poem: the pandemic is us

she is waiting at an inner-city line the bus pulls up blood-red, it is weeping corpses the bodies are old personas, old dissected diagrams of the same girl: she is ambition, desperation, romanticism. but now— she is washing and washing her hands trying not to be something she is not, trying to find the small…

poem: i have no reasons, i have no reason

girls in books do not have interior lives; they are emotion, they are not Thought. And here I am, sitting alone in the dark terrified to go out terrified to stay in— if I pulled myself apart you would find text, an introversion good enough for Tolstoy, but not good enough for—who else? Who else—is…

poem: “inside the outsider (on my own again)”

my ambitions are small things, held and taken like pills. I am unstable, crashing like clockwork; I tell people it is for the art, but I spend Monday nights alone: the cats throwing their faces at the well and laughinglaughing at the way the skulls smear. I have plans I had plans There are cities…

poem: apology to readers and followers, Feb. 2020

I am sorry that I cannot write conventional things: you would prefer anecdotes about depression and things that are easy to read, where a word is a word is a word.   I am sorry that I prefer nonsense; that my poetry is so abstract as to be ineligible that what I think is art…

poem: night terrors for dead girls

she is split open once too often; they dip into her for communion bread, for vampire wine-tastings. she is fresco, oil on canvas, chalk, watercolor: there is something addicting about virgins, about the girls with universe side-splits and the cosmos falling out of their brains onto the dirty dirty ground. you are the monsters, catching…

poem: pastel lust

you walked by and i, sitting in jeans and tee-shirt was suddenly a virgin in a field, my legs open over grass my fruit open and falling the daisy heads indented into my thighs, small red faces, matching mine; can you hear the water falling, the girl becoming?  

poem: girl waiting alone for her lover, at dusk

I am watching the trees catch Darkness, the cupped hands, the branches, all shaking; feminity is caught tight in the branches, the men are earth and sea and sky.   Night stumbles into the foreground; she is drunk, she watches her enthronement: the earth laid thin, dyed with falling eyes, faded mirth, coughing angels. This…

poem: nostalgia, not contrived

the girl sat in her english class and watched the sky flatten itself against the university window, like even the clouds are desperate to get in and learn critical theory. she pulls her sweater over her fingers and silently sulkily puts an earbud in so she can listen to japanese indie and feel like a…

poem: stock character, female

she turned very slightly; smiled. she said I know you know we know we all know That we are just matter. she bit her lip, she brushed her hair behind the pixeled part of her ear coming sharply in and out of focus. A bad movie; the director is inebriated. reset the lenses and and…