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.

thirsty

oh, i tell you, that love was the kind where you love and they take it like it was water in a bucket fullve holes. you pour and pour and the ground gets wet alright.
it was on such an occasion that me and my muddy feet woke in a daze some days out from the trail. with the yellow sun shining my eyelids red i just lain there awhile thinkin how funny it is to be born barefoot for carrying water in a hot asphalt world.

the firing squad

my eyes hurt from studying all night and the morning light is damaging their already precarious state and my brain and body are fighting a losing war with eachother—
i know what is coming and draw it out by walking as slowly as possible to the office at the end of the hall. more fortunate prisoners are taunting from behind the lab benches
'dead man walkin dead man walkin'
my professors invite me to have a seat. each takes a sip of coffee and exchanges a glance with the other. my evaluations from the last two semesters are spread out on the table. the first glances over the pages.
these are poor, she says, and demands explanation.

there is uncomfortable silence as many things i tried to bury come rising up in my chest like worms after the first long rain. i only wish i could cast off the weight of my many mistakes like they were ugly old clothes; but nothing i can say will save me now from my goddamn foolish youth…
i think this. my mouth stays uncharacteristically silent.
a blindfold is provided and they load their rifles, reassuring me that they are only trying to do me the favor of saving me the trouble of wasting my time applying to medical school.
the oldest one catches my eyes with their purple circles like one too many bar fights. last fall, what the hell happened, what were you thinking? i tell her i dont have the heart to tell her ( i was weighted with darkness, pressed with the cruel hands of god and men and poverty. i stay silent and )

she smiles the weak smile of the executioner after the last appeal is denied. my stomach churns its last meal of ahab's revenge coffee and stale cheerios with no milk cause i aint had groceries in two weeks.
they stand me up and line me against the mark, clemency maybe if i grovel but i am too proud
and it is too late and my paper-thin bones are already beginning to float out the window, rising up into the clouds bright with the sun, away from the objectivity and vivisection, the captivity and microscopes...

la abuela habla muerte

someone's abuelita died. donning our blue rubber gloves, we unceremoniously lifted her tiny corpse which was folded up like a child in the fetal position waiting for comfort.
but in the dream version we dont have a gurney for some reason, and carrying her of her humble house becomes a procession and we are lifting her light bones high above our heads, me secretly wishing she will just be assumed right there into heaven rather than a cold metal locker and a leering mortician downtown with pumps full of formaldehyde.
we are getting her into the back of the ambulance and something slips, her body tilts in our arms, her mouth parts and spills tar and ash that covers us like a cloud of damnnation. the bystanders scream and retch, i can hear it splashing all over the pavement and it is cold soaking through my shirt but aint nothin else to be done except moan the same low song and wring our hands all covered in black death.

riverside portrait I

he is thin as thread and grizzled as the flagstone sidewalk hes settin on. 35 and lucky to be alive, he preaches now to his brothers down by the river who are always sneaking slugs of colt forty five between their amens.
he absentmindedly traces his trackmarks, watches those wretched men wash themselves with water full of the sky's clouds. when they catch a hint of their staring reflection they slap the still water away, bring their hands to their whiskered faces to see if it really could be true, if the drinkin and whorin have really cut lines deep as oak bark across their sunspotted skin.
they ask him for soap, for lye, for lotion. he just shrugs, spits.
'them stains dont wash off. youre jus gonna have to answer to yer tally one of these days.'
each looks down his clothes, noticing the traces of gray that stay now after scrubbing, after bleach, even after stealing new ones from walmart: the cotton is spotless for a moment but
something telling always seems to seep through.

for judas

the other day I met the Big man behind the biochem lab where I'll be doing research this summer. he smiles, gestures, welcomes me as a new acolyte; projects are discussed, chemical reactions go up on the white board. i politely resist the urge to say that
it strikes me, increasingly,
how quick stainless steel and plastic entirely replaced stained glass and iron crosses as the ornate monument to a myopic obsession with invisible things. these new alters are maintained (much the same) by devoted, celibate young monks in robes of white; now their gloved hands hold not chalices but pipettes, with bunson burners to light the sacrament.
maybe cause i am not a man i cant revere this dissection, vivisection, the deep satisfaction of gutting, cutting, pulling everything apart into tiny pieces, separating gray into black and white.
even the smallest molecules themselves cannot have their peace: we drown them in magnetic fields till they are forced to let go of everything and fall apart.
once the last fragmentation is complete, he at the helm turns toward me
so delighted in all this golden hubris,
with his pale face bathed in the green glow of so many machines.

monday

amongst all this toil, all       i want is to be reincarnated as a june thunderhead
blooming blue above them red mountains

in rambling,

longshanked highway runners
live to fix their vacant eyes on an empty horizon,
never holding nothin but a cheap butterfly knife
tween them and the dark wet places flying by beside the road.

apple & farmer

i got these tattoos,
electric imprints beside my breast, the skin surface changed forever --i will be drawn to rest someday as an old oak cut with the easy scars of verdant sapling youth.
any spring tree could tell you that nothing grows back quite the same after each frost. its new april-green chorus is shaped with notes of misshapes that are their own memorial:the freshly marred bark flaws mark the memory of fruit and leaves who already done breathed their last sunshine and let go of the sky and wind to fall

down there to them earth standin men who watch simple and hungry
with the moon waning in their eye, reducing to a scythe, their harvest beneath the blade coming up cold and colored red in its final phase

put me in the ground

of late i find myself dreaming of bones, living and dead:

and these days, i am afraid to open my mouth fearing that my ribcage may fall through; i could
never
live down the embarrassment of spilling such    personal things all over my professor’s floor. what would become of my bones' mess spattered there on the linoleum,?—aint no reverence in science; &i could never put em back myself.
their new livid stench would draw forth so strong that vultures'd circle overhead like id been gone for weeks.

gambling

sometimes i catch a faint tendril of your scent—your discarded t-shirt in the bottom of my dresser i keep aiming to wash but never quite do. i open the drawer and

your tan face suddenly glimmers flushed and sharp like a casino’s neon lights rising like knives out of reno coming forward from the cloudless brown desert.

dream a highway

i do not know if the way memory fades like so many tungsten faces is a blessing or curse, only that now it has twighlit some august night just short of the end of days, back when you could smell the girl so ripe in the dusky heat with her sweat dripping like honey to stick
the bees down towards her naked toes sunk deep in the red mud. it is almost enough to know that junipered hillside wont never answer to us again, wont forgive the time our campfire defiled a millenia of sandstone talismans.
the moment dissolves into the shimmering air above the sunbleached miles; the blacktop cleaves the desert driving mercilessly forward, each minute one more distance between that body and this one.

now it's one month later and your lank hair has faded on the pillow of a hazy morning you awoke in agony while i retched up the hangover having crashed up my bike on broadway in some overbrave 3am mania.

sunrise on route nine

there are two motels on route 9, not so far apart but spanning an entire lifetime of mine: i can yet see the green carpet at the hadley inn, us the rapturous and unwashed gazing at the lampshade’s new hole where it hit the floor while the laboror’s pickups idled outside in the dying night.
down the street on the other side of that dream there is a hotel chain’s cheap façade with a window facing the stripmall that caught the sun in my eye so shockingly crystalline that morning with me lain out screaming and screaming on the tile.

FLOOD-new orleans, 2006 (previously published)

The bottles had been underwater long enough to soak the labels off; they were dark and anonymous. We lined them up on the floor next to the mattress we had dragged in and then we lingered in the electricity-free silence for a few minutes. Dead computers surrounded us and their associated hopeful vocabulary—modem ! keyboard! url!—was tacked up on the wall and peeling. Rescued religious statues regarded us from their pile in the corner.
I kept flashing back to the refugees' scrawled notes still on the chalkboards.
R gave me a long look and twisted the cap off. Not a tight seal. He smelled it and brought it to his lips—"a little funny."
I thought of the squalid, horrible place this liquor came from.
He looked at me again with those eyes like an tomcat in the darkness, killed the flashlight, took a long draw, passed it to me. Opaque brown bottle. I raised it and drank; it was whiskey with a faint taste of the smell of rain near factories. I raised it and drank what brought fragile order to its knees, what roared through houses and filled lungs to the brim. tearwater mudwater bloodwater: the flood of the people's funeral. i swallowed until my stomach was hot and my eyes burned. and then when the bottle was empty and r was unconscious as usual, the ghosts came in and we raged in the ruins with me laying down my body and them breathing in their bones from my breath.

Alone in apartment 89

at midnight I closed my eyes on the weary sodium lamp yellowing my cellblock-sized bedroom, falling asleep to the most curious feeling of tiny seeds unfolding under my skin. things were moving, pushing through, there were green thorns splitting my flesh. i had no choice but to tear a hole in my t-shirt between my breasts and let the wildflowers push out of my chest, fragrant and dripping from the bone.
my sole witness, the sodium lamp, just buzzed jealously as i twisted up in the sheets with visions of those dandelions lit by meteors burning across the night up there, way back in my eyelids, on top of some summer mountain.

after eden

and what of adam? these days you'll more'n likely find him cursin the lord jesus, laying in a bed of fleas he made himself with hands full of murder and seed spilled on his shrinking belly, reeking of dread and emptiness.
as for her, eve, the new whore of babylon? she is still wet from the fuck, all slimy with snakespit, mascara running in the mud and smelling of her rebirth in a den of feral dogs.

a humble ode

in denver back then it was all threadbare houses and drinking cheap tequila deep in the chill of july midnights. id been desperately in love with her, with that supernatural gleam and ancient tragedy weighing and lifting her skinny brown body. id always wanted that night, out there by the bonfire in a weedy backyard. she was yowling like a bony allycat under a red moon some old blues song. everyone was drunk without watches and time stretched till i could barely stand having been overcome by the smoke and her perched so high on that splintered log with her songs and scent drifting down to cover us in all of our earthly mortality.