Bright with bumblebees, the meadow frolicks in the sentimental sun. A child with a magnifying glass haunts the ants and butterflies. When I see a giant Monarch come up behind him with a giant one, I don’t tell the kid until he’s starting to singe a little. I side with the hexagonal bees in all things, from dancing to dissing. If the bees don’t like you, neither do I. I was born a poppy in a field of pastel dreams.
Mermaids
Jealous molecules cling on to their exes. The amorphous film of water over my skin makes me shine. Fanged mermaids patrol the drooling shoreline. I, too, am dangerous, and I do not budge. Their eyes glow. My hair is autonomous, and flows toward one’s neck, strangling her. Men are a myth here. In my dreams last night I stood at the edge of a haunted wilderness I’ve only ever seen in my slumber. The abandoned house slick with demonic intent was across the marshy field. For the first time, I did not cross the field into the ramshackle shack. This place follows me. And when you feel the essence of evil breathing behind you, watching and enjoying your fear, you fear nothing after that. Pink and poisonous, I taunt the remaining mermaids into surrender.
The Radical Politics of Spanx
I tattoo my man’s name on the stiff breeze, and let it tousle the chimes I call my hair. The radical politics of spanx. The gross speeches of spectacular leeches. My man once brought me chocolate along the sylph like river, and my eyes glowed like a cloudless blue sky when he fed them to me gently, enticing me to remove my shackles of shame. His name is on the wind and travels parallel to the sea, daring storms to look at me. Sapphire encrusted coasts look jealously at the warm lines of my publicized body.
Calamity Rides a Yellow Bicycle
Calamity rides a yellow bicycle down a facsimile of a country road. Along the dusty edges, market stands offering the juiciest news and freshest betrayals. My house is at the end of the road. The windows glow blue like dead computers, and inside my ghosts are serving me brunch in their red checkered aprons. I didn’t invite Calamity. Only the stupid do. But she will come anyways, flinging the carnations in her bicycle basket into my outstretched hands, demanding to know where the bathroom is.
The Blue
Slatternly clouds disrobe the blue sky, peeling away for storms in another dimension of cool correlations. My causation is staring at me, unblinking. The sky is exactly what I mean when I say I was blue, flying my kite down Main Street and making promises to tree tops. I hear a wind summoning me to the brink of winter, the culmination of the cold leaking in the edges of unsealed autumn.
Memory
Mem ory has a whole hole in it, made as it is like fishnets from the corner store. My cornucopia of vanilla flavored dreams are cataloged by neurons who are all drinking Everclear on the job. My menstruation is meant as an affront to the cold. Memory is embroidering “welcome home” on doileys they pass out to the homeless on President’s Day. If my name doesn’t make sense to you, it’s because your inspiration is flowing backwards. Memory is flimsy and frail. I once swallowed scissors, and that was the end of my life’s record. Now, the dark halls of my brain are mostly silent, except for the wind whistling through my eyes.
My Lover’s Silver Hair
Ambition disguised as snow coats the city suits in a light dusting. Christmas in the city…or the collection of bridges and turnpikes we call home with the vague flavor of discomfort in our mouths. Christmas laced with martyrs’ tears, glowing as icicles outside shop windows. The cold here wears a roledex and diamonds. As the time gently but surely crumbles away like Christmas cookies, I yearn to be even half as permanent as the flakes on my lover’s silver hair as he builds another world for me.
Honey and Hell
Hexagonal childhood spreads its honey over my spreadsheets. The facts were all I was asked for, and they smell like ocean and regret. Shadows compute in the closet, the blue screens scathing the disillusioned shadows whenever their electric blue light touches them. The numbers are fossilizing in amber honey. I have weighed myself on the balance and found myself wanting. So many digits away from heaven, and every new year is a countdown to hell.
Math
Sour glowing integers run away from me like sunlight. Sophisticated testimony of a holographic truth echoes through the passages of Culture, who is wearing cheap leggings and an oversized sweatshirt. The math here is simple. Take a woman and divide her by herself and watch angst spill out as the remainder.
Woman
A woman’s body is a playground. They are jungle gyms made of softness and gentleness. The yellow stripes tattooed on bees are slivers of anxient sunbeams. Some truths cannot hold us. The fire hisses out in the hearth of our collective memory, and we are each assigned an idea to degrade. Woman is a fallen tree. A woman’s mind is a 4 course meal. A woman is herself when summer ends and leaves her holding a cute tote with “Try me” emblazoned on it in red letters.
