two links

tao lin posted a link to these poems by chris moran on his blog and i clicked on the link which then redirected me to 3AM magazine which is where they reside, and after i read them once, i read them again and have thought about four of the lines repeatedly since then.

persona egg poem from point of view of slutty needy girl

BELLY UP

the still-borns are appropriating
the white walls of your bathroom tonight
their sterility

and an aborted phone call to an ex
so here I am
to piss out the snot of our clumsy consent
and I can smell it

a could-be phone call
of future long-afters and fraudulent questions
-answering machine questions
phrased like statements
“I have your book still”

your white walls are hard
the white floor is cold
you are out of toilet paper
and im warming the toilet seat
naked little dripping egg

the most fragile things are always the hardest to handle
there is yolk in the toilet that I didn’t flush down
and much later on the phone
i will explain to you in concrete ways
how i have proof that i am not sterile
and when i tell you i am broke
i will be pissed
and you wont quite get it
or care

i know this
because i know what the walls and floor of your bathroom are made of
and why they remind me so much of a doctors office
that white things like this are made that way to appear more sterile
and unlike you,
it my first time for this kind of thing
and tomorrow morning after i have gone
you can step right in to your sterile white bathroom
and smell it
and know.

i have been published on 3AM Magazine

two poems by me

old, no-longer-my-style poems that i still like.

SANDBOX

I have a recurring dream
where I am singing a sandbox of me
into a flying airplane frame
and as we are enveloped by the darkness
it all slips away
grains into our eyes,
grains into the sky,
I am looking for my mother
until our crash landing
into a sea
of pirates and monsters
and me
where the asphalt is the water is the sky
and im swimming to i dont know where
when sand starts to patter down onto the water
and I wake up thinking of my father.
Because when im asleep,
I am the sand
and when I'm awake,
I am the sky,
but forever my mother will be the water
and
forever my father will be the plane.




PISCES AQUARIUM

The pits of your eyes

are consuming you.

and with feeble

meek-minded hands,

i have tossed coins

with wishes attached

and past-curfew pebbles

onto your double-paned stare

for hours on end

to no avail

and here i'm supposed to say

what you had done

to begin with

and how I tried to stop you

or keep you

or both

or even neither

and whether or not it worked

but I am numb with

addiction

to the cacophony

of your stare.

and here I'll remain

captivated by the stones in your gaze,

until

in your greatest moment of despair,

you well up to me

finally

and when I am

unable to cup my brittle shoulders

enough,

we will pause

and with the lunge and pleat of the waters

edge at our backs,

we will totally overlook

our mineral splinters

moving into dissolution.

STOPLIGHT

my mother never runs red lights.
it was that moment,
sometime between the swish and whisper of closing automatic doors,
and the injection of keys into a side door lock
that didn’t seem like it ever would let us into our home,
when officer Davies realized
that he had made a mistake pulling us over.

He didn’t need to ask
when my mother wailed and mewed into his arms
if she knew how fast she was going
as the water halo around the stoplight had
failed
to change from red to green.
he didn’t need to know
that the swaddle of clothes in my grandmothers
unrelenting clutch
were salt-stained and soaking
but warm—
-still warm-

nor did he need to apologize
or speak at all for that matter
as he held us
each in turn
with his
soft falling eyes,
from outside our drivers-side window

and he did not need to explain
as he walked away
that he too
would return to his home that night
and imagine
the red
cavernous moments that occur
in those we love
when everything in the world is calling
and holding you still at a stop
but nothing can keep you
from the beckoning glow
of a horizon
so far ahead
which is
-until that last moment-

just out of reach.




WHERE LIGHT PERMEATES DARKNESS, AND NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND

Sit in with me for this one.
Tonight, I will discover the joys of eating what worms eat.
where sustenance is joy
is surviving
is joy
and where my dead friend
who was burned into ashes
had left some set of creepers
Wanting,
nourishment elusive.
Tonight I will stay up past the last mew of your meager ghost
and wait until silence built on toothpicks and playing cards blinks and twitches into my ears,
Convince myself that there is a little grey machine somewhere
humming into liquefaction…
cranking out quiet
By you For you Of you

and I Die.
Life relived by every night in which I am allowed to think outside of your memory.
Except for tonight.
You are sitting in with me for this one.
narrating my death
in your stifling white lab coat,
Binoculars and beer bottles on your hip.
next to my bed,
me in it like a bottle of red wine,
lying on its side
My cork hair cracked apart, undoing my intentions
in vermilion rivers
drying into topographic cracked clots that are
mapping out the bedsheets.
You’re close enough to hand a flashlight to my innards,
Hands absorbing the simultaneous gush and drip,
my breasts move apart
when the light funnels down through my trachea
Into the barrel of my chest.
The hardened cavity of my heart
Cracks like an egg and
undoes its own outline with light

And you do not flinch
When I scream out in the absence of physical pain
I COULDN’T REMEMBER WHERE YOU WANTED TO BE BURIED
but
I NEVER TOLD YOUR GIRLFRIEND HOW YOU DIDN’T REALLY LOVE HER
and
I LOVED YOU I LOVED YOU I LOVE YOU
But never got the chance to say it.

And in a place where light permeates darkness, and not the other way around,
You are still here
Sitting in with me for this one.




AMPLITUDE MODULATION

it all starts with Orion
unstitching your temple
on a peatree dish.
and I am there

having googled your location
just moments before.

we try like AM waves to
bend over mountains like teacups
of static
and soon are
alienating ourselves to the sound of the desert,
you and I,
where moonshadows
make atmospheres accumulate
like a computer screen that
glows at you from across the pacific--

like it is right now--

or so you think
in the clean, legible light of the morning
when you find your post-breakfast tea leaves
like sticks of the I Ching
and you can't help but
notice Orion
on the teacup rim
of the horizon.




WISCONSIN POEM THAT IS NOT REALLY ABOUT WISCONSIN AND HAS ONE SCENE AND ONE POINT

I have found
slightly slanted in the direction of the turnips,
a deathbed.
a puddle
a pre-1932 clay core portion of a record.
the shellac has flaked off into the root vegetables
which were planted to absorb emissions
along a road which sublimated the travel urge that
popped up in the fifties.
I have found
parsnips planted by green thumbs
and a ripe mind
in an age of Premarin,
cool-whip, cremation, and plastic,
where steel replaced silver
in the kitchen of my great aunt
and elsewhere.
she lives to explain
the greenery and be satisfied.
she knows how to stop the itch of a mosquito bite
using only a banana peel
and alcohol
and never wishes to know the viscosity of oil
or what is acceptable behavior
for a married woman in the capital of India.
she asked for my help
so I am outside where
it is easier for me to be patient

with this horseradish and its spiny leaves
in rural Wisconsin,
and the earth that receives my eyes the same way
now
as it would have sixty years ago.

the ink that wallpapers my notebook
really looks the same as it always has
and whether or not anything will ever really change
looks to me right now
like a crumpled map
whose endless folds have become indistinguishable against
the printed lines
that are supposed to represent the land.
and I am looking down
wondering where this was printed
and who stood here before me with topography in mind
and whether or not it is still in the breezing air.
that maybe soon, this peaceful, buried horseradish will garnish shrimp
cocktail in a casino in Nevada
and it will be just as good there
as it is right now
and that the shellac flakes from the insects
to the record
to the ground
are also just as purposeful now that they are buried.
according to this equal opportunity poem,
I am not buried yet!
and I will do better to wear gloves while plucking things from the soil.

the unfirst blog. ever.

let me begin by saying that,
"i will not feel bad for writing on this banana before eating it"

i just ate the fruit of that sentence.
oh, dear.

that is all.