XIII
|
UNABLE TO HAVE CHILDREN
Can't tell the difference / between my dream / from last night / & the man pushing into me / on the subway I jog up the escalator to the 6 wondering who the hell / I am don't know / if my body is too human / or if my lungs finally work right after years of trying to die / making me unfit to be a mother / blacking up the stardust inside my uterus / crunching out my ovaries / no generation after me / we come / from the same father |
|
BLUE IN GREEN CHERRY-COLORED GHOST
It was snowing all silent like an abandoned convent, oracles floating in nearby lakes, tokens of human error ;;; there wasn’t a time before this one just other spaces with us in different bodies ;;; In another room, he sat across from me his hands fiddling, a plastic wrapper the only sound between silence, my sloppy attempts at teaching him something as if I could teach him anything but still, we bartered our words in different languages meant to fill a space as if emptiness is something unnatural, as if it could be censored and we would sit in silence, a question of translation of the body and he would smile and I would smile. Sometimes he looked down at his hands would hold mine. It has been years since his hands ;;; he is nowhere I can see, not where a computer can see and what is that sense of longing when someone is completely gone, disappear like the snow at night when all the oracles left earth ;;; The first night we touched alone, I felt a ghost inside your hands possessing my hands ;;; what difference are your hands from where we were created, my zip code, different state lines planets without names genders missing without someone saying: There is something wrong with you. You talk with your hands and I saw your hands telling me to calm down asking which one of us is stuck in an amber sea like a dying bee Everything disappearance & I couldn’t see and it kept snowing that night after the first night and the ghost wasn’t there, wasn’t inside your hands but I was still watching waiting as if you would suddenly start brushing the snow out of my hair like a chemical burn ;;; When I ask for Reds, the man behind the counter says he’s seen me before and when I tell him I don’t live here he laughs like I'm lying and I know I’m not lying and I say you’ve never seen anything like me before and I light the cigarette while walking past two teenage boys, their heads bobbing like ducks in the cold and they don’t know what they’re in for and they’re scared but they won’t ever act scared ;;; They don’t notice me as they walk up the subway stairs, waiting for a transfer they’ll never get and I want to love them in a way they can’t love themselves, haven’t loved themselves but I know I won’t ;;; I still wish anyway as if magic exists ;;; and here we are only the most beautiful and alluring only when we’re busy and unaware of being watched unaware of being loved like endangered animals ;;; There is a silence. You aren’t in this silence. You aren’t here. I could play music but I don’t ;;; I decide to punish myself instead I find my victims in a sea, want to drown them my victims are all me and we are always drowning in this same sea because we are always cold in this room in another city where I cut wild berries and fireflies out of my body ;;; there are so many knives don’t wear me down please wear me down please wear me please let me eat these planets, reshape my body arsenic inside, your hands I feel them all over me. You are one of them, those ghosts inside my body, a dream where there are rivers and sometimes they flow backwards and upwards into the stars to try to bring the stars back down to earth and you ask if the stars were ever here to begin with and I say if someone could charge 10k in Fritos on my credit, then the stars could come back down to earth, could be wilderness, could make us victims of the gods could open my teeth in illness, in your body in a haunted house split apart by a radioactive ocean neon jellyfish swarming our bodies in absences because we have become accustomed to all poisons, all tombs, these dry valleys and do we even deserve any better? Do we actually deserve anything other than ourselves? ;;; I fall asleep and there is no sun here and let my womb make war inside my body because it has been hunted by men ;;; I kneel unsure what I’m kneeling for because I kneel for no man but I kneel anyway ;;; this war, all war created by men who want to be remembered, their hands weaving crowns out of cauldrons, spells for water levitation by fire and you can only hide yourself for so long ;;; you can only hide from yourself for so long you aren’t sure if you are hiding from me or yourself or her or our ghost or if the difference matters at all so instead there is silence and you ask me in this silence, what is redeemable? ;;; so I grab a jug of water and keep pouring, watching the overflow rush into a dark linen sack, digging graves into the condoms you left behind the plastic bag tied, empty valley where you fill your needs, find them as directed ;;; it's not an exam I remind you and inside your muscle lining, you carve the phrase I remember you ;;; uncage the wilderness, the ghost inside your hands hunting the fireflies, the wild lilies, bees swimming in nearby rivers, bodies like oracles awake again make them drink blood and find our bodies floating in amber. |
|
PERPETUITY
We always have a threesome with your plants, you say. Their arms spread out over your body that becomes my body and you’ve become trees swaying in a kind of wind and I’m the wind and our voices are gone. Everything is sway and branch and back and forth motion. We have created ocean. There are times the idea of you in another room creates a space wider than all the oceans and my mouth sinks into my throat, the ache of something I don’t want to understand throbbing. I don’t want to know it. I don’t want to know absence. It’s the sound of water bringing up longing, the sea drowning a blue rose, the sounds of a spell, a spell of creation and the question isn’t who created, but when except we already know the answer: there is us and the want of hands pressing our body, my body, your body, down into the earth. Rising again later. Look at me the whole time, I say. And when I say you are a poem, I mean you are a prism of original love, the opening of Pandora’s box and inside isn’t poison or weapon but a love that can’t be undone, its breath a first and last breath, only love like open windows, a lack of suffering-- no subzero nights closed around breath curling a stillborn flower. When you push into me, hands studying the bones under my skin, I say always and never enough never stop, keep coming back to me until our blood is the same until our cells refract new cells and we are something entirely new, a different kind of human, a creation holier than the space between the earth and moon, eyes abandoning distance to see where heaven is supposed to be and finally stop the kind of waiting you’ve been doing since you were a kid. We don’t wish to be dead anymore—or find the sun unfurl into a betraying darkness but wish instead for breath and hands and the words endless and forever and always-- because there is nothing else we could be. |