i have this habit
of uncomfortable truths,
wear it over my day clothes
with a crown of cactus blooms so
as with the desert or a novice no
one can get close
enough to discover
the possibility of my
beauty without
risk of heat
stroke or eternal
damnation.

folded up into a puddle of
blue-stained nightmare
she woke from the bottom
of the bathtub, shivering.

strange because
the tap was turned
all the way to the right,
streaming showerhead rain over
her best dress and dreams
hitherto undisclosed;

maybe it was the nakedness
that caused the goosebumps.

the morning after
december’s first snowfall i
woke up in clear eyes,
borrowed pajamas and with a
chest bruised
from where the
doctors had pumped wild
air back into lips and
lungs that for too
long had tasted only
salt.

i feel their fevered jags
slit the palmed flesh between my toes,
shrieks of mirrored staccato hitting a
frozen ground like
acid echoes across
the rain-abandoned parking lot
inside my chest; lysed
screams silting down on
smeared lashes, leaving silver-ashed
edges at the bottom of my jaw,
eviscerated hopes sliding off
my tongue and into the scrap
at my feet, silent and unearthly.

i drank down
your lies like
a washed-up moonlighter
nursing her
last bottle of sweet wine:
a pinot with
a pretty label and
a bargain-store
price tag whose
finish burned ever
so slightly at the swallow and i
should have known
the morning afters
would more than make
up for the high.

six paces.
the length
of the rope
left me to hang
the remains of my
humanity,
yellowed cinderblock walls
canvas for narration
of unhappy endings.
inset fluorescence
glared down; i
glowered up,
voiceless fists
on concrete bars
in subtly shouldered
rage.

they told me later
it was nothing, just…
justice, this:
a little
girl
in a little
cell
losing life
a little

at a time.

this poem also published @ Poets for Human Rights

someone once told me never
to turn my back on an ocean but
truth is the lies crashed
over my head before i
could suck in my breath;
now buffeted by deaf winds and
drowned in tumbled waves i
slide noose-like under
waters too heavy to hold me,
scrape shins and
veins against a
shore all too willing
to forget.

what color is your soul
when shadow ceases to exist?

who are you
locked in at night
behind the darkness
of your eyes?

are you even human?
every dignity gone,

all your dreams naked,
autumn branches
scratching at a bolted window.

the last question
they will ask you is

“If we have to use restraints,
should we call your family?”

last primeval answering cry from
deep in the forge-fires of
your heart, knowing:

there’s no one
you would want to tell.

you were my muse
and i was your poet;
i saw the rhythms of your soul:
they raced with me across a beach,
laughing.

so when you tentatively
held out your fingers, i
took them as a lifeline,
shut my lids to the
wounds of this world,
found a brighter self in your
ocean-eyes.  but like children we
swam too far out,
past the point where our toes
touched land, lost
our footing and ourselves and
somehow you found me facedown
on my kitchen floor,
sunk down in tears and pain,
not the girl you had
fallen in love with, not
even really
a girl at all.

in the darkness
you rubbed dry your eyes;
you shook yourself off;
you locked doors all around me,
blind to the reality that i
was already prisoner inside this
skin, and you, you walked out
under crying skies but
walked free nevertheless,
taking my heart with you,
leaving me to drown alone.

this is weregild for a crime never acknowledged, for
the piece of me stolen but never reported missing,
a momentary antidote threaded through
the pulse of the year’s dying
to feed feeling back into numbed fingers and
assuage the inquiet in the hollow place
just to the right of where my heart beats,
where if you put your ear close enough you
can still hear the roar and swell of the ocean,
hungry.  each wave as it crashes devastating
over me i will take and
take, losing shoreline with each
breath, hoping to find in the rush of a moment or
a brush of skin something
akin to going home.