You Want Me a Prom Queen
(after Alfonsina Storni and David Lynch)
Me, a polished tiara, you want me.
Framed photo, feathered hair. No flip! You want me
& my twin peaks. To make your night draining in black-&-white.
A darkening window, with no sense of irony, like Venetian blinds, slats up—
always up!—until you black out behind a couch. Out of view, one lone cloud
caught between your branches. In only an apron, then you want me
wild in tongue in a way you can understand. A glaring overhead
snicked on, like dawn in a kitchen. You want me
to cast an odd glow… like I was a treasure… to feel, forever. Stone cold,
stone fruit, rigid & limpid
—no pulp, no more icepick, please. You want me
buried like an old bone in the yard, passing over me
with your lawn mower. Go ahead, you know you want me
wrapping around your shoulders, biting like a swarm.
Self-Portrait as Datura Stramonium
Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 (Georgia O’Keefe, 1932)
I was born to startle.
Queen to your desert,
darling. Psyche
-delic trickster
stem & trumpet
jerking off
more like dried
-up ass twigs
carried on
the backs of birds.
Try to follow
my lead, will you?
O, to be oblivious:
five different faces
same connective
tissue—white to blue
ventricle, shiver,
skull—all scale,
pulse, place
slips & still you
want me
giving death
a look.
In the Wake
3:17 a.m. A fish splashes in the harbor.
Behind our bedroom, two swans
aloof: latent figures float across
the optic nerve. I lie here, next to you,
my love & try to think of things
that know how to become new.
The list isn’t long—frogs, fungus, trees.
How still you sleep, unaware
how blunt your words, your breath,
how even nude & horizontal you weigh in
heavy human carbon,
imprinting me these eleven years.
4:05 a.m. Trees, too, need space, their shy crowns
refuse to touch. Like shadows we enter
when we love. Under this canopy, branches
twisting as we graft onto each other. Every night,
the cellular tissue between bark & wood
unfolds. Until the sun comes up, giving its violet
hue. You pull back again & my skin thickens.
Like a harsh sweep of wind shreds: a nest
then nothingness. The way minutes before rain,
a cockerel hunches into its herringbone wings,
one eye never leaving the ground, the way
I wish I could push away from you.
4:56 a.m. Grief the shape of flattened grass,
bearing our boy’s outline, the essence of time,
before he dissolved into earth, soft bodied,
& you diving in with him, leaving me
the keys, five maples, a sullen sky. As if
the lawn that goes on forever meant nothing.
By dawn, the pores of leaves open.
I find you: letting the water out, carbon
dioxide in, a whole tree again from roots
to branches, breathing. Your body was once
a shrine for me, I swear.
The Mind Is
quivering spikes of foxglove in a field of dying grass
a vague smudge from a bleary-eyed cloud
like a wet mouth suddenly flying apart
an open cavity
juxtaposed with so many ways I emerged as your mother’s angry face
made worse by a series of still-face experiments you subjected me to
a line of resort-ready summer dresses
marketed as fair trade &
specifically female, thanks to the hand-block printed fern fronds unspooling
seduction & a story about the Walgreens® personal lubricant in a motorcycle rucksack
a gaggle of Nassau County girls who will hover over your grave
dredging up your evening voice
in the unreliable light of a couple whiskeys to counter the mother-figure
her indelible brows, still arched & not easily erased
my exception to her rule
the arrangement of exotic flowers you fingered
now a loosening fist
coming clean from your backfire & smoke