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.

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.”

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 bear 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.

Garage

August lulls in a dull gray,
rain falls heavy, and we are three women
being 20 in a half-open garage;
water explodes when it hits the driveway
like bombs bearing gifts
to the asphalt crack weeds. Joanna and Candice
throw rock, paper, scissors, for the record:
Dark Side of the Moon or Working Man’s Dead.
Candice rolls a dart joint
that goes straight for the optics,
dilating pupils to dinner plates,
turning rain into kamikaze words,
soundless except for song,
and the broken letters pile like trash on curbs.
We watch from a three-seater rummage couch
made of polyester flowers, and we’re stuck!
Three brown-eyed, brown-haired girls
of sister source are submerged like mermaids
under the incredible weight of instruments;
we don’t want to swim out,
and Candice likes the way her dreadlocks
sprawl like tentacles under the sea,
Joanna’s tresses make a backwards S
and mine makes snakes like Medusa.

Utopia

When I pee
in a public bathroom,
I pretend
I’m Queen
of a naked country
where toilets are thrones,
and no one
minds a little thigh,
or a lot of thigh,
or a vagina,
or a scrotum;
where people
earn Nobel Peace Prizes
for fucking in public,
so children
know sex
as humanitarian;
where women
sit under
period huts once a month
to bleed
into dug out ground
and men cum
to combine
egg and sperm,
then gaps
are covered
and nothing is wasted
as flowers seed
in the dirt;
where I need
no panties
to pull up under
my dress,
or a dress
to pull up
over my head
when I make
walled-in love
(because sometimes love is wetter
one
on
one);
where there
are no stalls
separating
the shit holes
and I can
poop in peace
knowing
mine is just like yours.

Cat Foot

I should lie
like a cat,
soaking up
the sun’s energy,
waiting
for the buzz
of a mosquito
to open
my triangle eyes
and tempt a swat.

But I am
human:
a biped
who thinks
she has more to accomplish
than a cat,
learning from her lineage
to be a woman
in balance-
well,
a cat on a ledge.

My orange tabby
won’t remember
her Mama.
She has herself,
her right now-
good days
spent on the rug,
in the sun
and the mornings after
street-fight nights
spent underneath the bed
with a bloody tail.
She grooms
although she must be neat
for no one,
using a sandpaper tongue
to keep the wound
from becoming a scar.

Why is it that I,
a biped,
won’t groom
when I’m estranged
from Mother:
the matriarch
who led me
to the ledge,
from my lover:
the man
who drapes me
like silk over our bed.
I sulk
over wounds
long since dried,
peeled and healed,
that scarred
because I wouldn’t stop
scratching at the scab.

I won’t wash;
I won’t treat.
I will lie like prey
succumbing to predator.
I should be so lucky
to suffer
like a cat
who still wants to be clean.

Born

I want to feel myself
as if I have been created by an ocean,
as if I dragged a limp, boneless body
from the womb of the earth.
I want to cry
on the shoreline
and beat my slick fists
against the grains,
striking hard and with purpose:
to see blood soak
instead of float for the first time.
I want to turn over
on my back
and blind myself
by staring straight into the sun;
the star is just that
and I am no longer under a wet blanket.
I want sand to seal my gills
and my first breath
to build lungs of the dust
kicked up as I struggled
against the tide
carrying a broken wave
out to sea.

Recycle

On sleepless nights
I pretend dream,
smoke cigarettes
like I’ll never get cancer.
I am a crab-web of stars,
alive in the sky
and the ocean floor.

I forget physics,
float with the smoke
gray and colorless
at once.
I dissipate
with the plume,
am recycled into blackness.
I’ll exist
a gas sprite,
a point of light,
orange embers burning like a fire in the desert.