it is at nights
it is so hard to switch
between voices was l
milk or wine
or was I the tear
undulating
I have cried
mountains have torn
plates of liquid gold
into prayer have
bitten my flesh
with a jadeite
tooth gifted
to all of
our
gods
in equal measures:
the torn out eye of
a horse three rings
of a birch tree and
two beating hearts
yet
I still cannot dream
open-chested like a songless bird
it is at nights
that
I was the heavens
I was the treetops
I was the crescent
I was the grounds
where if not
here who
if not me
to mourn the passing
of silence the tongue
tied slices of ambers
where if not
here who
if not me
to hold back fountains
so that we can emulate
the rising of a thousand suns
the crashing of a comet
the edges of a universe
folding itself into sheets
of ice I forgot the words
forgot how to accept to
be crippled the peg leg
of my father a knocking
on wood only my father
had no peg leg and not
one of us suffered more
than our fair share but
what is fair if your home
has betrayed you a long
time ago if rightfully all
you can ever be is guilt
or shame a molten lava
crown making your hair
burn
it is at night
the mistress speaks
take me out to dance, will you? only this once, in
shoes of pearly liquids
where I can hold my teeth in your hands
and mockingly laugh at the seabirds
today on the balcony my feet looked old like
crows feet only paler and harsher
it is in your absence that sometimes I screech
like a beetle like something small
I possess in abundance: letters of your
commands. scars of your whippings. wounds
from the thrust of your silver tongue. I lack: the
certainty of what could/should have happened.
thanks to you I cannot enter the holy bath
untouched not even for the crowning
but I still know to wash myself in brine
before I touch the foreskins of our fathers it’s like
there’s a wall inside me I can feel the words breathing
behind the bricks and I bloody my hands scratching
what if I rip out my throat again or one of my eyeballs?
they must spill out like intestines must hurt like
sickles cutting the rye must live
here now must be you yet not you must be the
lonely minotaur glittering and dancing,
dancing
Entanglements
once or twice while we fuck
he wants me to hold him so tight
my body suddenly becomes the bite of a shark
although it does not hurt him
and I comply in wonderment not hunger
why is it that we ask only of strangers
the things we need more than anything?
‘you really have no boundaries,’ he says and I remember:
once I was as a virgin girl who fell in love at first sight
‘you have a beautiful soul,’ that one said
only this time I seem to be a blood-nosed hunter
or maybe I am an oyster trapping his attention
within concentric layers of vulgarity
‘I love the taste of your cum’ as if indeed
a frosted pearl could grow from coarsness
or from a splintered heart
Drowning, almost
one day I inhale the oceans iron
and I suddenly think of how my dad used to cup my
mothers drooping boobs when she bent over
of the uneasiness I felt watching it happen
yet I know I was ruined or ruinous even before that
even before I fucked my collegue bareback in the cellars
(an irascible cook who later called me thief of sperm)
or a married man his three children watching
dutifully from the frame
even before school where I first slept with my best friends
boyfriend and then with his
brother I was much younger when I heard
my parents moans through
the wall and touched myself to the sickly sounds
and also when a teenage neighbour took me for
a ride on his cock
his pyjamas still on and when I somehow kind of liked
it how easy it’d be to say:
I did not understand so I turned my shame into hunger
and my hunger into power or
into something that felt owned at least so maybe
one day I could own myself again
but was it ever true even just born even
before and before and before?
it is o.k. now I am maybe more like
the propulsion of siphonophores
a colony of
the girl
I was the woman
I am the ghost
I will be
and if I had a God I might be praying
or I might just go through the motions
folding up my napkin after each meal
asking forgiveness
