luminous red novae

Dearth and burning famine milled these
teeth I grind, the dough I work. As sure as
certainty brings ruin

(and γνῶθι σεαυτόν, I know myself as well as you). 

Hand-carved and scolded, limitless in orbit
 but frozen here in place, an edged weapon
ill-tempered, waiting for my life to begin. 
 
Come taste what lies beneath my skin,
slick sharp. Watch unwarranted embers
scorch my tongue--pale coral devoré,

the acidic yearning to run, the way my
wingspan burns in reds and golds, how
mica shreds me, grass-edge wounds me,
heartbreak in foaming

cherry syrup, kakigori gore spilling from the
side of my scowling mouth into silver rings.
Ice slips into my throat, damp and paper
petals falling from my hands, dull against
the wind. 

I snarl and show my teeth, I tear at the seams 

where my face is settling into lines I cannot
understand. I am sinking, caught in soot,
soft as feathers that stain me ever deeper

dusk, dust. 

Always the shade against dark

skies you cannot touch, still trying to solve
this groundless, grievous fault, I wonder, 

is it such strain for you? the reach? to reach

the light of new stars, the reflection of the
slivered moon as hot and copper as blood,
as salt as ocean and tears. As terrible as
time, as silent. As luminous as the oil-slick
that gilds each dying bird, as sultry-sweet as
the memory of your hand. 
--

barycenter

I dream of your thirst for flushed cheeks
and ragged breathing. I whisper these summons
into my own tangled hair, silver locks strung with keys,
as if in the words I struggle to keep
from their quicksilver tumble from my lips,
in the way I keep my mouth from seeking

a descent, where damned river sinks into this jaded sand,
a song I sing to the tune of October and November and on and on,
as if black apples eaten under cypress trees
and those long-memoried lists of love were no dream;
as if at my demand he will always reach for me, once more

oh beloved, at least once more.

I play at accompaniment, draw him close
to drive him--augment it with roses and char,
with thyme and burning sugar--each song a pale-moon reflection
of how I require one hand at my throat in challenge,
how inexorable in his love,
how he raises my face to his own, so coolly

calculating my every shuddering gasp, how I live
and die for every maddening kiss. These draw us but
the truth is, cold is a game we both can weave so clean
until mouths meet skin, always sweet, a sigh and a smile,
sometimes sharp teeth and ruin,

pretense and authority. He knows this fire, too,
disguises white-hot and trembling in a pale scrim
playing at snow-sheets and shade-trees, my sunrise.
Silk-glass spun, splinters left in my skin and so-sure hand
on me shaking all imperceptible
to any but the pulse I've swallowed, shuddering,

he knows every cataract, cascade, and riptide

running through my veins will be an undoing,
and still it comes singing, still I come singing,
still it comes in fog and rhyme and unmarked depths
to catch us, even aware, bright paper lanterns all alight,
a burning in renunciation of those ashes we already knew. 

No Harm

 

Tanabata, tired hands folding waxed paper into

wishes to knot around hollow limbs, foil-bright

cranes under howling hoods.

I am still plating fiddleheads in July, through

heat advisory heavy weather sunscreen salt and

not one breath without the thought of you.

Sweat more than tears rolling down my arms as

I lift them to the sky, longing to reach that cool

river of stars that separates us still. I am caught

in canes of red berries,

I cannot be submerged. But I can weave, warp

and weft, words and winding, each thread a

fragile song whose whispered notes barely bend

a single leaf on the slender bamboo of your time.

I love in shards of glass reflecting, in the blood

that falls, in the way it cuts, unthinking:

lacking in filter, with total disregard for consequence

or the curses that ring in my wake. Śīla,

paper knives and silk, stars and every anxious

breath pulling me deeper, sky and sea. Śīla. 

A stone in my shoe and a weight on my heart.

Śīla. A ragged inhale. Śīla, śīla, śīla.

Anemone

Even in love, permafrost. Cellared autumn against incipient winter, scarlet glass,
a blaze of coral against velvet night. Exhale your prayers, visible breath,
take off your gloves. Settle here in the earth next to me and taste the chill.
How deep my roots here and still reaching for your hands, my refuge in rosemary.

I want them sunk to the wrist at the harvest moon
and seeking, I want them tangled in my hair to unearth me, turning my face
to the heat that lights my skin. Season-agnostic I tend the shape of you, held close,
awaiting convergence. There is always space for you in my garden bed. 

Some flowers need the cold to bloom; you are the only warmth I need.
I have no heart for any other--let me be your shelter when you seek the sea,
where the currents catch their breath at your every whispered word. Lay me
more than six feet down, what's left of me lit against the ocean floor,

burning wires wound tight in my marionette limbs, tethered where weeping
Tethys rages still. Sing me from the deep, call me from the catacombs
where dawn never breaks, see me tattooed in night skies and hung with pearls.
I am only foliage, dark under the veiled moon, bright petals on the verge. 

I dream of you while I sleep through summer, lost in salt water. I will wait for you,
tend my garden thalassic, where the stars are always sharp enough to cut us free.

marrow

Summer is like this, stifling: last winter's yuzu still sticky on my hands
and every hovering firefly flash a whisper, just a brief flicker of heat lightning.
A cygnet, a signal, a falling-star ache, whip-sharp burn of want,

A wave--it isn't the rain you asked for, falling from my hair in sparks and drops,
a smile in shudders and notes and the rose-petal bruises that blossom in my skin, singing
in molasses candy, a bed of brown sugar in the snow falling from the AC vents.

The sun so bright it burns in every direction, obscuring my way home,
the shadows so long I can't see a difference in the distance and the depth,
desire sweeter than antifreeze and just as thick on my tongue.

Cold in my hands,

in this dream, I hold a carven silver pomegranate. Scarlet juice runs down my arms, garnet seeds scatter, I am bound in a ring of peony petals, palest blush matching my cheek. 

I bear white gauze into the summer starlight, I tattoo myself in woad. My fingertips are stained the color of your eyes when they have gone dark with desire, and I can paint on the mossy stones each shuddering breath that burns beneath my skin, reddening the pale. 

I taste toasted coconut and desert air, dry and scented with cactus blossom, I come clothed in spider-silk and pearls to the sun. I am blooming, blushing too. This year is marked in pinks. In magenta shading to deep violet. 

At the pollen-bright center my body lies, an invitation writ in gold for a kiss--oh! Just one kiss, to begin! I write all my longings in a shaky hand, posted to the wandering bee. 

Doradilla

Do you know the resurrection plant? The false rose of Jericho found tightly wrapped
into a ball that looks like string? They sell them at the side of El Camino Real
next to the corn dolls that look like blank bisque pottery, like my tía in stage makeup
and the lime-green ribbons for folklórico at the bright sunset of each month, skirts whirling, 
eternally crowned with the huge white silk dahlias she loved

as big around your palm that dwarfed the saucers at the cafe I used to haunt. My sun
still rose and set on you, and the afterimage of that dizzying light tasted like the slow
burn of your smile, discretion darker than a summer midnight, sweeter than cafecito 
pouring thick into a paper cup on a counter along the busy Miami streets where
we have never walked together. Not yet.

I do not talk about the drums echoing wildly through the brilliant desert night,
some days I cannot speak at all--but how long can one false rose stay curled
so tightly in on itself that it could be mistaken for something long dead? 
Even in a city of sand and glass, the rain can roll in, thirst can be quenched,
time retrieved from drought's grasping hand.

I rise again and again from my own ashes at your whispered invocation,
the walls I built around my heart spun from moonlight and flax that shiver at a touch,
the green radiating outward, relieving the strain, relaxing each limb.

And Abuelita said: I chose this name because I wanted you to heal,
like tatarabuela, I wanted you to touch the wretched stones that 
rise in each of us and set them to rest the way your eyes dissolved my
aching bones in joy when you laughed at your own birth.

I've always preferred marigolds and the Moon, so I never bought one,
never brought any of them home to rest while
I gently pour water into a hard-baked terracotta dish so I could watch
it unfurl and bless us with so many beginnings.

kshanti

I want to taste the end of days on your skin, I want
to watch your eyes when my breath catches. Tell me
what you see, through the blush? Light descending,
time running out, the thread unwinding? This isn't
safe, it never can be. Stone sparks against water,

a mystery whose price runs high. Always on the edge 
of a conflagration. Still, I want to breathe it in, I 
want to drive those fires into my skin where I fall.
What is the feeling in my kintsugi heart that is not
quite emptiness, the desire to press my face 

against your back as you drift off, the tangible
knowledge of the aching distance we put between
our physical selves? It's no accident we're like this.
Śūnyatā whispers to me just out of reach, pale and

shaking in my hands, my renunciation of desires
forever shredded by this want, this strange and
telescopic love. As if no moment has passed, and
yet as if the end of the world has come and gone.

The resin I used to repair the cracks raises welts
on others' skin. The metal you burnished into my
wounds is all that remains. Mushin--the breaks
are our history. I will not forget, will not taste
the antidote in this life. I'd have you no other way.

消えないで

my heart is a jackal in the desert night, makes a sound
somewhere between a sob and a peal of laughter,
is fencing the stars, slender silver stabbing against
a backdrop strewn wild and white. I dream the clouds are
swelling over the cliffside, the salt air in my mouth,
I know this. this dream where your face is imprinted
with lines from my pillow. where I place my finger

and trace in blood returning. bread rising in the kitchen,
my pulse is a muffled drum, the same as the breath
dragged from the deepest part of my lungs;

clouds dark against the sunrise,
deep blue streaked with gold and orange and violet
dim in the memory of your hair, the new light reflecting.
and I smell tangerines, I smell jasmine, I smell clove
rising from my own skin. water wants to run, water wants
to fill up your slant-smiling mouth and overflow in words
I salt away.

boke-aji

planted, I rot
germinated, then wasted away
here at the end are "wet," "torn," "soiled,"
no words to conjure true magic

I have no arm to raise
no sword to brandish
three times
and fade away

(once) I cannot
(twice) I cannot
(thrice like a charm) I cannot

lay me in the lakebed and bury me in mud and amber beads
close my eyes with pearls, peel back my fingernails
dress me with wheat-holed coins and discarded fish scales
press me into the clay and let me breathe green lake-water

I wish I was anything but this

remote update

A carpet of stars
caught on blue velvet, each grain
faintly glimmering:
impatient, I'm rushing past,
waiting for life to begin.
--

I miss the darkness;
the skies outside the city,
the scent of the wind.
--

Ananke

These are the flaws that make it mine:
a slanted stitch, a hole, a miscount, a wavering hem
that flows from side to side instead of marching steadily on.

The hands that make these things are as contrary, each
slow shift, each clicking needle a testament to shallow
waters. Each wrist flick, each knuckle crack, a metronome.

Contradiction in every cell. Wide palms and narrow fingers,
spread aslant to pull a thread, to snip or coax just a little farther on.
I cannot weave any longer, but I can cull. Press a finger into the

hollow of this wristbone, press your lips against the pulse that beats
there, grey wings thrashing against a black iron cage, grey wool winding
around ebony needles, grey pinstripes on silk like dark waters.

Slipped stitches, dropped skeins, slow and steady will make no
imperfect thing. Speed alone will kill, rushing headlong into the end.

Knot it tight and move on.

ohana

no nine-tailed fox, not now. only washi dissolving in ink and tears and rain. your lips are gone and the light that rang in your eyes like the nine thousand names of god has dashed against the rocks and shattered into nine times nine thousand indifferent fireflies.

that name was a silver bullet on a full-moon night, piercing cold, meant to wound until I folded out of your way like the paper crane, I whispered, I warned you, that simple fold that may be my true form. I cannot bar you from harm when I have no more stars to light my way. I used to know where I was going from here.

you are not who you were. I cannot be who I am. I will remember who I was, someday, and I will braid my hair into a coat. a chain. a noose, a sail. I will no longer look into the night sky, hoping for a way home. I have learned the futility of loss, the frailty to mourn, but I never regret. just give me time to stitch this up and regain my balance, to stop bleeding out on someone else's floor.

Sepsis

Where is the worry? Is it in the second-day stubble of my shaved legs? Or is it in the swell of my breath, pooled in my lungs like the tide and pushed out with a sob? The things I never noticed until your absence from my body? I do not know. Today is grey, the kind of grey I love. It is about to rain.

I have slept too long, wrapped in blankets and piled with cats, purring somnolent on my chest and hip. They reach out to each other in their sleep the way I imagine reaching out to you.

I will not dress today. I will write or I will smoke on the porch in a nightgown. I will drink cafe au lait with almond extract, and I will eat dreams.

The cats do not miss me. They have curled down in the warm puddle of blanket I have left and they are sleeping again.

I cannot focus on any one thing, your hair swept to the side and ending in a wave, my beloved ocean in shades of wheat and gold. Your eyes, blue and green, cobalt universes. Your lips and wry smile, the defense against any endearments I might muster in an array of hope, pleading.

I tell you I love you and I cannot see if it sinks in to the hilt. If it touches you at all. At all.

I light candles against the day. I wake at night and breathe the damp darkness I have been dreaming. I hear music, I want to sing, but the words are no longer there. Salt on my tongue washed away with too-sweet coffee and heavy smoke. I cannot see myself without you, and I try.

I live. I breathe. I exist. But your context is missing, your definition and style. I can touch and be touched and I will enjoy it, I will arch against another, and another, and however many others, and whisper in other languages the words they need to hear. The words I need to say. What meaning does it have, when I am not beside you?

Here is a game I have been playing: Who is the secret center of this dance? I reach out and manipulate because it pleases me to do so, in the moment. Because it fills my emptiness. Because I cannot touch you, because I cannot see my love sink into you, to the hilt. I wish I could be ashamed of my cruelty. I have nothing left, not even a conscience. You have all the best parts of me, still.

All that is left to me is sin.

gilt-edged

the key grinds in the lock, the tumblers turn

and I am mute with need, my shaking hands filled with 

cast-off shards of iron and agate, glass sticking into skin,

blood welling from the edges and you sink deep. somewhere,

I left my resistance out to dry.

I will pull my ribcage apart and let you eat, replace my red-running

muscle with silver wires, that wretched heart with a canary

stained with iodine, leave me packed stiff with gauze 

and settling in for the winter, racked with longing

and marveling at the chill.

it's supposed to be spring and still I run through gasping cold,

ash-brown trunks blushing green, maple buds burning 

against the sky like the embers of every lonely cigarette

that has flared between my lips at night. at dawn. at civil twilight.

you have coiled between my thighs to hold the ashtray and 

even wordless, my hollows and edges limned electric,

there is no difference between the summoning

and the invitation.

Huldra

It is after three. I can hear a drip from somewhere in the house, some faucet reminding me to sleep. I have turned on the music to hide it, but the beat shaking in my bones taps the same rhythm. My skull is a kettle heated to boiling and you are sleeping, responsibly, in your narrow bed so far from mine.

The storm has passed and the rain has slowed. I am waiting on a package. There is nothing at the door no matter how many times I check, not since I discovered the slip to be signed yesterday morning. I want the books inside, but I want the shoes more. Impossible shoes, lacing tight over the arch and nosebleed-heels stretching my calves to screaming. Fuck-me pumps. Fuck-you boots. Somewhere in between, the reality of life in a strange new place.

I have never been good at making friends, only finding lovers. I can only take pictures of my back, painted in Victorian wallpaper patterns. I bend at the waist and stretch imaginary muscles, pull my hair down to cover the emptiness and wear the sorts of dresses that only emphasize my utter lack of humanity. I am not beautiful, no matter what you say, no matter the wisps of thought that escape my mouth on a misty night, no matter the wideness and calm of my eyes. The vulnerable look on my face, they will tell you, is only a trap for the unwary. There can be no true feeling from someone like me.

No. The feelings I have had! They burned me hollow, they were coals scooped from different hearths and set in my skin to char. Piece by piece, how I craved the burn, the ash, the fall. Corded and caught. I have been touched by no one since. Dancing in the forest, dancing in the sea. I dance because of--or is it despite--my lack of an audience, and I will dance for you, if you are unlucky enough to be caught in my gaze. I have so many names, pet names, endearments breathed in my ear at climax, epithets, each a choked whisper bubbling from the throat of a dying man, in all the languages of the world. But I am not a threat, I am nothing, nothing, not even the wind in your face as you run.

Only a woodwife, stained dark and hollow and waiting to fill with someone else's need.

little brass key

I have a steel wire wrapped around my skull, silver flush with the bone in a spiral shape. There is a keyhole just below my occipital ridge, enameled in green, lined with brass and surrounded with copper filigree. I have grown my hair to hide this vulnerable place, the fontanel of my desires still fluttering and gasping for breath. I have hidden more than this from you.

You are a clockwork creature, and I have wound the brass key in your back for years upon years, springs coiling ever tighter inside your bones, and I hesitate to wind you when you creak and groan beside me, but I cannot stop. If your springs snap, perhaps I will finally be able to take the key and give it into your hands, give you the ability to touch the arbitrary nature of this desire. Perhaps I have always expected you to stick the key into your mouth and coat it in acid, and then use it on me.

Let me break the strands of coiled wire resting in your skin, and I will kneel in front of you, pulling my hair aside. I will bow my head and wait for you press the key into my own lock, to turn it while I bless you for the pain. When you twist the wire of my bones I will open like a flower and sing my pain into you, I will weep and plead and curl into you. I will drown you in the dark waters I have concealed for so many years, and we will rust in the cold and copper-tasting well-water together, whispering pain into each other's bones to replace the metal your acid has leached into my base and basic nature.

Dryad

I learned to be cruel when I was young,
and my teachers were always older
wiser in the ways of hurt

and we do not hurt each other
before we have learned to hurt ourselves

the pain in your voice draws blood
up to the surface of my skin, welling from every
deep breath, every last thought

of a world without you.

I light candles, each tiny flame a lesser
hurt in a sea of anguish, a tide of hellish loss
engulfing me, dragging me down.

I am heavy with it, swallowing
my own pain like shards of glass
before it can cut you

and I am spent, exhausted
and alone--not alone--
it ticks and chimes like a countdown, brass gears

shifting in an expanse of wretched silence, scarab-back
shining, fleeing the sonar of its own clicks and clacks.
I will beg and I will bargain for you, and never
ever look back. I'm calling you out,

I'd pull you out of hell with the notes of my last dying breath.
Without the light in your eyes I am afraid
my leaves will fall, my little moon will wane.

a pact

Jotun, jotun, brush my hair, and I will be your Thursi.
Call me night and call me cold and I will warm for you.
Cry out in my arms and I will be your Yagayevna,
witch-daughter and eater of flesh,

praise me and I will sing. Unholy hymns rising in the
air like wisps of fog, surrounding you,
binding your arms, knotted tension and anticipation.
Peel back my skin with tempered wit.

I will take your hand and place it on my throat,
hold a hallowed knife against your spine, press these
words into your mouth by moon-dark and while you
choke on them, I still will sing,

pull you into the tide. I will drink
deep of your lust, your longing, and your adoring
gaze. See me as I am.
Braid my hair into fetters, chain yourself to my broken heart.

Frost-eater, fell and fair, wrap my braids around
your wrists and hold tightly. Call my name
in the night, gasping for breath under my wave,
until we drown together and rise again with the tide.

Brush my hair, long strokes from my crown to my waist
and I will sing for you until you can weep no more.

Inverted Jenny

It is no good now, to relegate me to your desk, its rolling top accordioned down over aching limbs. You have crumpled me into a bundle of letters, long faded and tied with dusty ribbons.

In the old days, it was a brush, a teardrop tuft of some soft fur. You painted intricate characters on my skin and the ink slipped sweetly between us.

At dawn, I watched you scrub the tint from your hands and wished for an end to all mornings.

When you grew weary of darkness, the sharp nib of your fountain pen scratched indigo myth into my back, and red-ballpoint corrections flowed down each side. Once, you left a discourse in green marker, your declaration of independence stamped boldly at my waist. I thought that one true. It was the quickest to smudge, though your verdant prints lasted for days.  

Those nights of calligraphy stained me. Cuneiform shadows rise from my surfaces still, copper-brown or the cerulean of tranquil seas; but each dawn you returned to someone else's senses, ink trimmed carefully from your skin.

I am as patient as parchment, out of place, but I remember. However you inscribe me, emboss me, engrave me--by morning, the end of dreams is written plain.

--
For the Scriptic prompt exchange this week, Michael gave me this prompt: "'Think of writing as writing a letter to someone.' -Kurt Vonnegut. Write about mail, or post offices, or postal workers, or writing and receiving letters."
I prompted lisa with: "Pressing business, tonight at the brocade factory."