The Hermit

I was quiet
As I went
Down the road
By the ocean

I was quiet
Or I wasn’t
You didn’t know me
You didn’t care

I was a unicorn
On a lonely road
And the sky
Was green, pink
And purple

Lonely yellow stars
Hung by the balustrades
And the moon was gel-like
Petty, and forgotten

Did we kiss, or fuck
I don’t know
I don’t know
I don’t know anymore

I know the blue
Of the evening
Was lush-dark
And that the moon lit its face
On my road

What I’ve come to look for
I don’t see
What I’ve come to find
I don’t see anymore

Still you walk
Ten steps ahead of me
In the foreground
I can almost see
Your cloak

Will you turn around
Will you turn around
No you do not care
How I wander

All the things
I wanted
The other time
When the sky was mist

I don’t want
I don’t want
I don’t want anymore

Elsa, IT’S OKAY. CRYING On The Bathroom Floor Is

Elsa, IT’S OKAY. CRYING on the bath-
room floor is a RIGHT of passage. You will
PRESS YOUR CHEEK against the bathroom tile and
find comfort in that irony. You will REPLAY THE
THINGS he said to you in those first 2 weeks
of dating. You will REMEMBER YOUR PLANS
to go to ———— together. IT WILL
FEEL like a condom on your heart. You
will DO THIS at least 17 times be-
fore you turn 35. EVERY TIME hurt-
ing will be different. You will EAT ONLY
WAFFLES and hope you lose twelve pounds. This is
a ritual YOU WILL CALL HEARTBREAK.
IT WILL DESTROY YOU LIKE NOTHING ELSE COULD.

Elsa When You Are Single This World Is

Elsa when you are single this world
is so amazing. It’s like an enor-
mous penis. It PAYS ATTENTION. Your
nipples harden just thinking about it.
Everyone wants your vagina. Your nail
polish changes color according to
your emotions. Elsa when you are
single it never rains. You can get away
with the things girls do in public bathrooms.
Do you miss me, Elsa? My best ideas
with you come when I’m brushing my teeth. I
wouldn’t worry about it. Instead spend
your time building syllabi, buying
wedding clothes. Wiping bug guts from walls.

I Wanted To Write It For You

Someone has written it lightly in dark paint.
Did you come here to be with yourself?
Did you finish that day you couldn’t begin?
That’s not what was written but what I came to ask.
I wanted to live with you.
I wanted to know where you leave yourself
and who you live inside.
Someone has written it lightly in dark paint.
I wanted to call you, I wanted to hear
just you. Talking. To me.
I wanted to see your mouth move.
I wanted to write you.
A novel, no letter.
Do you understand?
I wanted to write
without a beginning or end.
I wanted to write just the love part for you.
Someone has written it lightly in dark paint.
Above a window. Near a fire escape.
Because we have no escape
I wanted to write it.
Someone has written it lightly in dark paint
like I wanted to write it for you.
Just the love part.
That’s the only thing I wanted to write.
That’s what it says. Above a window.
Framed by a fire escape.
That’s what someone has written.
Just the love part.
There’s no plot. Nothing happens.
Nothing will happen in this poem.
Nothing much happens in life.
Nothing worth knowing about really.
Just the love part.
No beginning or end.
I wanted to write it for you.

Manhattan between the wars was not made dull by death or dread: it sang. The pink-lipped living strode past the fresh monuments mounted over the new mica-glitter sidewalks, exclaiming over the stars at their feet and around the park, trolley conductors competed in bellringing as they took and mistook actual stars from far off California. Although liners could be heard moaning clear across town, exiting and entering with abandon, ironshod hooves no longer rang, only the occasional garrulous fruit vendor sang from his horse, making its last rounds, or a carriage-driver cursed at his plumed nag dodging motorcars, the last harnessed for the park pleasures of rubes or Frenchies–so much noise was made on the street that the pink-lipped living shrieked their gossip as they walked in twos and threes over the glittering sidewalks.

An odd couple shrieked down the street in tandem, not quite together, not quite incognito, one of them a deb. New York debs were covered by the press just like Grable, cited in columns and flashbulbed beyond blindness. With assets considerably less physical than fiscal, Dot had been debuted but not suitored. She directed the two of them south along the mica, south to where one could get a seat, more specifically, a seat on the stock market. A woman with a seat would be new. Toothpaste was new, most all of what stacked up beside a pharmacist’s till was new. Father, owner of all the sugar in the world, would know what a stake in clean teeth was worth and that she could handle such a transaction, and handle it best with a seat.

Today a company selling women’s items, Dot said, napkins they called them as if you would have them at table, was about to make a public offering of stock, and Father thought she might handle the delicacies. She had handled them, and then Father. Bid it up, she told him at lunch. Women aren’t having children anymore. A coathanger company could produce piles of profit too. (more…)

Réka’s Dream

She dreamt that I was living
in the basement of a cathedral.
To visit me
she had to climb through a window
and then through an air duct
with Rabelais’ catacomb bones.
The church was actually
a monastery in the Tatra mountains
where the monks made
ale and goat cheese.
No, that’s not right.
I was being held
against my will
in the basement
of a megachurch in France
and I was getting
the Hansel & Gretel treatment.
One day during her crawl
she overheard
the women in the laundry room.
They speaking in English badly.
They cackled in French.
They were anti-Semitic in Hungarian.
They got tricky and discussed my fate
within the cult in Slovak.
She saw one hooded auntie open
the washing machine door
but what the woman dragged out
was not laundry.
Angelology is the study of angels
she said, lowering herself
into my cell.
But those women are not angels.

Pre-Genesis

These are my words. Press them against your gums.

In the beginning God Sr. made God Jr.
because everyone needs to come
from somewhere.

That means God Sr. just appeared
& that wouldn’t make any sense.

Know this book doesn’t make any sense,
but neither did the first one.

Still, follow me.

Tucking God Jr. into bed, God Sr. tells him
I hope you dream about stupid zombies
instead of martyrs being eaten by lions.
God Jr. is scared of lions because thoughts
of the future are worse than thoughts of the past
when the past is just beginning, like fourteen
lines ago beginning. (more…)

from The American Folkways Series

Spring placed its finger on my spine. I am not some kind of zombie with a surfboard and ham. I am not some kind of pigeon cooing itself to death. The engine of my flatbed truck cuggles on the hill. The neighborhood wyvern sits alilt on the berm of its own brain. I am ready to have some babies. I am ready to be a bellicose producer and have some babies and toss them into the air for years until the Lord strikes them with the gift of speech and their tales turn the mountain’s insides out into the meat I eat for breakfast. Until then I will watch my squash grow and pine for the cleft of some long lost beauty’s historical chin. The daily path is riddled with deceits, dresses, yellow hems. We were merry once. We hung curtains. The Lord brought us together in a shallow pool, the water beaded on her fur. I loved and despised both her vicious and enduring parts. She could not get on with my mother and left for the insolvent side of Jacksonville, Florida. The blue mouth killed my mother. Her head-wrap. Her incessant dusting. The hymnal contained eternal springs and she sang over it, her thick ankles and periwinkle eyes. The spard-misted clouds of March reached inside us. Walking to the church was terrifying. Walking into the church felt like walking into your own mouth. Inside the church Jesus was hairy with milk, laments, and there was a copperhead swimming in the baptismal. The blue mouth killed her. Do not put your mouth on the spigot, dear Lord, do not insert into your mouth a hickory twig, Sweet Peter James. I suspect my children will not exist or else become legendary in their silences, mute puttocks scrimmed from the sourmash. And yet the mountain rain, all kinds of spectacular dying, Biblical black leather, going to town, hair that won’t stop growing, a mosquito stealthing blood, the asylum inmates buried vertically. I shall play my toothpick. I shall eat yonder cabin. I shall ride yonder donkey. I shall ho yander cake. I shall be wrought from my own particular orality. I shall wear the yellow dress in private. I shall smoke my mother. I am not some kind of zombie with a surfboard and ham. I piss upon your digital age and your perfumes rent from dog eggs. I am wrenched into this mountain. It is airish out. Aroint my crotch with your killing gun. Scoop out my scrotum like a pumpkin’s entrails. Remove my potato eye and shove into its gulch the caché-bearing fury of your Quaker cock. Break my spine, silver rain, a bait of ruined teeth and quick-feckled lies. She remains in Jacksonville, still, and in my dreams tiny dobros hang from her firm and too large ears. My warped singing shovel hangs in the barn. I have never heard a more vatic rooster. Some bright morning. A song more dead. That dazzle. Oh, Twila.

Unfolded

All the world’s details blur when I turn
the fan on to sleep. The little cattle
fall over on the table. The sheep wobble.
Furniture skids across the floor
like crumpled receipts. The house,
an origami box, is undone.
Confetti falls out. Flimsy, after all,
like mother said, it wasn’t expected to last.
I have no husband, no child,
no dog to feed: the faces
I put so much faith in are paper circles.
Templates of Christ, they
resemble him in the most obvious ways:
mute and tiny and light. But He is
invisible. Unfolded. Taking
His beatings with gratitude and grace.