the flap of skin swaying beneath its throat
and share it with the next wolf
to trot by. But here there are no wolves.
Through the kitchen window fangs the moon
to fuck you up even more, to send you slathering
away, past the condo community,
past the lit houses, into the deep woods;
where there’s a moon,
there’s always a deep woods.
SONG FOR SAD GIRLS
Right now I feel like a self-cleaning microwave about to malfunction.
My friend texts from the east coast, I smoked so many cigarettes in this chair.
She’s in some bar. Do people still even say, old haunts? She’s sitting there with a second beer,
haunted by a sad girl. Now I feel more like a burn hole in a cushion,
still smoldering. A set of plastic curtains. Whoosh, I could go up any minute.
Sad girls, sad girls, you’re everywhere. Sick on the snake oil
of romance. Blundering in and out of beds
and squabbles with roommates. Scalded by raindrops.
Hating yourselves with such a pure hatred.
Loving the music that makes it worse. This is that music.
There’s a low piano part in here somewhere, sinking under a wave
of minor thirds. There’s a plastic guitar with shitty strings and you think
you’re that guitar nobody wants even for a weird art project. You don’t know
that your trash and dead birds can cast beautiful shadows. You don’t know
anything and I love you for that.
Right now I feel like a menthol filter. I float face-up in the toilet,
my lipstick dissolving, as crowds of girls swirl by. I creak like a rusted-out insect
trying to fly. I spin around and around
for you and you only, scraping out this old, sad song.
RÉSUMÉ
—after Dorothy Parker
Families shame you;
Rehab’s a scam;
Lovers drain you
And don’t give a damn.
Friends are distracted;
Aging stinks;
You’ll soon be subtracted;
You might as well drink.
TELEPATHY
I don’t know if telepathy has ever been proved or disproved
but when I go out with a friend & there’s a man by himself . . . I feel . . . him . . .
Something goes out from me, little threads of energy, my invisible feelers begin waving,
my third eye on its stalk turns slowly . . . & if I’ve entered the circle of his awareness
where his pancakes are shrinking from his bacon . . . or his beer is wetting itself . . .
what messages are drifting into his hair . . . like cat dander . . .
like oversharing fortunes from insecure fortune cookies . . .
I am not a strong, independent person experiencing life to the full . . .
I never learn from my mistakes . . . Maybe you could be one of them . . .
Men like to say they’re not mind readers, but the ones I’m drawn to aren’t readers at all . . .
Their thought-balloons are full of dick pics . . . floating toward the ceiling
& slowly deflating, like their interest in me . . . Maybe telepathy is bunk, but magic sure isn’t . . .
I remember a man who liked to dress me up . . . then saw me in half
& I stood up smiling & bowing . . .
SMALL TALK
Let’s skip it and get straight to the rabid dog at hand.
This is some weather we’re cowering from.
Would you please touch my face like a blind person?
I feel like a giraffe in a parking garage.
Let’s skip it and get straight to the death smell
coming from behind the refrigerator.
Can I offer you something more subtly evocative
of the underlying theme of your life story?
How many self-important wounds do you have?
Everything you say is tiresome.
I’m going to walk away slowly and not look back.
Now we’re getting somewhere.
GHOSTED
I guess you realized how worthless I am
I myself am just beginning to discover it . . .
Nothing is being named after me
A planet would be nice . . . or a star system
But I don’t want to be anyone’s sunbeam
Maybe a black hole . . . I just saw a picture of one
& oddly you weren’t in it . . .
I don’t care what you’re wearing right now
as you don’t think of me at all . . . I’ve already disappeared
like a dead girl in a police procedural
but you’re not the detective . . . & I’m not dead . . .
Darling, there are plenty of nameless alleys
& I intend to walk down one late at night
howling at the trash bins until a light blinks on
& someone sets out a nice dish of gin . . .
AUGUST
What I want is to slice open its stomach and watch
its toxic sun uncoil into the sea.
Cicadas seething in their asylum in the trees.
All this frenzy and scorch
and at night music hammering from the outdoor bar
where the dancers blindside each other
with longing, and the long tide slopping
in and away, barnacles on the piers clinging
in the littoral drift. Whatever it is in me
that crawls like a wasp over the remains
of a picnic, used napkins blown
over the senseless grass—tell me
how to kill it. How to let it go out like the last
disaster of love, last boat guttering in the wave-swell.
WINTER SOLSTICE
I can’t think about the black slick on the river or the deer
corpse at the base of the tree or how one lover is
too young & sometimes indifferent & another is
lighting candles with someone else neither
ever mine for more than a rare evening the days will
lengthen now but so slowly it will still
feel like darkness is winning the battle between
it & what people call good or God a few fallen trees
are always there in the woods turning back
to earth rump torn open a kind of caul
over the eyes maybe a coyote thick
film on the river a lover’s hair lit fallen
trees lengthen now but so slowly I can’t think
indifferent base God between either darkness
ALL HALLOWS
It’s bad to be alone on Halloween, worse than spending Thanksgiving with a Styrofoam cup of Turkey Noodle
or a sober Christmas after a breakup, surrounded by happy lesbian couples discussing condo timeshares
You have to turn off your lights & hide from the doorbell
You have to cover your eyes from knife shadows on the walls
& your ears from sinister music scores, smashing window glass, & terrified girls
You have to remember that time as a kid you vomited all over your fairy outfit at the shopping center
& then peed out of shame, with your ripening talent for making things worse
You had a talent for singing, too—twice you lost competitions to boys playing the drum solo from “Wipeout”
You should have just stood up in the auditorium & done your retromingent trick in front of the entire school
Now you do it in poems, laying a golden sheen over the paper, inviting people in
to the dirty gas station bathroom of your performative loneliness
Princess, French maid, ladybug, cowgirl, zombie
It’s the Night of the Living Ex-Husbands
The souls are pouring out of Purgatory or steaming up from the animals
they were trapped in
My father wants a fresh beer, my mother some Fritos with a single bourbon-and-Coke
My brother just wants to go fishing one more time
Cheerleader, angel, skeleton, witch, imago
Round about the toilet go
In the fatal kisses throw
Oh my weird sisters, we’re not bad, just lost—look at Anne Sexton swirling overhead
behind Plath & her impeccable broom, look at all the blottophiliac girls
longing to faceplant in Mr. Death’s crotch
Ladies, women, darlings, bitches, you
Stop it right now & pay attention: Virginia Woolf is rising
from the river, sloshing home to Leonard in her Wellingtons
nothing in her pockets but bread
You have to take out the stones & put them back where they belong
You have to carve the names of the dead & then let rain & years destroy them
The moon weakening like a cheap flashlight while your heart blinks on
ALIENMATCH.COM
I am trying to center my spacecraft
over a volcano. I am six trillion years old
but am often mistaken for an asteroid.
My body type is indeterminate.
Sometimes I resemble a white marble floor
on which stained glass light diffusedly falls,
at other times an aortic clot.
The first thing people notice about me
is the caul over my third eye.
I would like to engage in heated conversation
about which is the dish sponge
and which the counter sponge.
I would like to date you
if you would acknowledge my special qualities
without my having to exhibit any.
After six trillion years, my spacecraft
is a little tired. Sometimes I spend
whole nights trying to phone
my dead parents, running from tigers,
looking for a condom. Mostly I feel
confused as a daffodil who didn’t get
the memo about fluttering. I keep trying
to wake up in my dreams. If I didn’t
know better, I might think you were in them.
TO THE WOMAN CRYING UNCONTROLLABLY IN THE NEXT STALL
If you ever woke in your dress at 4 a.m. ever
closed your legs to someone you loved opened
them for someone you didn’t moved against
a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach
seaweed clinging to your ankles paid
good money for a bad haircut backed away
from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled
into the back seat for lack of a tampon
if you swam across a river under rain sang
using a dildo for a microphone stayed up
to watch the moon eat the sun entire
ripped out the stitches in your heart
because why not if you think nothing &
no one can / listen I love you joy is coming
WAYS OF BEING LONELY
Like a haunted river no bridge wants to lay itself down over.
Like a taxidermied grizzly in the Student Union.
You cry at a frequency only subatomic insects can hear.
That time with him in Houston.
Sometimes you flame into a scary flower.
An eruption of coherence in the post-modern seminar.
You stand in a shallow creek & your reflection floats slowly downstream without you.
Alcohol is your emotional support animal.
The fan hums erratically.
An unclaimed suitcase of miniature toiletries, burst open on the baggage carousel.
Like an amoeba without an e-scooter.
An extra in an epic battle scene, trampled by a non-equity horse.
You’re a red-breasted flute, but everyone else is a dowel.
A Zen koan blooming in the White House Rose Garden.
Sun-damaged curtains in the parlor of an abandoned friendship.
You’re the queen, but you’re a bee being sucked into the pool’s filtration system.
Like a version, touched for the very last time.
Spooky piano music rising from the dishwater.
You wake up alone to a bird reciting Keats.
GUITAR
Sometimes it sleeps in its case all day like a stringed vampire
In the store down the street its friends are hanging like hams
Guitars, like hearts, can be anything
If you really want to break your lover’s heart it’s simple
Just immerse yours in tepid water & walk out of the kitchen
Go call someone you always wanted & play them a song on your new guitar
Don’t break your own guitar unless you happen to be a guitar god
in which case go ahead & smash it with the impunity befitting a god
Also feel free to smash your chosen people while reminding them how much you love them
My guitar is often depressed because it takes itself seriously
as the instrument of a few generations of sensitive singer-songwriters
The ukulele has lately grown in popularity but a uke is so babyish
Playing it is like trying to placate a god by ritual murdering a sacrificial blankie
When my guitar is sad it glows eloquently & goes berserk
thinking of light thinning in a hospital gown
& the sound of paper slippers on gray linoleum
like a voice being mopped off the tiles
A guitar, like a heart, has a hole in it
It heaves out its music like a twerking volcano
like a faucet leaking bluebells in a gutted house
Heart like the last Red Wolf
in the decimated population of eastern North Carolina
looking for a mate
Heart like a target
Hole like an exit wound
Play on
III
CONFESSIONAL POETRY
Writing it is like firing a nail gun into the center of a vanity mirror
or slowly shaking a souvenir snow-globe of asbestos & shame
to quiet an imaginary baby
It’s like sewing rhinestones on your traumas so you can wear them to a pain festival
or beating a piñata selfie with a pink rubber bat
so you can pet the demons that fall out
No, the confessional is a mode among other modes
Right now I’m getting fingered in a museum bathroom during a Cindy Sherman exhibit
while discussing Susan Sontag’s “The Pornographic Imagination”
& live streaming it on Instagram
Why don’t you follow me
A beef-witted male critic is indexing my sins
in a highly regarded literary publication
Supergluing my clitoris forever to the pillar of historical irrelevance
It’s shitting your fancy gown in a home movie & everyone who loves you recoiling
while you shrug because it’s only a movie
Doing a clever impersonation of roadkill in glitter eyeshadow
then lifting up your dress to show everyone your invisible dirty panties
Not wearing waterproof mascara while you’re being tasered
Staging your copycat suicide, leaving lipstick on your noose
You open a vein of hematite & convince everyone it’s blood
then bleed out on a white shag carpet
All over the world, depressed, narcissistic little bitches
are filling notebooks with their feelings
Sloppy, boring, grotesque, unfuckable feelings
I really like feeling something when I stagger into a poem
& having a place to lie down & cry
I woke up this morning from uneasy dreams & put on three pairs of tiny high heels
Embed me in plastic, pass me around
Put m
e onstage so I can stand over a grave trap
& a man can explain what’s wrong with me
Rape me by the light of the moon shining over a nuclear reactor pool
Is there a single idea in my pretty little head?
Let’s have another cocktail & find out
while I remove these sticky bandages
IV
ARCHIVE OF RECENT UNCOMFORTABLE EMOTIONS
PEOPLE YOU DON’T KNOW
You have no idea what’s inside them.
Slipped gears and downed wires, rotted-out floor planks.
Maybe anemones.
Now We're Getting Somewhere Page 2