Hand-shaved days fall into the pot.
The water fills with starch.
I move backwards & forwards
while sleep reapplies its lipstick.
Enter: blades of twilight.

Eight inches of snow
between the angels
& my skull-cap.

I slide my knife
between the vertebrae of my belief.
Use the bones as my guide.
Borders loosened at the joint,
I can crunch light
with my fingers.
Far off I am being
stitched into the groove
of someone else’s fantasy.
My dreams
hum a low tune.

*

When I was north
I ate elderberries
& read songs about the sea
as the empire of loneliness.
The laments convinced me,
their cold air & hopeless gannets.
When I was north
I dreamt of hares.
Cast stones to strike them
from memory’s dark ravine.
I’m wired to see patterns:
to turn the hip & shoulder,
to protect the neck & wrist.
& know my tells: tapping foot,
heaving chest.
When I was north
I ran through tunnels
low tide brought back
from the underworld.

A man slammed into me
like an Atlantic storm
& it made me a coastline.

Is it possible to write about north
without mentioning escape?
Or fields of lavender, forever.

*

Death cuts its immigrant braid.

Its black hair is strewn
all through the laundry.
New year: I call off
meat again.
Balsam & cedar
ignited—green.
What lives is plastic
or feed.

I’m a bobcat squinting at fire.

There, I did it again,
lived to another winter
turning over
to show its soft belly.

Isn’t it miraculous enough
to have survived to here?

Still my questions follow,
a key aquiver
on the piano.

*

Dear memory—

When will you be done with me?
Every sentence
trails back to you.

I want to be pried smooth
of my callouses,
I want my feet to leave
no tracks in the sand.
Dear memory—
You’ve come to me
wearing that olive coat
that belonged to my mother,
brass button dislocated
in the ocean.

You startled child,
your hair is shorn
kernel-dark.
& still
your lip curls—
& the caves
part their sandstone hands—

pupils dilated in low light—

after Robin Coste Lewis

I was hired to cry lacuna! lacuna!
‍& press the flesh of my pubic bone—
bust of a woman rising from shipwreck,
grinning at all that flotsam. Little five feet
of Venus hips, shedding my gold hair
all over the mattress—deathless
goddess of the spangled mind, I dream of being
planted in water, my cut part growing a verdant limb.
I want someone to address, but o darling
is a Bloody Mary chant to apparate
my own panting self. What have I got to do
to prove my body steeps in a cast-iron kettle,
that my herbal scent blooms with sugar?
Fine, I am another woman painting herself
in thin glazes over wet white ground.
On my first bleed, a girl spat in my face
that I was nothing but a walking uterus.
Sun-skirted sister, where are you now?
All night your laughter threads Cassopeia’s
spread arms. May the winds carry you
out of your own self-hatred.

The past shifts behind red spray paint:
small but beautiful, if you’d like to see

I take whichever menu is offered
Be polite: buy a drink & you can watch

Voices boil, reduce

My face dips beneath an unknown meridian
& crests out of reach

*

Wind from the desert diverts the boats back to port
Comfort plunges to meet the water’s temperature

Once the divers groped for oysters
Now only pigeons roost in the grotto

Your face, the guide says,
it’s too angry for a pretty girl

Of course I smiled for him
I was a prizefighter in the last town

*

The church of bones is open only for worship
It’s an honor to be interred in a wall

I follow the seam of the Atlantic
through tunnels at low tide
The layman can’t tell what’s God & what’s nature
What I can tell—

Tree: fig, almond
The princess weeping for want of snow

The graffiti says
every day someone drowns in the beautiful water

Return the way I came
An ant carrying a half-burned cigarette back to her queen

*

Change the ending & the position of the tongue:
now you’ve learned a thousand new words

My night-plotline creates heat—
I’m too tired to dance, to claim what is already mine

The dawn streetsweepers will brush it away
Lip on throat the dinghy going down

Beautiful, isn’t it?
Drown in it.