gestation

tiny flies bud and burrow out of the mud. the oily film of the ground outside the sawmill behind my house coats them and they leave trails of it as they crawl across my naked skin. the sun heats us and the dirty water steams out of the sawdust and the sound of their hatchings clicks in my ears.
i fall asleep and dream that my eyes and tongue are covered in clutches of wasp eggs, that i am accidentally swallowing millions of them and then i can feel them inching awake inside me. i snap awake and night has come with its centipedes and worms underfoot no matter where i stand.

hall pass?

whered you get that circle, girl?
He looked at me again, accosting, refusing to let me drop my eyes.
you been fightin?
I was sitting with my legs crossed on in the back of the colfax bus, and he was cross-armed in the seat across from me.
why arent you in class right now?
I was 14 and wearing knee high combat boots, stockings, piercings and all the rest. I wouldn’t listen to interference.
dont have class, I’d say and look away.
But there he was, watching his own folly play out again. He didn’t know me but he was me, and it pained him to watch us going to shit all over again. And so he camped like a fucking vigilante on the back of the downtown bus right about when morning class was supposed to start. Every kid who walked by,
you goin to class, you on your way home to grab your homework and hand it in or what now?
He didn’t tolerate silence. You’d always answer him eventually, maybe you’d even stop and think for a second about whatever risky thing you were probably getting into.
More often than not we’d ditch anyway.
He always watched though and it got to be that every time I was fucking up, his glowing eyes and knitted eyebrow came to mind। I never did learn my lesson till it was too late and I was hands-bound in the back of a squad car.

the gulf stream rains no tears

the night i met you i couldve no more resisted your gravity than i could stop a freight train with a
feather or a hurricane with a whispered plea to our lord. i couldve been something but you were already
coming dark and hot like katrina roaring up over the bayeou:
there was those last moments on dry earth before you forced me down with your jaw sharp in the dark and your promises slick on your lips like oil from the gulf rigs oozing in and smearing my naked skin so molten we couldve melted all the ice up north away. and then the wind brought the rain and the city died violent and i went from 'could have been something great' to treading bloody water with an armful of cinderblocks: a hollowfaced refugee with no fucking doctor in sight to lay hands on pain with a strong heart in the face of them rising floodwaters.

nuit blanche

maybe two hours into laying open-eyed again in the sweltering night,
the sweat of your unsleeping brow begins to melt the dust off memories
and other things that had been long buried। all you can do is lay

there twisting in the unmoving air, feeling the hot mouth of june at
midnight begin to issue its ghosts: they come with eyes like empty
windows and spread themselves on your soaked sheets with their long
gone faces drawing close and repeating your every violence and
trespass.
dawn is hours off. maybe you put on a light, try to read a little, but their breath in your ear dont stop whispering lists of the sins you cant forget, things that will weight you
till your reckoning
comes down. chains made of times and places enmesh you in decades and
continents till the walls of every hot room you ever slept in begin to
press brick by brick on your throat: and it is now, with weary eyes
that dont cry and a throatful of thick air, that you first begin to
wonder what kind of trade the devil would take in exchange for a night
of silence.