Untitled

be still now,
this bare hour of tar centipedes
in waiting boots
take the morning breath
that hangs like chalk dust in december air.
the shudder of night along a cheekbone,
makes familiar turn and cough.
absence is as tasteless as space
wrought as hunger in china stomachs.
who would be whole if filled with glass?
don't worry, you've already lost
ten and twenty and a hundred times.

For Corrie

When he put the revolver to the heads of the neighbor's dogs
he didn't know you were only a mile away,
curled in pink and white pajamas,
down the roads of Botetourt that roll like tongues
in soft, wet, unsuspecting mouths.
He didn't think anyone would hear the shots
the high yelps as they tried to get away.
He didn't know the ghost dogs visited your windows
that night and many nights thereafter,
eyes whiter than the moon in full,
snouts wrinkle back, expose foaming teeth,
bristled hair standing as tall as August grass,
still barking, even though he went to silence them,
still barking, even though they were only your mind.

Written for a cat named Lovey (revised rough draft)

sphinx,
seated upon a love worn chest,
i have never thought you the killing type.

but here:

eyes black like nazi coal
watch my heart move
through my breast.

Commencement Address, Stephanie Brown

I read this in the Great American Prose Poem collection and thought I'd share it. Also the collection is pretty good and I'd recommend looking into it.

I have no more to say about throwing up or causing myself to get diarrhea there's nothing heroic about it though the movies on TV want us to endure quietly and cry appropriately. It's a wonderful role for any young actress to place herself in some dead household where the dialogue is sexual between all of them including dead grandparents who are still alive in theory and very much inside everyone's bodies, clucking away like old geezers with huge inflated egos bruised by the failure of their children to spend each moment worshiping their self-created sun. So the girl you see who opens her legs to the idea of fucking everyone who says hello but also wants to feel like a nun with vaginal orgasm rather than the ones his kisses and teeth cause which seem to come to e.g., Saint Therese the Little Flower just from prayer in her cloister for hours which made the girl, the subject of this poem, cry for its truth and its nakedness. Because how could it be good to have that curly-haired boy put his face between your legs nearly every afternoon who will not even say he loves you and this is what your parents don't like about it: he will not spend his money on you or take you places in his car. But of course we have to learn to live inside fences and to sweep and clean lower our heads until in the end it is this which gives me flutters I do not need his teeth and lips at my sacred entrance I find release in order and demure discipline the needle and thread tongue-tied when you accept that you do not have this choice if you become a slut, after you see the error of your ways, you renounce them, you become someone who will live easily within his four walls where he keeps you like the flame of live inside his body there's no need to find the way out this is the way it will be and always was: all the mirrors around you say sacrifice order and love.

We live unsettled lives
And stay in a place
Only long enough to find
We don't belong.
--Mark Strand

Springtime in Lynchburg

What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth.
-- Annie Dillard

It is Spring:
the old tom cat
leaves blood prints on the porch.
I hate them and the open throated swallow
at the end of their serpentine path.
I hate them as I hate the hyacinth scent
that hangs stale in the air these mornings,
and how I have never learned to look away.
All journeys end this way. What’s the surprise?
And yet, how handsome the old tom looks
reclining beneath the azalea bush,
licking his jaws with his pink tongue,
purring like a lion.

Did it hurt?

Nothing feels in our world:
Not the sparrow we gassed in the kitchen
that April when it frosted late. It wouldn't live.
I knew that, you convinced me anyway and
who wouldn't trust your strong voice, your large
hands, as you say, "It won't feel anything."
And what of that bird that we buried in Spring?
Who gets to claim its death--
the one who turned the oven on
or the one who left the room? .
Our lives are exercises in silence:
only perpetual pulsing knees make noise
up and down like a piston engine under the chairs.
What now? Who gets the surgeon sucked entrails
the ghost of could be, black as bile
silent as tongueless dogs.
Are they fed to those starving for anything?
Are they taxidermied, held in a museum
fiji mermaids:a nickel, an eyeful?
Are they captive in jars, swimming in
beautiful shades of amber, fostered
until, fully grown, they pull themselves out,
walk down the streets where we live
meet the eyes of who gave all they could:
Do I know you from somewhere?
When I put my hand on the stove
The skin bubbled in target formation.
It didn't hurt. No. Not that much.