poem: clinical subterfuge is not a diagnosis

but give it twenty-years time, give it a lot of desperate people. they say gender is performance but only (honestly) class is performance, class is shunted offon the everyday sexual life on the everyday person, all madepolitical so someone, in a fifteen-thousand-dollar apartment, can readthe new yorker and mastrubate without guilt. the blue night comes…

poem: the view from my living room window

some people light small fires—I, am lit. someday i will be won and not waiting: it is an old refrain, told by older woman; in the still afternoon i watch three sparrows circle my childhood, the greens glowing yellow, and i think— there is something waiting out there, there is something roaring.

poem: therapy is cheaper when you’re in a relationship

I really must not pin hope on people who do not (yet) exist; one day, he might want to lean over the table and hold my eyes and hear the personal hell but in the tight space between 60 seconds and one minute, we are still nothing; he does not care about the damning things…

poem: trauma

we are girls tied body to body to music: our headphones like veins bringing the low guitars and lighter wails, pumping in the bright noise that keeps us from dying in locked rooms the memories coming like birds in flocks of heat our arms splitting open from remembering we are not talking, we are not…

poem: girlhood in fantasy

the spring is too flat here; there are no grand peaks in the clouds, no witches asleep over grey moors, their brooms spliced out into moss and heather. these are meant to be the wailing times and yet when I stand outside, I hear nothing. there should be the tromping of boots as my sister…

poem: sex ed. from camelot

When I was younger, I spent some ten or so breathless hours lying on an unmade bed, grey sky clamped above me: I was reading one of my mother's books from college, those years when she went through her pagan stage and believed in abortion and Earth Mothers. The legacy of that is kept on…