.
Crashing the Wedding of my February to September Lover of 1998

I couldn't unlatch the fence's
lock, but I would make myself
a witness still: the front door's
security was replaced
with ceremony and the hinges
made no protest to my pressure:
let me pass into the kitchen,
where I found the someone's
grandmother holding a blue jay
in her lap: mumbling
last rites as she took
wedding cake poppy seeds
she'd softened in her mouth
to the chipped beak.

She let me sit at her feet.

She closed my eyelids
with her fingertips.

She called me by the name God gave me
on my second deathbed,
after six vertebrae cracked
because my spine was not stronger
than asphalt; because there never
was room enough on the seat of that bike
for you and me and the way your body moved
when you saw any grey Honda
and got to thinking about the gal
who left you in a Las Vegas parking lot
when you were old enough to know better.

She placed seven seeds inside my lower lip;
told me to sing until they sprouted,
when bees would come, taking the notes
from my throat now filled with roots
and make an orchestral excuse on my behalf;
make honey that would turn
sweetened cups of tea into the hemlock
or the castor oil,
but either way, I would not be the bride.
.
.

My first elegy...

.
.

Callear's Legs

How do I say
that I would do anything
one sarcomere short of everything
to transplant my lateral motor neurons

to your spinal cord.
That I would crawl through
the fence and cocoon myself
around the transformer, combusting

into a thousand trillion nerve cells if
the sparks could massage
the sclerosis out of your atrophied tissue.
That I would roll myself into sheaths, bulk

myself into muscle, scissor the skin and
unscrew my femoral heads
from their hip sockets to see you not even run,
not even bike

not even take the stairs
to your third-floor workspace, but
walk
from the passenger seat of your wife's Ford

to the building's door without
the walker
and without
the clenched grimace of the determination

needed to drag two limbs that are
uninterested - no, abhorrent of
being called your own. You.
You who taught me of the heart like no man

I have ever met: EKGs and angiograms;
treadmill, dobutamine, and nuclear
stress tests; ejection fractions, x-rays, angioplasties,
stents, Holters, AICDs; valves, arteries, atriums and

ventricles.
Never before had the ugly mass
inside my chest been so much more beautiful
than vintage handmade Valentines, salutations

concluding sincere love letters, dots of the "i"s of
third-grade girls' handwritten
history essays, gold and ruby lockets hanging
from slim throats housing thumbnail photographs

of boys
who think jewelry is an easier way to get
inside a girl than whispering
something cardiac.

Never before had I understood that my circular
nature was more
than psychological; that when I
could not speak,

I could still pump my heart
to pump my legs
to pump the pedals,

and it would be enough.
.
.
.

Tonight your ghost will ask my ghost...

...where is the love?

.
I Was a Young Wife, I Was a Young Mother

There are sixteen of them: inside
the seventh and wrapped around

the eighth, I keep the post-its he
wrote his vows on, even though

at the altar his nineteen year old
nerves took over and his declaration

of love started and ended with shit
girl, you know I won't let you down.

Where Teddy Ruxpin's tape deck
once kept his stories of discovering

Grundo with Grubby, I keep home
video cassettes: reels of the dance

indigenous only to her eight-month
old bones that she kicked and shook

as her first teeth jack-hammered
their way into her head; reels we'd

labeled To Be Watched with Baby's
First Date. In the hollowed handle

bars of his Y-Foil still chained
to the fence in the backyard, I keep

a collage, ransom-note-arranged
headlines of Young Wife Becomes

Young Widow; Twenty-Year-Old
Woman Buries Infant Daughter.

Poorly pixelated black and white
photographs of police and caution

tape and tarped mounds amid
a wasteland of steel and glass

along the 500 block of East
Jefferson Avenue: Small

Town Serenity Rocked By
Raid on Drug Ring: Father

and Daughter's Walk Ended
by Speeding Getaway Car.

In bottles lining shelves lining
the attic walls: things I don't

want to forget: the smell of my
husband's skin after ten hours

sweating with tar and gravel;
the taste of our baby's sleepless

nights and the terror of her first
silent one; the sound of her laugh

with the sound of his mouth
blowing raspberries on the rolls

of her fat little legs; the feel of his
wedding band through the sheets.

In the black ink above my left
breast: two cat claw scratches,

one inscribed 1/19/82-5/28/04,
the other 9/2/03-5/28/04.

In going back to the wild patch
of blackberries across from our

home, taking them seventy-nine
miles away to my home to bake

a pie that I will eat in one sitting,
sitting on the floor so that I am

not so far from the ground
that holds the bodies of the ones

I need.
And now you think

you know me. But you only
know where I keep my love.
.
.

Take Heed of the Man Missing His Incisor

Come close. Close enough that you can't
tell the whites around my neck aren't pearls.

Close enough that I can massage your gums
with my warm milk and bourbon-dipped
thumb and forefinger; that you eagerly open
your mouth for my brown sugar-dipped lips
and let me suck the roots from the sockets.

Now go. I am not the kind to put boys in
boxes and ship them to the bottom of active
volcanoes: I would rather hear how you
whistle your th's, smile a scared and sacred
homage when you tell them, her, that one...

Postcards from BsAs

.

With One-Third All My Love

I have half a mind
to wire him 2k for transportation:
..-. --- .-.
- .... .
-. . -..- -
..-. .-.. .. --. .... -
- ---
-... ... .- ...

Telegraph: Need you stop
Now stop
Wear your black cardigan stop
Bring the Raspberry Bite
lipstick and matches I left
in its pocket the night we stop

Send to his mother's address,
a postcard, the one with six shots
of six pairs of Argentinean breasts:

For my darling,

Boobs.

With one-third
all the love
available beneath
my own double As.

Between the cardstock and the glossy
photo, slip a map of the city
with a purple-inked path from the airport
to the foot of the bronzed Latina Cinderella
just outside the cemetery: a path dotted
with as many sonnets as it took me to realize
what he'd really wanted; to decide
I wanted that too; to find the vocabulary
and the sense to tell him how I'd like
to be his sophomore year steady: fifteen,
learning to fumble my hands
into the front pockets of his Levis
as we wait for the traffic lights
to let us go; how to stretch my spine strong,
curve my neck soft so he could separate
muscle from muscle with his tongue,
harboring his face and his fingers
in the hair I kept long for no other purpose,
as my own eyes look out over Avenida
del Liberator traffic, begging passersby
for a challenge: to hurt my pride:
to tell my limbs not even Buenos Aires
could seduce my reticence;
planish me into a woman who stands
in the middle of everywhere unwinding,
unthreading the seams of a skirt
to make room for her thigh:
for when the nerves hear the bandonéon
and want to cradle her man's ribcage
without waiting for the notes to fade,
the audience to go away;
without waiting for their own feet
to get them to a back alley or the back
of a car or back into the apartment; without
waiting for another way to say she needs.







.

Expect a Series of BsAs pieces....

No title. A fetal draft.
.
.
.
I think we are supposed to do something
romantic here: at the corner of a 1906
Rue de Fleurus and a 1965 East 47th

Street, beneath a coin-operated moon
made full with nine dimes and a nickel,
the street-orchestra playing a tune only

the paint-can drummer hears as his high
school sweetheart's favorite lullaby that
floats through a midnight mist of a blend

from Mendoza, I think, yes: quick! Take
off your clothes! The moon won't mind.
Quick! Open your mouth I will crawl

inside: skinny dip: swim in, swim out
of the gaps between your bicuspids,
wrap myself in the arugula left over from

the omelets we ate in the bed dampened
by the rainstorm the weathermen didn't
forecast on channel 9, 14 or 37, which

seemed reason enough to open the windows
and push the mattress onto the balcony.
Because that is what we are supposed to do.

Yes, isn't that what we are supposed to do?
Will you still love me if I become beautiful?
Find rhythm, my footing with the orchestra?

I wrap myself strategically in the arugula,
slip seductively from the corner of your lips,
glistening a slightly ashamed Eve for the

knowledge I swabbed from inside your
mouth: for the thought that perhaps the Book
of Chemistry, Spells, Science and Kama Sutra:

A Practical and Proven Guide for Self-Helping
to Find Self-Love, Self-Healing, Self-Improving
from the Hair on Your Toes to the Pimple

on the Back of Your Neck in Order to Attract
Your Perfect Mate and Keep Him Without
Holding Him Down Except for the Nights

When He Wants to be Tied, was written
for some ones other than ourselves; some
ones who know only one good variation on

the theme of things to do with two mouths.
.
.

Hey, I wrote a poem....

Very fresh first draft, although I've been toying with this image for a while, since I got stuck on Florence + the Machine, particularly the song Blinding. I could get out a line or two, but that was it. It is tricky being feeling inspired by something so complete, but staying within that space. The lyric that the title is from is actually 'no more calling like a crow for a boy/for a body in a garden.'




Crawling For a Boy Through The Garden

I keep seeing her: in a garden she made a graveyard:
clawing at the dirt, getting
nowhere;
getting her hair tangled,
her skin saturated with the dew of a sweat less
coolant for the midnight Missouri-August limbs
than expurgation of the spastic heartbeat
from the vagus nerve that won't leave the heart
of her heart, or the heart of her head alone.
Either
way, I keep seeing her in the flowerbed
in a satin and lace nightgown, whiter
than what Saint Agnes always dreamt God
took Mary to bed in, and the heat
of her trenching hands plowing through the ground
leaves her skin lined with Bahraini pearls, nacreous
in the same loving spotlight of a half moon
that gives bats unabashed flight and lets teenage girls
sneak out second-story bedroom windows: makes
half-living repenters into conductors
of a kinesis they and their lovers and their doctors
thought was killed in the questionably successful
exorcism of the guilt that landed them
in the bed, in the office,
in the first place.

I know but I don't know how I know
there is a man dressed from collar
to ankle bones in his marital suit just
a few feet below her dirty knees and nails.

I don't know how I don't know
why she put him there:
sewed his
eyes shut with mismatched buttons,
sealed his lips closed with wax
from their wedding candle
and embossed the drying tallow
with the young family crest
of her own mouth.
I don't know
why I know how he didn't hurt
her and I don't know how I know
why she thinks if she didn't
save him when she raked over
his burial bed,
she can do it now:
wash the dirt off
with rose water and
dry the skin with
Mexican frankincense.
She
can make
him
breath again
if she can get her hands beneath
the grave ground.