Tortoise

Tortoise

And then came the time
They had to cut her from the house
The bricks and caulking like wet chalk
Layered in every crease of her home
Had failed to release her
What’s a girl to do
Thankfully boys with chainsaws will break door jams
Blast hinges, bust open filmy windows
To reach her beached and sequestered body
Heaving and alone, removed far in a
Dusty rose bedroom that smells of ashes, sweat
And fear

Decades (centuries?) before she had walked along
Sidewalks strewn with elongated tree shadows
Mottled wild flowers reached to her from overgrown lawns
An orange pink sun was sinking behind pulled cotton clouds
Firm in her thighs, steady in her ankles as
She passed boys who smelled of tobacco and
Cherry soda
Girls with jeans that dipped to reveal lower back tattoos
Twirling around curbs on bicycles, wind catching their ebony
Wavy hair
She saw their dark eyes glimmer, she kept walking silent but
Alive

Breathe in, breathe out

I moved, I moved from where you
Knew me
Crawled upon the back of a giant
Tortoise, its elephantine feet lifting moving shifting
Forward I moved I moved
I have moved
From where you knew me

You don’t get a forwarding address

---


I will attend my own Zoroastrian funeral
Paint the nails of my left hand black
Lay upon the smooth shell of the tortoise
I’ll find fame, I’ll find love, I’ll find a death hush quiet
But they will all know me
(In hearts, in my throat, I know that’s not what matters – not what
Truly lives)
I don’t want to miss me


She’ll spread her doughy legs and give birth
On the back of that turtle


Memories can be like needles to the tips of
Fingers
Remembered as too loud, too much, need dripping like
Used car oil
I’m not there
I’m here

And you can’t have my forwarding address

Someone has to lose

Someone has to lose

Some of us get used to being a
Descendent of failure
A damaged ancestry inked into our bones
Knowing nothing better we
Birth
The same
Wet, squirming in placenta sacs writhe
New sorrows, a womb empty
Since sun produces showers
Swollen clouds obscure views
Strangers keep to themselves in sun bleached, rotting wood cabins
They clutch unloaded guns to their soiled chests
Mutter with ragged teeth about ending the world
Sadness crawls through every mouse hole, slithers
From the fireplace that hasn’t seen
Warmth in years
Glimpses caught between deep green trees
There used to be a trail that lead to a stream…

We get used to losing
We nicked the soles of our feet on rusted nails
Protruding from ancient bridges
Jammed knuckles into slats of ladders
Reaching skies we can’t see
Whatever was enjoyable, easy, loved was erased
The dead stop breathing despite your needs
The storms roll angry despite your contemplation
Of wants
Dreams
Desires
It washes everything away, water recedes and you don’t
Choose to keep memories
They crumple dry petals disintegrate from so
Long ago
No one needs to taste
What could have been different, possibility mocks those
Who remember

There is nothing to fight for here, take down your signs
Silence your bullhorns
Don’t you see she’s let go of what was being
Offered?
Don’t you see someone has to lose?

Dignity

Dignity

Rule number one:
Always keep your dignity
Do not accelerate through
Yellow lights
You look desperate and cheaply
Made as a patchwork
Skirt from your mother’s scraps
But recall your name and no one owns you
You rummaged through the dusty firewood pile
In the end you chop your
Own logs, heave the axe over your shoulder and lower
With force
And no one owns you

We move as light beams bounce
Off planets
Not always knowing what is to
Be encountered
And it can be like syrup
And it can be like a storm
And you can wade in water up to
Your knees, the cloth of your pants
Saturated, dark and heavy
It can be sweet and it can be
Sad

We pitch our bodies forward and lean
Into the cool air
Because we can
Because there is no other choice
There are footprints behind me because
I can leave impressions on the
Earth (follow me, see where I go now…)

Why do you sit alone as the dark weeps into dawn?
Licking the carpet for what might
Remain after the rats have scattered?
You know better
Insight was the light bulb smashed in the outage
So you shook the flashlight gripped in your sweaty
Fist and prayed for
Illumination again
I won’t be in your story, I want to hear
Singing I want to hear it again
I want to hear it now

Crisp notes leave my mouth and it all
Falls away
I build, I thrill, I hum, I build, I build, I build

(I never said I wouldn’t take your hand)

Distance

Distance

My eyes have swollen, hardened to
Shrewd garnets
And you’re little boy blue
I kept my distance
Purged it from my blood like toxins
I keep my distance
Leached into the atmosphere, it doesn’t breathe
In me anymore
And I further, I birth a chasm
You can’t reach me, you never really could



Understand
It’s not that I don’t deepen love
In my heart
But you’re not that precious
And I had a cabin to forge
Its taken root you can see it from
Space
I finally take full shape without any of you


I carved my fetish necklace
Carved it of bone, carnelian and topaz
(Hadn’t been able to find the jade)
So little signifies now, I feel it cool calm in my hands
It warms my neck
At night I dance with the feet of a thousand jackals


Oh, I should thank you
You fueled hot iron rage in
Me so my voice was
Finally heard
The megaphone had been cold
To my lips
But I sang, I sang
Can you hear the notes bleed ripe from my throat?
If you ignore the song, you lose everything you’ve
Nursed in your heart

(Not my problem anymore, I see highways ahead)

---

I needed you to miss me but in the end
I fertilized my own yellow roses

New Low

New Low

It was then she began to swell
Skin on her hips blistered and erupted
As the expansion took over
She couldn’t
Fit through the door, her head
Pressing against the puckered drop ceiling
Friction enough to stop all movement
Flesh-splitting edema she’d
Opened her mouth to explain and
Frogs escaped in hoards to cover the floor



There’s a taste of a new low here,
Licking the tiles of a dirty floor, the gooey
Algae-clogged bottom of ponds
Sinking further than she thought was
Possible, stones providing weight in her pockets
Wrapped in sediment cloaked in rotted roots
Where was her sky now?


This is how we lose friends, sweetie
They slip through our fingers
Like paper dolls and drift into flames
Brown edges detach float upward like dust
None of it was real, and you knew that
Surely you knew that

She gazed down to slowly raise each finger
From her palms and they
Were empty
She’d not been given much, a few pennies
A broken pencil
Some tattered false eyelashes, used pieces of chalk
A faded, torn Halloween mask from years ago

And somehow, as expected, she’d lost it all along the way


---

It’s like I’m walking in a movie
Where events I can’t control
Happen to me
Woven in your soul is important, vital
Work for you to do in this world
I remain the same, please don’t think I
Planned it this way
I’d bled out blue when I thought red was in my veins
My toes stapled to the Earth
When I’d always imagined flight
You told me you didn’t care what others felt
About you
I’m entrenched in the opinions of others, it eats me
Alive, maggots on a corpse

Vigil

Vigil

Their vigil doesn’t begin
Until noon
Dawn is for a different kind
Of dedication
They gather sleep as they can, carrying
It under their crusted eyelids, settling into
Old bones and stringy muscles
The morning can do what it wants
To them it’s not a delay
To wait until the sun is overhead

Tattered grass patches slope up to concrete roads
Displaced bursting flame wildflowers
Crop up the sun-dried incline
The diesel soot of the highway works its way
Into their clothes and hair, into
Their memories

Someone stuck a small American flag
In the parched ground
A few days ago, they sit in a
Circle around it, rest a forehead
In a greasy hand
Rub chapped fingers across dry lips in thought

..of the cars that race to destinations
They can only imagine
They know they aren’t there, aren’t them
Aren’t one of those people
The people who drive, work, jabber on cell phones
As they worry about the sea of red break lights
Collecting on the interstate at rush hour

The vigil continues
Every day I’m here to take another
Breath
Heading to another exit, unable to read
All the signs
Pressing my foot to the pedal often too early, often
Too late
No matter where I head, I always return again
Like Monarch butterflies to the forests of Mexico
Genetic coding awakens my homecoming

They remain
With their flag
The speeding cars nothing more than a
Mild drone barely touching
Our internal worlds

You don't live here anymore

You don’t live here anymore


The fish with their lacy fins
Dart from aquarium wall reflection to reflection
Back again
The wind catches the bottom of the hanging
Spider plant basket on the balcony
Threatening to topple all and what sinks like left over
Fish food in my brain
Is that you don’t
Live here anymore

The days stretch longer, like tired limbs
Waking from slumber
Minutes become hours since
You don’t talk to me anymore

Tall, you seemed to brush the clouds
Above you but
Never recognize their simple beauty
Knowledge leads only to pain
You said
I held
Your fingers in my small hands
And wished it weren’t darkness
Nestled between your ribs

Guinness and cigarettes
Sparsely furnished apartments
Porches dusted in night and ashes
A million kisses in the dark
Tears the next day

---

The trees softly gestured in the breeze above me
I remembered life before, hollow, burned
Scattered and infected
But
Beneath the April blue sky, the afternoon air in my
Marrow, calm now
Listening to melodies, laughter and chatting
Around me bloom like bluebonnets
A small girl with blonde pigtails
Lifted her kite above her head
I saw now I could breath
Again

---

You slipped away from my field
Of vision
A failed experiment in the lab
You’ll dose me with silence
I’m never really angry
You simply don’t
Live here anymore



Thank you
Everyone inside me was
Accounted for with you
I’ll share your joy
When you’re born -
Misery will lift like
A shell that never belonged to you
I’ll never stop wishing
I could see your exquisite eyes
One more time