the soft animal of my body is rotating in the 7/11 hot dog display
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All in Poetry
the soft animal of my body is rotating in the 7/11 hot dog display
Wait for enough things at the same time, and every action becomes an effect.
I read things and they float away. I would rather stare at my own breasts. “Mind like a steel sieve,” my father would say.
I pass trucks carrying oil, milk, a load of onions (mostly) covered by a tarp. You’re hot, he says.
The problem that afternoon was that when the woman seven months pregnant, in the throes of fentanyl addiction, began giving birth on the sidewalk
“burn me some herbs
put on some tea (osmanthus oolong, please) and light the stove to slowly
let it steep”
“we roll our bodies down the hillside
everything feels so green”
“there is nothing separating us but a few inches of cold metal, through which his questions stream like water through a sieve.”
“he never smiles, only glares at the camera
like he’s looking right into your soul,
and wanting you.”
there is no liquid like grief—
the moon pulls it all,
and my body responds,
begins to bleed.
Cheeks wet with tears, I croak—Jessica, you are the biggest fucking cunt in Somerville.
She giggles like a female alien, inhales serenely, and says Thank you.
I put on my suit every day for work.
It takes three hours.
The stars have no proof / of life but smolder regardless, maggots / feasting on the sky’s vast corpse, and like them / you were science before you were fiction.
“the dog was lucky enough to catch
it mid-air, the bird flying low
searching for worms
or seed. The burial
is quick, without
ceremony. Some preservation…”
“despite not being real
Them and them
the conspirators
and the voices
but more the voices
which I waited for”
“When my husband says divorce, / I start decorating the interior / of my cardboard tent, stock / it with cans of SpaghettiOs / and Bumble Bee (flip-topped), / re-do my hair into a wild Einstein / without the Nobel or any theories / about relativity…”
Sunday morning, / he is hard / at worship / in the divine / church of golf. / His most / ardent prayer, / his heavenly gaze / comes down / to this tough putt / on the 7th green.
“Because I could not see what she saw, / I invented the burning city that gives no heat, / I planted the pillar of salt that is no resource, / And now, as their shadows wave at my feet, / I imagine the horrified look she gave / And salvage her look that has turned from me.”
