Opens in a small western town. There’s a flatness. A dryness about the place. We are everywhere and nowhere. Far away. He doesn’t fit in. He’s running, but from what? We won’t find out for awhile, but it might be
Botanical Garden Duplex
Built from bricks of red poppy The short-lived perennial Two years of invisible war Warriors carve into their skin Birthing poinsettia on thighs And with pineapple sage They anchor fear to hyacinth wrists With a hand full of spades Instead
Shadows
drool in my garden like honey on the hilt smearing beneath the skin and swimming through the rock like eggs to eat a rose bitter with diamond petals I tongue the smell of rust and watch the water moan ripping hair
Shipwreck
the harpy trembles with a distant rhythm pulsing and scratching at the curl of my ear she sheds her skin to unravel the scales revealing muscle and bone wound with salt she breathes into the nape of my neck teeth
Inked
I watched the seamstress keep a stoic face as the needle guided tar-black lines out of her skin, stitching a heart. I imagine myself as tattoo artist, mutilating the softness of her body and making dashes around an empty space
The Trashed Up Beach. It Took Her Time and Time to Find a Clear Swatch for Them to Sit. The Man Was Truant but He Wears a Watch.
Her searching eyes stuck in a patch of gleam, the forward rippling ocean. Mounting the sand dunes, the man swells into a throbbing shape. Ascending the dune the man slides a smudge in his alligator boots. He struggles against the
At the Prison Her Hands Cling to the Sting of the Wires of the Chain Link Fence. Drained Blue Sky. Staring at the Red-Sign of the Prison Gate. The Placard Reads. There is No Unction for the Destitute.
Unslept prison-guard sleeps in his office of wire-chair. She says in a voice gripping water I’d like to enter please. The desk inside the foyer empty. She is pressing the desk-bell with soft finger tip, the bell-sound lances the room.
The Woman: A Witness
The woman wakes to the pressing weight of the world. Her square sunken room is washed up in boxes to pack, trinkets memories to stuff into the throats of silences. Freedom is a sack of wet feathers, her sternum is
First Kiss
She is not sliding off a cliff stepping into the man’s red car. She is not falling like a Silk porous unbearable hot dusk broken by the murmur. His car engine runs like open Water, I’m stuffed he says, groping
Dislocated Heart
the trains took away the mountaintops leveled the side of the bear’s home earth body dynamited & hauled away the vanished live in clouds now how difficult it is to start again with monsters building pipelines thru your ribs the