My Eve.

you wound me
A lotus dress with lace
of red.

Memories, Never Mine.

I’m pissed at God, but tell me who has not been,
and because I dream, my skull surfs in torrents

Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss (after the sculpture in France).

psyche-reaped and kissed
into a lushed womb where
coiling into my lap, she lay

don’t leave in limbo (Draft).

variegated in singes; touches of her neck and wrist, contused
in no promises, only the sprawl of remembrance gets darker

Letting Eve in (Draft).

My hero turned out to be a monster,
it sinks further in my chest; frail leaves
and empty words spill—spill

Melpomene (Draft).

her lune,
how precise and anticlastic
as if each horror you provoked
could somehow make me want you

Solicitude (2nd Draft Version).

like abandoned memories, recalled by my mother
like when my grandfather said
“I’m going to kill you” while counting money

it was home to me (Draft).

with no thread of flowers
to plant your feet on, and into morning air
at a hotel room
remembering that’s what home felt like.

O’ I had bad dreams.

O I had bad dreams; I was wooded into the sand,
lady, I am dead from you all

Some demonstrations of sorrow (Draft).

I found a dead deer in the road
at the same time my dad told me not to look;

Do not tell me what I was.

Do not tell me what I was
to redraw that cold war face,
to see a woman of what I bleed

snippets from a psychology textbook.

sometimes, I wish I were like that. don’t you.
how do you break off from yourself
do you ever think about it?

Father’s Ocean.

Father, I love you,
as the orange of the sunset fades to the ship’s berth,
to the fields of a cherry birdsong so darken like a lute,
your song purifies my broken soul
father, you are everything, my world, myself,
I love you.

mon chèriette.

Through the smokestacks
there is the death of me
as I pass the hills.

glass eyes (Draft).

Glassy eyes
in sumac touches
she waits for me or doesn’t

the muse is dead.

as if I held her hand, full of regret. A weeping willow rejects me
breathing in my cigarettes,
death’s in the traveler
being left alone in Italy; from the garden,
all bodied, all that red and bleak