I Didn’t Need to Read Communist Theory to Know
Sciatica sounds like the name of a philosopher
I haven’t read yet familiar with the concept
runs in the family inflamed by certain
working conditions
zippered livewires open
the crook of my inner knee
If ya got time to lean
ya got time to clean
a friend says they never thought their chronic pain
could be considered a disability
hours ballooning in the wrist
bitter calluses divorced
from lichen tight shoes
cobbled eggshells & knives
I didn’t need to read
communist theory to know how strong I get
lifting other people’s boxes I could give
my dissatisfaction a skeleton carry her
to sloughed horizons
where fences give way to ancestral colors tied
to manoomin where monarchs lift
from hot wheel husks planted away
from men who claimed the word
chiseled from illegible bone
I weigh materiality in one hand
a penny in the other
I know there’s another language
a language of verbs & blood
to describe what’s happening to us
that boils
within the fact of our bodies
with whom I stand all day
Mania
Fluorescence glazed the prostrate
bearskin, lukewarm beneath my palms
as my father urged me to pet harder,
pet like I meant it.
The Mall of America still glows
like a synthetic ice palace
still smells like the deep end
of a swimming pool
as it did when my family
was yanked upstream the wheeze
of closing time,
security guards meeting
my father’s bugged-out eyes.
He’d gambled away our vacation money
but the mall was free to enter—did he mean
to seek out the most luxurious thing
we could touch? Sprinting the wide halls,
his drill sergeant bark a threat for us to keep up.
I remember the shopkeeper’s kindness,
assuring me the bear could not awaken,
that the muzzle’s proscenium of fang
would not lurch to pearly life.
Years after my father’s overdose,
I came to the same understanding
as I did when, as the shopkeeper
locked the clattering gate, I stole
one more glance at the bear’s umber sheen
and saw her color as my hair’s own.
There had been something alive
behind those matte-black eyes
that belonged to me now,
brain-tanned and flayed.
Watercolors
Dahlia soaked cotton reeks ammonia
vulva is a song at work on repeat and traffic-jammed
vulva is proof of nothing
bubble wrap popped silently and with a pair of scissors
sheds grammar from the uterine wall vulva
has a lot to say, most of it already said
dilates deep space portals between consumers
and consumed crackled with packing paper
vulva needs to sit down but the chairs have been taken away
and now vulva can’t hide sobs from their cousin
sciatic nerve who is quilting with dispassion
a hip that loathes to make a fuss
gravity tugs cervix with a boredom rolling sour
on vulva’s tongue the dahlias won’t lose
their iron taste for at least twenty more years
vulva opens and closes an umbrella
inside us no rain on the horizon
dear managers of the world we would like to cease
to be defined by pain so please
let us burrow in the snow
as we wait for the lights to turn off
we can last the day but it’s what our ancestors used to do,
dream and eat and read until the bleeding was over.