if you have a kindle, my first novel is FREE ON KINDLE RIGHT NOW, for a limited time! although, it’s always on kindle unlimited for free, right now anyone can get their paws on it.
it’s not the sort of story that i ordinarily tell (as is known, i’m usually all about the horror or fantasy, & this one is more psychological), but it’s a story that i told. & it’s free until (unintentionally) midnight, on valentines day. 🧛♀️
He forgot to carve his name onto it—my slow-dead
womb builder. So he thatched this house with reeds
as presences and struck cymbals.
I gave its shambles to the fire, heaped its mar and its
lime, and the skeletal birdcage of it into the memory
of a tongueless August mouth.
Its chasm, a door—its screen porch, a belching Madonna.
Thin-torn frankincense fumes like god-blood from the split
of its rarefying wound, where the
whole of purgatory is a scent of goulash and of low mur-
murs; the sin of knowing, a Clorox-tinged swimming pool
rash and the sponge of wood rot.
the rattletrap where i watch
in flesh-colors quiet as the static
on play-slides gallop to a cutlass.
and decrepit with me in a malibu
it rusts in happy meals. bloats on
a warm backseat corpse savoring
in fragmented leather castled by
dehydrated fries like blades.
a city map is sewn in the scalp;
looped in the goat-milk, or spit out,
tongued in silky blades of stomped
down grass.
i’m crowned with high-pitched fingers
clenched in fur.
in octaves only shades can bear, i simmer
in their holy cradles.
i become the roughened corner of a mouth
grinning at its own joke.
there, the receding home in ranch-style polaroids of a dirty blond stranger and my mother squinting in the sun; some home not mine or yours.
ventricles, which
in a woman’s left grows tiny,
and in a man’s more supple.
i keep alive by milking goats.
some like lifelines, some like ulcers
the city streets are braided in my hair.
i was in a dirt hole or clasped on
a napping road-trip road.
palpitating thru the lines or bones
on the ground, or underneath.
i found her heart in a rat pile
flapping like loose mother-skin
grieving with the last milk oval
on the whelps tongue.
are above me, like you
in a circlet of whore-stars,
maniacal with
teeth for deep space.
a belligerent isolation embraces
me and i am born in bright black.
i stare into the sun and when i
shut my eyes, it winks back
and it will never leave.
my love was a thousand shells
in salt on earth. i was the killing jar.
i croak to the fractured window of a bone-white ford truck groaning down, shambling up a shaft of dreary road.
i, a silver figment or mislaid filament, a filigree wafting bare thru realms hot & rose-gold, loom where the skeleton of the truck is parked eternal: i see the rotting choir of burst leather spaces, vacant, on which the sun has dug its holes. little else remains within apart from remains; i’ve loped from one graveyard to the next.
840 minutes in a warehouses’ baking mouth bending metal out of men, where oil-dyed hands stain wonder-bread or stay-at-home wives’ necks, they used to make trucks like those. and like the one that was his daddy’s buried in that old garage. all he had was that truck
and all I have are his songs.
you’ll never feel young in your old cage—that’s old age—
It’s no comfort knowing that you’re buried,
deep down, taking earth around you
like blankets that fall apart and crawl.
But seasons still disrobed like actors
backstage in a play, in front of
everyone. Even with you
gone, the world moved on.
And I watched. We all did.
Forced to watch, without you,
with seasons pouring the years
between us in vanishing old flannel,
smelling like Salem filter kings,
soft.
Spring grew through us both
like a blade.
And you died in the summer.
A diamond in that box
they buried you in, deep down,
where you fall apart and crawl, too,
by now. Still waiting to be proposed,
like the plan to go back to Santa Fe.
Sometimes I wait for you to show,
maybe at the movie I go to alone,
sitting next to me when I peek over
in the flickering dark. You could come around a…
‘let sleeping dogs lie’ or if they’re in florida set them on fire; let them die. ‘speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world’ i am the melting ice. i am the gun on the dashboard to Savannah for the 4th of July. i am the word speak now, or forever hold your pieces.
for rent: a popular swamp, far away from the highway. a tongue left behind with a womb-scent, a piece of me in the toilet. and the dog, always barking up the wrong tree.
like mottoes, mildew crawling up the walls like arrows, climbing down. point me away from the fingers they lick in prison for nicotine.
they live in a dishwasher so they can put roaches on my eyes instead of coins when i die; this is where he laughed, where he made me into wax. they check in, but they…
i was once obscure like food stains under skirts or a film of oil on a flowers tongue but i grew to be a bigger blemish like a birthmark on gods face until i had to hide away so no one saw
death had come on many occasions and i, the greeter at the door would grin but i was not the company he was looking for when i’d invite him in thus i watched them all march out my loves; one-by-one and fall to ash and still i, never being the one sought out began to wear white instead of black to mourn; no coward soul is mine, in hopes he’d never return.
until i disappear completely, i can weep into the liquid face of a mirror and speculate about who used to dwell in my iron & carbon skull, before i was the me that faded.
i held onto me like a movie ticket
in the back of my wallet
the one we all keep
that justbecomes a tomb like a placeholder in our hearts for a special day we end up forgetting.
i’m perfunctory now, roiling, knocked up byrainstorms and lightning writhing down like a noose on his red beard, drinking snake oil
maybe theworld’s a cat’s eye and i am shattered faith my shoulders a hewn epitaph of hopes am i lucid dreaming, i never fell asleep. these days, i lie down in a trance and never wake up.