew into my flame?"
"then they'd circle you afire," you said
"become disasters - wandering stars"

so i said: "then, your light is a candle
your light is a flame
for i know it only as the moon
i know it only as the moon

and i'll never leave you
no, i'll never leave you
i'll wrap my wings around you
and i will follow only you"

"then i'll burn you with my fire," you said
"and i'll eat you up in flames"
"for i am a disaster," you said
"i'm a wandering star"