a morning in my office
The stories are swimming in my head.
“My daughter tried to kill herself.
I live in fear of her death.”
“My baby is hungry.
How do I get food?”
“His fever’s so high.”
The joys of
mother-
hood
The stories are swimming in my head.
“My daughter tried to kill herself.
I live in fear of her death.”
“My baby is hungry.
How do I get food?”
“His fever’s so high.”
The joys of
mother-
hood
on june twenty-fourth
i’ll distract myself with work.
your birthdays… break me.
i would be so much hotter without acne
red painful splotches on my cheeks
a giant bump on my nose ready to explode
unconsciously picking at them in class
my bra strap feels to tight but its just another lump
“whats that white thing on your face”
a pimple Britney shut up.
my mom doesnt believe in dermatologists
maybe if i went i would be so much hotter
I kiss her through you
across the centuries,
my first love
whom you resemble so.
I don’t know
if I believe
in reincarnation
because
I don’t know
if I believe
in the concept
of a soul.
You kiss me
but really
you are kissing her,
the girl you left behind
several states away,
love interrupted
before it could
grow beyond a crush.
You only love me
for my fangs,
the pain I give you
that you’d rather not
give yourself.
I love you
because you taste
like something new
and something familiar.
We hold each other
in the darkness
and share the pain
of being alone.
for the five-member crew
of the OceanGate Titan
Dared to dive deep, to
live a slip of history, to
break landlubbing chains
and sit beneath the sea
trading legends and myths.
You did this, striven
and driven to risk it all
to dive where the Titanic
did fall and fail to return
its fading souls to us.
Now see Titan’s nose
cone, its pressured hull,
fore and aft, asleep near
the great ship’s bow,
married vessels vowed.
She will watch over you,
keeping you warm with
White Star linens; sailors
standing guard over your
remains from her masts.
John Phillips will man
the wireless as he did
his final night, telegrams
transcending time
to minds above: all is alright.
Far from chilling waves,
your harvest of salvage
someday will be harbored
for verdant voyagers
in exhibits yet unmade,
for sometimes
bits of history
are all we have left.
I asked where the chain of guilt by association ended
And you hated me for it
You knew and I knew that asking was the same as buying a one way ticket across that eternally burning bridge
Where no answer is the same as
(Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out)
I know you’re picturing one long line of people who can get fucked
But actually, it’s a rat king of wrongs
Not to be undone or cut apart
By anyone other than the girl who put the sword in the stone
No true heroes live here
But our rat community is warmer than you’d think
We still hold rat parties
Sing all the great rat songs
It’s almost like being a rat is just fine
Like that’s what we were from the beginning
So I’m writing to let you know it’s okay
To be here, on the other side of things
That I found an answer
about where the guilt ends, and
It’s with me
the answer might just be
all in the outlook
instead of what’s wrong, broke, intangible
find the opposite and cling
sing a song that doesn’t remind me of anyone
dream a dream never considered
otherwise it’s a repeated melancholy
good but not great and mostly mediocre
I can do better
so I will or I won’t
Hradecky, considering Keiko, three or so years
and a doctor’s visit between them—
(in the consternated din of somebody tempering distant dumpsters,
scraping phlegm from a shivering snare drum)
who’d ash in the awkward asses of grumbling window units
slumped against crumbly sills, asea
in dismissive soliloquies, lachrymose wheezing
rasping each crepitant name,
each ambling song of innumerous larks and starlings,
every stiffened and itchily chittering spat amidst oaks and squirrels,
the virginal symphonies circling stars had nourished,
to dull and tumid moans borne ashen and frail as the squealing chalk stubs children had shrunken in dryly transcribing redundant schoolyard dictums, ersatz laws like
“I will not run with safety shears…”, or
“I will not weave my gum in Matilda’s pigtails…”,
“I will not butter the soles of Mrs. Chisholm’s creaking sneakers…”,
“I will not idly tap my toe (to mysterious music nobody knows but me)…”,
“I will not force my thumb into Peter Dilby’s bellying navel
(even if packing it back is of almost mortal concern, a Samaritan gesture)…”,
“I will not file my teeth with a ferrule
(albeit of no other purpose really—far be it from me to have given it purpose)
to resemble the fangs of hyenas and marmosets…”,
toothless rules
of basely compassionate masters scribbled
ad nauseam over a wall or a bruising palimpsest,
lain baying and raking the breast of an umbrous pall
that Chisholm defiled with cock-eyed equations and
wizening maxims, chalk worn down like bones
of a wambling building scrunched like
puncturing ribs entoiling kidneys,
hesitant heralds of lavish catastrophe scratching their scalps to a farrow of dandruff,
plangent calls of a teetering condo shrieking
let me rest already god damn it,
a giddily prickling stitch run wild as ermine sniffing out
tingling herring and rat kings wove as phylacteries over
that gnashing scowl, that sinister limb of that
woebegone Mrs. Chisholm, damned to recant
in but fraying and bandying pink noise
anything even dissembling cherubic freedom —
her uvula stripped to but snickering wire,
her throat besodden with crackling wax,
her teeth worn down to unwieldy chalk stubs,
every phrase refined to a styptic powder that
rankly lolled from her stringent lips
like a prostrate possum’s tongue,
like a skin tag lowering year by year from a crazed and crepitant breastbone.
(Keiko later discovered that Edith Chisholm was only a Mrs. in name alone, no née or beau, and retailed the profound deceit within virulent whispers, nervously folded spalls of notebook paper passed amid restive desks, in erratic chicken scratch chewed through the blackboard one disturbed November morn; and banished her back to Poughkeepsie, never to grade or degrade a pupil again.)
