We're starving, send books

And paper bound only the proper way.
The glue's the food in the right conditions.

Gods know our dinner is multivalent: feast, fuel, and entertainment.
Not in that order.

As adults we have certainly lost the ability to start fires and dance
around them naked and flinching and cooking.
Parachute matches.
For the children?
It's the only way.

We've given you all the lines you could want and you've not written a
goddamn thing.

Space is at a premium these days. Don't you know what these pages cost us?
College-ruled extra.

Paper condoms don't survive to ashes.
Always we all know--
But I was hungry and so were you, and fucking just isn't part of a
catabolic diet.

drafted left

These are works in progress.
Read them down to nubs, and then I'll start again.

untitled

whose shadow
impetuous and moody
as blood orange
many wretches
wickless virgins
in the sunset
sun an inclose
i only return
in pain\in rearview
an emergency
or a glare
pure porcelain blue
aerial and
calcium\cartilage
crawl home
divorced from
stain of wigs
malleable orange promise
who closes
if meant to want
will rise
not nullifidian
earth mover\manticore

oh, she is so as this has sewn a cross-stich-heart for her to sow.

i want to live in africa
on flat or curving land
with a ground that is
brown or green or very green
and a woman with a white smile
and dark brown skin and
a giggle that sticks
inside her throat as she
walks and watches and
bends and talks and
dances.

she must dance with me
with her smile and her sound
and her hands and her feet
and her hips that swivel
in the heat of the african
evening, beautiful african
evening of distant african
farmland

we will dance in our africa-
things creating themselves-in
dreams

RETURN OF THE JEDI

Bird-shaped holes in the factory, but no birds. The jogger,
his legs unraveling into cobwebs, enters. I put a key
into the air, turn it – a golden retriever greets

the grandparents, all of them amazed to recognized
& still alive. My hands ring to be shook, foiled with
mediums, confused all over, but there are no wraiths

in this playground today. The resort town is gone, still
the ghost & his child stay, who coaxed me to take in
my second air & live again. Out of the sand, their hands

of help still waver. How they projected me, a green building,
raked together out of ideas, forward – the stranger at the brink
of a boat, holding the rope, turning back

out of habit. When I throw the pear-rind, ghost,
your boy catches it – over & over he catches.
The masks move through the pines, floating beside

all the bodies we’ve met & recognized, moving us
like arrows made of enough atoms to look human.
Arrows hugging arrows in the satchel

of genetics, where the retriever, his back hair twitching
to be remembered, will not die. Already we are
filling in the bird-shaped place with a basket

of electrons we call barn-swallow. Black-winged, badged
with burnt-orange & golden, the jogger
steps eagerly into his next first breath. Come now, cool fount:

we will never die. We instead will fall from that slide,
where the sand brings a specter & his boy to coax us
in, with the snaps of their coattails, again.

Wolftown VA

i am the grapefruit in your lungs,
the nipple that fell from your breast on thanskgiving,
the discarded cigarette butts in your attic
and the dusted fingerprints covering your walls.
i am small hairs on your pillowcases,
waking you with a knife at your throat before the sun evenrises.

i am nameless, sitting next to you on the living room sofa,
stretching out my arms and legs,
making myself at home,
to watch the workings of gravity.

this, that, our bodies as they enter spring.

i slept thryough with a mallet bellow. echode, it,
th'primeary re-sun-sun-sun sun-sun-sun son.

my son. in my hands, while the daylight dies,
the turn of your hip begins to bubble and you

gasp-p-p p-p-p "ah" punctuated and preseeding
the schadhoed sounds that fold and fold and fold...

like us, now, in this now that--now--we are
creeading between our pupilps in this noigwht

not two--far, a weight--at the horizon, leyeing
beneath a palm, leafing in the breeze like a book

in a heavy wind that shatters the shutters, you
are all eyes and still below the covers.

four hours, eyes weighted in some st-st-st
stutter that st-st-stuttered for all my memboreyd

on incandescence--

Bundle of nerves.
I'm a bundle of nerves.
Bundles and Bundles and Bundles of nerves,
coming inside you.

Guest post: "into the hills" by ZM

are you up there?

right here
through this side door through the garden past the trees in the moonshine I saw

it wouldn't be
yet yr eyes would be scarlet save modern physics

neat tricks knit
I'd like the change for that please

coffee twitch don't spill it
split yr picks to maximize returns
and i'll see you in a minute

within fin's tea, i wake to the wormhole

when--but young--i was but a nothing of what i was. (meaning had been).
when i was still in-twomed, scratching at the silence beyond my spaceship,
my i began to burn, and my single finger scratched and scratched;
inside was where there was found the beginnings of something which i have yet----at this very moment at this very time, at this now i present----to speak very clearly within conception.

The Sea Is Rising

It's summer
humidity seeps into skin,
sweat slowly rolling
down forehead.
Hair glistens in small
droplets of salt.
Neighbors have
the slip-n-slide up
and call at the door.
Swimming trunks snap
elastic and I'm there.
The small grade does
not look fast. Kids
line up and run, jump,
slide down hill.
High pitched laughter
resonates off siding.
The sun sinks below the tree line,
the chain link.
I take my turn, run
slipping on wet grass
flop belly down hard.
Water spurts up the sides
of smooth skin, arching outwards,
unnoticed on fresh cut grass.
Grass that sticks to legs sucking young skin.
The end is quick
grass bent in maze of ants
and dandelions. My hand slides
swift over upturned metal stake.
Upturned at lazy clouds, at weight of afternoon runs.
It slices the left hand,
short of wrist but dangerous.
The kids gather at sight of blood.
Run for Mrs. Beckstrom.
Like a nurse in apron
with dish towel so white it's shameless,
she presses hand around hand.
The blood rages red and spreads
the cloth so thin and my mother
the car and emergency room women
that coo gently to halt my seven year old eyes.
I take seven stitches and the hand is hemmed
like new jeans or the darkness that covers
the parking lot lit with moths. As we drive home
my hand throbs like cicada hymns in the quiet
yard. The cut grass matted to fingers
and fringes of stiff trunks.

i would prefer, madame, if perhaps you would remove yourself from the sunshine and sink into the shade for the purpose of pollination.

i am not a butterfly. i only wear a t-shirt printed with the body of a monarch spread nice and wide as if he were floating between the clap of his petaled wings, a green beret made of aluminum foil that i've painted and crafted to the relative yet exact specifications of the deadliest butterfly in existence, a black skirt that i've lengthened toward my toes and tightened at certain intervals for the purpose of accentuating the length of my legs in respect to my torso.

there

there is nothing to be done
about the fire. it is a self-
contained emergency. out of all
the locked carriages of the
subway car, she moves. via the
intercom, the conductor says
either the overhead sprinkler
system will work or it won’t,
says the ballast shifted in the
course of the journey, when all
the passengers at 54th got off. i
watch her leaving. she didn’t
believe in the concept of locks,
or fire, or self. my own arm is
overheating.