Graduate School

Tomorrow I fly to NY where the street numbers are upwards of “Route 2.” I slipped into a whole in the time space continuum: Plainfield, Vermont. Debbie said, “We are not in a bubble.” She saw a pick up packed with men throwing bottles and phrases from the car window, tires flicking gravel against wood dorms. “But not at me.” I said, “Just in general.” She nodded but said no to the passed joint, so Steve and I smoked it ourselves, and then three more on the porch of the dorm with the underwater mural where the octopus has nine arms. Google-eyed and red with one extra tentacle. John said, “It’s his tail.” I took a picture of the painting. And fires just logs without flames, the smoke silhouette a bustled apparition. And the building where the Lorax lives, up three stories to a door skinny like the trunks of surrounding trees. And hanging flowers, petals pink string, called Bleeding Hearts.

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This is my first attempt at prose poetry. Feedback, please. Thanks.

February

You are what stands
between me and March
when I’m eating my bark
like potato chips in January,
sucking molasses sap
from my skin cracks,
mistaking dead leaves
for fall foliage,
living as a tree
that’s rotted and ravined,
now a hollow dwelling
where the rodents died.

Casting gray crosses
on barren cash-crop farms,
birds fly in circles
until they can go North,
and America hopes the groundhog
won’t see his shadow,
and if he does
you will be vengeful,
throwing snow
and icing drives,
freezing groves
and power lines,
and skiing cars
across black ice.
your sleet storms
trap travelers
in damp log cabins
like fine-pelted wolves
in a hunter’s snare
while the salted city sidewalks
separate from the weight
of your white slush.

Stop taunting me
with the buds I birth
when Spring marches in
skirts and dresses
without panties,
my legs then hot tree roots
in need of a breeze
to cool what’s between;
I have a blossom
that needs to breathe.

(3rd Revision)

I’ll Only Keep the Cat

My summer will be spent
cleaning you from the corners
of my drawers, scrubbing your scent
of bar soap and toothpaste from the shower stall,
tanning my stomach were your hands wandered,
filling the space on the half-emptied book shelf.

Beneath a moonless sky, while trucks pollute
the night by entering and leaving the highway,
I’ll skin the sheets like fur from the mattress
we shared; the animals we’ve split-
I get the gray cat; you keep the pit bull-
then divided like children of divorce:
I never wanted her, and you never liked him
as much as I did because he’s reminiscent of you.

As the cat, you will still sleep in my bed
until the deep blue dawn when the tabby taps
my forehead, licks my nose’s tip, and wakes
me with your green eyes in his head,
purring like you would when we
made love in the morning.

Fuck Me

I get so high from meditation,
like I’ve been fucked
by the best dick in the east,
and he did what I told him to,
but I didn’t have to speak
because he felt the force of my being
rising from tail bone to crown
like the trickle of an up-stream river,
clearing my mind of all
but the ecstasy of being alive.

Boots and a Dress

I have just the boots to wear
for when I dance atop the jukebox:
the pair with the low heel, a wedge,
and rough leather zipped together
up my calf. I turn off my telephone,
let a soundtrack drift through my nostrils,
and smell the bud of an orange blossom
in this Florida stand-still heat.

I bought this dress: a yellow cotton
hour glass, a little slinky, with ruffles
like butterscotch sticking to my breasts
and got turned on by that couple
that kills everyone but one another
while wearing the dress without underwear.

Dress and boots together, I’ll drive a car
with your head between my legs,
you cramped between my feet,
enjoying the shoe soul against your bare chest
and my heel knifing your stomach;
I’ll drive all night and make your mouth hurt
more than watching me fuck another man.

Mama, 23

Mama and me uncover her photos.
I like how old pictures
have a frame-
a thin white border
smaller than a Polaroid’s.

I ask,
“May I have this one?”
She wants to know why.

I don’t tell her:
Because I can tell
you’re in a hotel room,
squash yellow
walls barely lit
behind you.
You’re in a hot pink
halter nightie-
A-line, a white stripe empire waist.
Sideways on a rumpled bed,
one arm drapes a pear hip,
the other props you up.
I can tell you tried
to tape your knees together,
but a white triangle is peeking.
They must have been cotton.
I love your pencil-thin eyebrows,
and your eyes lined black,
staring at whoever
takes the photo.

You smile without wrinkles.
Here you are not my mother.

I say,
“You were about my age.”

Rainforest

I am a beautiful woman
with a canopied pussy,
a mystery to any man
who can’t find the split of it,
any man scared of a woman
with a thatch thicker than his.

The Kids Who Never Saw It Coming

She picked us up on a firetruck-
Banana yellow, 1968 metal, the chariot of Dionysus-
topped by twenty thirty-somethings,
hollering, howling like wolves at the moon
until we took steel steps
under our feet and claimed our ride
through the streets of San Francisco.

It was she, Wendee, the glittered pixie
with the birthday crown,
who picked us like wild flowers,
who fed us red wine,
who pulled tears from our eyes
as we slid down
the Haight/Ashbury slopes.

And it was we, Matt and me,
who agreed to see the stoplight change,
who missed the bus at Market Street,
who ran away to California-
for just ten days-
to float up the west coast
with haphazard planning.

Had we set out
with a map and soldier’s steps,
always marching to our destination,
our second to catch
a chariot at sunset
might have been missed,
leaving Matt and I resigned,
designed to believe
there is no room for magic in the world.

Instead we made a space for mystery,
allowing us to bare witness
to a city sun that dares to shine
until the last possible moment,
and wants the sky because he owns it,
until the moon, big and blue,
pushes through a black lagoon
to bring white light to the night-
something the sun can’t do.

Morganne and I at the Saturday Morning Farmer’s Market, 2/18/08

As we walk the isles
of onions, broccoli
strawberries, and cherries,
I like to think we’re lovers
picking the reddest, most plump
tomatoes at the market
for Saturday night aphrodisiac dinner
with oysters and a bisque.
I treat her like we’re partners
in front of the vendors, taking her bags
while she searches for money
buried under bushels of fresh spinach,
helping her pick the best batch of raspberries-
last week’s were moldy.
She pays cash for the food and I charge the coffee
as the first spring rain speckles our scalps and clothes;
it comes down harder as we lug full burlap bags
slung across our shoulders to the car,
and I’m eying passers-by through wet lashes
telling them, don’t try; she’s mine.

Let’s Flee the Country

There is a song I want to slow dance to,
your hands clasped like a clam around my waist,
and a church parking lot I want to fuck in,
the cracked car windows peeking skin
to passing strangers, and a supermarket I want to rob,
as we kiss through stocking caps
after grabbing cash from each register;
then you and I hot wire a car
and drive it high to a marina in Palm Beach
where we’ll sail a stolen yacht stocked
with food, booze, water, drugs, and sun block
out to international waters, and we’ll live
on the sea until the cargo runs out,
when I’m sure you’ll have no problem
catching and cooking fish we find
on our way to the nearest tropical isle.