Tongue Rubble

The Causes of Cyclone Formation Aren't Well Understood

2012-04-01T17:32:00.008-04:00

This poem was recently accepted for publication. It will be in the world in spring 2012.

(forthcoming in Prick of the Spindle)

Tiny Studies (Particle 3)

2012-04-01T17:31:00.007-04:00

This poem was recently accepted for publication. It will be in the world in spring 2012.

(forthcoming in Prick of the Spindle)

A Tour of Pompeii's Red Light District

2011-12-01T19:42:00.003-05:00

This poem was recently published. It will be posted in April 2012.

(in Salamander Winter 2011/2012)

Roadkill on the Path to Salvation

2011-11-01T21:09:00.004-04:00

I selected this post to be featured on www.poetryblogs.org. Please visit the site and vote for my blog!

I teach Spanish now, and at school that translates:
someone who is good at this one language,
as if I live in a piece of luggage packed
with workaday words and plain phrases,
as if there's a black cloud of vowels and R trills
buzzing around me like malaria mosquitoes,
and no one can see past the swarm. Sometimes I talk
about a good book I'm reading. If it's a novel my reward
is a smile from the gal with a teaching award
and a look that says, "Good Señora,
keep trying." If it's poetry, smiles collapse
like small countries to a coup, new topics
queue up. Sometimes English teachers trade
daft looks when I name William
Carlos Williams, then clear off to budget
the annual author visit. When "poem class"
comes around (also once a year), our Language Arts team
won't let me near. They shut classrooms tight,
pull the dusty sheet off that famous Frost piece,
as if revealing a prize trophy from glory days,
then beat kids with it so hard, most want to take
any road but the one that guy is on.

(in Rattle #36 Winter 2011)

Summer Camp for Sirens

2011-10-01T21:07:00.001-04:00

It is here where we learn to deep-freeze Dreamsicles, lift bunks at wrong angles until our spines kneel down inside our backs, and handwrite Thank You cards with one athletic, cursive hand while waving with the limp-wristed other. Our camp uniforms are coveralls covered in flags. We get a new flag for everything we learn. There's even a new flag for learning how to earn a new flag! On holidays we don dress uniforms (called unitards) and dress flags (called drags). Then they teach us the language of eyes, how to ask for help, how to feign. We are taught never to talk about this. Our organs do our talking for us. The mouth of all pain is called the brain. This is where the miracle of early rising happens, and where the shopping cart turns in-law to the artificial heart. Because cars are still the best leg technology we have, the evening staff teach us to wheel-walk on land. The last day they take us to a lake, where we blare and hum at kayaks, milky bottles all around. Then they herd us straight back to camp, let us cry it out.

(from Sixth Finch Fall 2011)

Somewhere a Town

2011-08-01T15:27:00.000-04:00

Somewhere a town celebrates by having a giant tomato fight. They bring the tomatoes in trucks and can’t wait to pummel and be pummeled. After the pummeling, they slosh down juicy streets and pose as swimmers in shallow rivers of pulp while sopping journalists snap their pictures. Somewhere else a town celebrates by running away from bulls, or by watching others run away from bulls. Somewhere else a town celebrates by electing representatives to race around sharp-cornered streets on horses at maximum speed. Each horse is named for a different animal. Each animal stands for a different neighborhood. One horse is a giraffe. I know because I have a friend from the giraffe neighborhood. One horse may also be a bull. That horse may be under the impression that he is supposed to be in another town, chasing people. Somewhere else a town celebrates by having an orange fight. This is a more solid than liquid celebration, due to the peels. Liquid celebrations do not often involve large amounts of tomatoes, bulls, horses, giraffes, oranges, or decorum, and thank goodness for that, or we might all be wandering around half limpid, wondering how to throw fruit and run from animals in a polite and professional manner. Somewhere a town of bulls celebrates by springing leaks in people.

(from Puerto del Sol Volume 46 Numbers 1 & 2 Summer 2011)

Abraham, Honestly

2011-08-01T15:24:00.003-04:00

“With his own two hands, Abe Lincoln built the log cabin he was born in.”

—from an American college student’s history paper

Theory 1: Out-of-Body Abe

The ghostly glob of fetal Abraham sneaks out of his mother’s womb at night with architecture on his budding mind speck. In the first two months, the Lincoln bean can barely hold a toothpick, let alone a log, so he darts around his neighbor’s place, plotting floor plans and examining crannies. By month two his heart’s really in it. By mid-trimester he’s using his tail to smooth out the mud mortar of his neighbor’s house. Mudd, he thinks, and feels his very first shiver. By month five he’s chopping thick stripes of wood by the light of his prenatal halo. By month six he’s strapping logs to his unborn back and floating them across miles of undivided Kentucky airspace. By month seven he’s all over the roof like a Christmas specter. By month eight his newly-lit neurons are sparkling up the lawn as he flaps back and forth from womb to hearth, nesting like there’s no state like home, no place like tomorrow.

Theory 2: Born-Again Abe

When you make a house of your heart, no assembly is required, but some laying of the hands may be.

Theory 3: Authorial Abe

Like many Abrahams before him, Lincoln enjoys limited omniscience whenever he writes speeches, treaties, bills, or commandments, and this has begun to affect his mind in mellifluous ways. He often imagines, for example, what it must have been like for his Pa to construct their homestead. How many times had the teenage Lincoln built that same boxy lodge in his mind, amputating trees and sanding them to naked plainness; putting, perhaps, more care into it than his own father had? This fantasy kicks in like a nervous tick when he loses things, and for every log he stacks on his imaginary abode, a windy sigh rushes through the grassy blades of his beard. Since the war began, he’s been adding new rooms that were never there in his youth, and the walls are getting higher, so high that the house is now a tower he must climb and climb.

(from Cutbank 75 Summer 2011)

Black Hole Horizon

2011-06-01T15:20:00.001-04:00

I’m in flux with a TV alien, and that’s the best sad thing that’s happened to me all year. He’s in flux with someone else, of course, but they live in different universes, so it could never work. My chances with him aren’t great either, I know, but I’ve used mathematics to figure that the odds of my nonfictional self bumping into his fictional one are actually much better than the odds of two universes overlapping and forming a handy little doorway, so I think it’s safe to say that I’m in a much better position than the long lost girlfriend at this point. She’ll keep pining away in her parallel world, wishing she had the weekly window into his life that I have, or at least an identical night sky. I’ll keep polishing the glass of my flat-screen crystal ball and writing her farther and farther into the back of his mind, until he can barely remember what her face looks like, until she’s just another dot on his bright and busy page.

(from Crate Issue 1 Vol. 1 June 2011)

Poem Poem Poem Poem Poem

2011-04-01T15:16:00.003-04:00

—for Joel Styzens

There are certain white noisy things that scientists believe. When aliens contact earth they will do it by making a tonal racket from on high. They will do this celestial honking at regular intervals. They will use the honk method because space can be a raucous place and science needs replication in order to work. Recurrence must be for belief to occur.

This alien din will most likely bloom in B flat. Various branches and twigs of study now corroborate the news that B flat has juju properties. Crocodiles are tamed by it, anomalous echoes echo it, and black holes are constantly humming it. Add to this the true events in my cousin’s ears, and the reduplication of B flat magic is overwhelming. Ear anecdote:

My cousin the jazz percussionist woke one day to the opposite of deafness. His ear drums had acquired a heightened tuning in to even the smallest of sounds. A light tapping of fingers on a table; a dog’s nails clicking on stairs; the scrape of fork against knife, plate, or tooth—all torture for my poor cousin. In addition to this, he was hearing a high-pitched ring. This ringing was in B flat. This ringing never went away. Not leaving is a kind of repetition. Some possible conclusions are these:

If my cousin ever hears the alien note, it could hurt him, kill him, tame him, cure him, make him spill something hot, or drive him insane. Alternately, it could blend with the tinnitus already filling him and go undetected. Doubly alternately, it could be the tinnitus. The aliens could be blaring their high-tech claxon right now and his super sensitive canals are the only instruments that picked it up. My cousin’s ears may even have been specially selected to eavesdrop on this cosmic megatoot, which suggests that aliens have been in his apartment, which further suggests that their Big Beep Machine (a.k.a., The Universe Horn) is already obsolete, unless they’re using him as an instrumental test subject while speed-caroling more cacophonic worlds.

In order for us to trust any of this it must be repeated several times. Read this poem over and over until you believe.

(from Sixth Finch Spring 2011, the American Tinnitus Association website, and Relax Your Ears April/May 2010 newsletter)

Escape from the Abhorrent Vacuum

2011-02-01T15:11:00.000-05:00

What if nature is tired of being a mother,

of gendered metaphors splayed

in her honor, the suckling pigs of poetry,

obscene apple muzzles shoved snugly

under their snouts? What if she is ten kinds of trans:

transitory, transmigrant, a transplanted liver

filtering the good word from the gaff ...? What if she isn’t

a she at all, but a beautiful bearded mountain

man, all oceanic swagger and volcanic lisp?

No remedy for identity. No one-off spring

for the innerwintered, the homoseasonal

(de)pressed. Diagnosis: mother-obsessed.

Let’s give nature a choice for once. Let him let down

his habit-bound hair, spit, grope, and swear.

Let him eat steak and cake. Be multisex

beast. Be worm. Be queen and worshipful worker

in one. A beeline made to fit. Wear it, mother. Put it on

if only to shrug it back off, again and again and again.

(from Drunken Boat #13 Slant/Sex Issue Winter 2011)

The Forgiveness Project

2011-01-01T15:03:00.001-05:00

—after Szymborska

Under what conditions should one admit wrongdoing?

Is confessing in a dream as good as in a booth?

Who goes first?

Are there age restrictions?

Do the dead get a shot?

Who runs the project and for how long?

Will it be necessary to make a reservation or appointment,

or is it first come, first served?

Is there a suggestion box? A gift registry?

Will I need a witness?

When the apology part is over,

should all spilled secrets be tagged and catalogued?

Accidents, sins, mistakes, peccadilloes …

who decides what’s what?

Do records remain sealed?

Do poems count as admissions of guilt? Do paintings?

If so, do they have to be narrative?

Are "confessional poems" by victims filed under Allegations
during pax audits and quarrel inventories?

Is the Forgiveness Librarian discrete?

Is she happy?

After the project, will a pardon be a privilege, a rite of
passage, or both?

Is there a prize for the best entry?

Do animals participate? Do plants?

Will there be a new holiday to mark the end of resentment?

Will there be an “I Forgave Today” sticker at the exit?

(from The Café Review Winter 2011)

From Your Hostess at the T & A Museum

2011-01-01T15:02:00.003-05:00

If you will not tip me for my dance, tip me for daring to ask. Or if, having stared at me directly for the duration of a song or two, you still did not manage to see me, as you claim, then tip me for what you see now: the perfect circumference of twin aereolae, one torso a la Aphrodite statue, one triangle of cloth bundling The Origin of the World and pointing like an arrow to the masculine earth. Do you doubt that the artist tipped his model? Oh, but you’re right: there is that old understanding between painters and nudes. Tit for dab, so to speak. Similarly, artists and restaurateurs have sometimes exchanged a mouthful for an eye feast (dab for tidbit; slapdash for tiddlywink). Tip me, then, in calories; offer me a slice of lime split wide over the edge of a beverage. Tip me for staring back so hard it puts even Olympia to shame and makes her chat noire slink ever closer to her overlooked and under-rendered black maid. Tip me, at least, for carrying so many geometrician’s tools: the circle, the triangle, the rectangular bills tucked beneath such finite and measurable bikini lines. Tip me for my burlesque, crescent-shaped ass. Tip me for what you don’t see: the abstract; the invisible; the squiggly outline of a model’s brain matter in silhouette; the negative space plastered between fleshy objects like some happy vacuum, giving form to the nothingness between us.

(from The Café Review Winter 2011)

What the Traveler Knows

2010-10-01T14:56:00.000-04:00

Every country is a cure for something;

every cobblestone a lozenge

for some scratchy, sore space

in your pedestrian head; every skyline

a pointy heavenscape of exclamation marks,

cheering you on. If you are irksome and rude

in your own land, there is another

where you are witty and direct, your voice,

once a pastel whine, now an atonal instrument

of desire. If you are hideous

in your home town, there is a locale

where you can melt the locals

with your sunless eyes

and hold your wire-haired head high while

an effervescent flow of admirers

bubbles from the sacred streets,

winking and circling you on bikes.

You have only to find it, your stopping place,

find it and let it remake you from the terra up.

Why make amends when you can make haste?

Look there, that clock tower, that medina, that

famous mountain peak, it’s the view you

were born to see, the perfect finish

to the shelfsong of your life

so far. The end. Keep looking.

The end. Maybe tomorrow. The end.

Almost there. The end.

(from Atlanta Review Fall 2010 International Poetry Competition Winners)

Dead Cardinal

2010-05-01T14:08:00.000-04:00

—after Rilke

Scarlet clouds against blue carpet:

a half-circle of feathers on the floor.

As if the last act were a sweeping

of the wing. Nothing was ever this red.

I found him lying in the living room,

the round, pouting profile of the breast

arched up the full lip of the body,

feathers pleated and poking inward.

Across the room the cat

sang a crying through closed mouth,

or an offering through the lung.

(I barely heard her vent her rant.

I was listening for a soaring.)

The bird’s eye, stiff in its openness

like a new fruit in a tree blossom:

poised and aimed for falling.

(from The 2River View 14.3 Spring 2010)

Excerpts from the American Heritage Thesaurus of Smells

2010-04-01T15:07:00.002-04:00

wet pavement – synonyms: a shuffled stack of singles, a pear, the tornado-safe corner of a basement. antonyms: rubber signature stamps, distilled regret, thin burnt white buttered toast.

copper – synonyms: a fat tampon, strep throat. antonyms: unsmearable lipstick, ferrets.

mildew – synonyms: carbonated water, the day before frost, sidewalk hopscotch chalk, a luxurious raincoat (See: home.) antonyms: eucalyptus, tiger balm, a mint plant doused in cat piss, a row of ashtrays by the sink.

insect repellant – synonyms: pine, latex, chlorine, greeting card sections of grocery stores. antonym: a curd of hope.

salt – synonyms: dead fresh water fish on a sleek river bank, milk that aspires to be cheese, the cusp between the body and arm commonly known as pit. antonyms: a naked margarita, a first or last date, a lint-covered lidless cherry chap stick.

(from Booth Vol. 2, 2010)

Poem on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

2010-04-01T14:13:00.002-04:00

—for Almodóvar

In my favorite movie a woman lights a fire in her bed

after trying all day to find her married lover,

to tell him she is pregnant. Now I know

what you’re thinking: the fire is a metaphor

for passion, but that’s not really what I mean.

What I mean is that I like the idea of a fire—

a real fire—being lit in someone’s bed

who has been trying all day to find her married lover

and tell him she is pregnant, but who instead

keeps finding her lover’s wife, and ends up

with no lover, no bed, and no abortion.

This flaming bed comes to her

at a time in her life when a flaming bed

is the least absurd thing that could happen,

so she does what anyone would do.

She stands there coughing like an idiot,

then goes back to the kitchen.

I like to imagine in that moment of standing

that she is thinking about her bed,

wondering if it’s ever been quite that hot before

and if so, when? I imagine she looks

at her sunny fire and sees herself

reflected there, as in an orange mirror,

then remembers all her really good sex

happened somewhere else. The roof!

she thinks, and turns for the door

just in time for all those sexy firemen

to burst in like flames and rescue her.

Because she still has that fantasy

of being rescued, and despite what people think

it’s really not that overrated,

especially not when you’re covered

in smoke and firemen.

(from storySouth Issue 29 Spring 2010)

Photo Album

2009-09-01T14:03:00.002-04:00

This first one was taken before I knew the difference between self and sky. See how I appear to be reaching for my own hand? That white smudge of deodorant on my shirt, the one that looks like the Milky Way on a clear night? That’s God. He sometimes streaks by like that unannounced.

Here’s another one of me and God on a picnic. This time I’m the one who’s smeared across a surface, though I can’t remember if I’m on the blanket or if I am the blanket.

The next could either be me or my sister. I’m never sure with baby pictures, what with our matching affinities for applesauce tiaras and other minor forms of idol worship. Whoever it is, that cowlick on her forehead is definitely God. See how he’s waving at the camera?

This is one of my favorites. I had just discovered rules. What a face! I look like a wilted jack 'o lantern. Where’s God? Oh, I forgot. He’s not in this one.

That’s my senior class at graduation. Can you tell which one is me? Nope, that’s God. I’m the one to his left. It’s hard to tell us apart sometimes, I know. We both have such reflective presence. Sometimes when he answers the phone, people think it’s me. I even let him record the greeting on my answering machine once. It was weeks before my mother noticed. I could tell when she finally figured it out because she started leaving prayers instead of messages. She’d say things like, “Hi honey, it’s Mom. Please let the first frost be late this year. Tha-anks!”

(from Suss: Another Literary Journal September 2009)

Follow the Law Regarding Sea Tablets

2009-09-01T14:02:00.005-04:00

A man walks into a titty bar. Asks for a shot, gets one in the chest. Yes, the breast god likes his irony. Quick-draw prayer definition: two beings of unequal status coming together with separate agendas, the weaker one of which makes herself totally "knowable" to the abstract. (Here, as in any divine or blason space, the privacy gauge is verily askew. At times like these it is useful to ask, “Am I a mascot for my own body? Is my body a mascot for me?”)

Another man, a stripper groupie, takes his knife to an afterparty, test runs the tip along an arm and neck. (Her body has a mascot in the form of a tattoo.) Her arrival there was easy as a blown stoplight. Leaving? Like riding on a blason saddle. (This event is akin to the one in which a road sign said seat belts, but from the corner of an eye became sea tablets. “Sea tablets?” the reader said, and clapped her throat in a gulp.)

(Her body is a mascot for bodies in general.) A ball team in need of a mascot paid a boffin to make a woman from raw ingredients. Her first words were: “I mean, if I wanted to be lonely at a gathering, I’d go home for the holidays.” Sex equals bodies in agreement on something, the something being done while they agree. “People with prominent muscles remind me of steaks.”

(from Suss: Another Literary Journal September 2009)

WATCH ANY FASHION SHOW BACKWARDS TO SEE DIVINE HOT-STEPPING IN HELL!!!

2009-09-01T14:02:00.001-04:00

A lilted green blouse tops operatic
blue shorts. A frizzy-backed man
in taffeta, hoop skirt. Her top
too small, squeamish of all it holds.
Are you decent? Are you halter and strap?
Is your jaded scrunchy all that’s getting
your back? Can you squint us with garb,
so mighty with haze, grant a wish

when your blood brooch
twinkles our eyes? Heavy now,
lead-pacing through a thicket of lace,
veiled legs sycophantic, sick umbrellaed hips.
Earth tones itself: anonymous in three

gradations of beige, brown skirts its way

through, flits along scrappy gowns, sounds
of oak, sycamore, and yew, yes, yew.

(from Suss: Another Literary Journal September 2009)

What's Mine

2005-03-01T14:00:00.000-05:00

Accidents are necessary, disease,

also. I believe this. I believe it

as much as I used to believe

in the remoteness

of a faulty roller coaster. Shameful, really,

the way I tricked my thrill-phobic mother

into taking that train ride

at Frontier Land, Disney World,

telling her I remembered it as tame.

I might as well have driven her off

the side of a cliff. She was that scared.

On my driver’s license

are printed the words whole body,

any organ, witness, witness,

but I’m not checking either donor option.

I want the pieces of me to cease

in union. Because my liver won’t get to live on

in the immaculate body of a five-year-old

cellist. My heart won’t get chosen

to keep time for the citizen

who just discovered the amazing

healing properties of coconut hair.

I’ll peter out in some old smoker, or worse:

I’ll be a metronome for a martyr who recycles

the great mistake of sacrifice yet again.

I won’t be given to the girl on the ground down there

who just fell off the first stand-up roller
coaster, the one her boyfriend coaxed her
into trying, who is dying there for all the world

to see, the rest of us suspended above the scene

by belts and harnesses, squinting at the speck

of woman at the bottom. People have to die.

I believe this. I believe it sure as my mother

believed her life was one frayed hair

from ending every time she braced

a curve by biting, hard

into my very own shoulder.

(from Crab Orchard Review Vol. 10, No. 1 Winter/Spring 2005)

Bisexual Triptych*

2005-02-01T14:01:00.000-05:00

Part 1:

Once I was pleasantly surprised to realize that my hand was leaning against a breast and the breast was not moving away. Then I realized it was my own breast and felt sad.

Part 2:

Sometimes I think I am Bi because I like B-words better than H-words. I have a very pronounced preference in this way, although I’m told that many B's are really H's in disguise! Could this he true? If so, how do I get reacquainted with my hody? With these strange hreasts and elhows? This heautiful hottom, lovely hack?

____________________________

*This triptych only has two parts. That is because it is a bisexual triptych. I thought about including a third part and calling it “Trisexual Triptych,” but that would have been redundant. I thought about canceling out the Tri with the Trip, but then I would have had a poem called “Sexual Tych.” I didn’t want a poem called “Sexual Tych.” These are the limitations.

(from Chiron Review GLBT Issue 81 Winter 2005)

An Amnesiac's Letter to Herself

2004-04-01T13:57:00.002-05:00

I haven’t forgotten the world, only its corners. Your distance from the doorway smells like something I once consumed. Tell me everything you know about head coverings, the many kinds of precipitation that precede them. What follows hunger? Why are there only maps of places? Should I eat this or marry it? Some days everyone guesses my natural hair color before I do, other days they serve me rhubarb just to trick me. Animals all seem ridiculous, though I’m told I may have worked in a zoo. Wings are still the only things that look familiar, but the ones I planted haven’t sprouted. So much for blue thumbs. Yesterday I walked up and down a ramp with my eyes closed and realized I used to surf, and lately, I’ve had urges to climb things and wave from the tops. When people stare at me I know to either kiss them or run. I no longer confuse babies with sirens. Tell me again why tickling isn’t illegal and crunching is only good if it happens in your mouth. Some days are so loud and others so noisy. I met a man whose face felt rough and smooth at the same time, like the orange side of an orange peel. Later I learned this was ugly. When I wake in the morning I’m always sure I’m home, then remember I’m not. There’s a feather in the yard.

(from Mid-American Review Vol. XXIV, No. 2 Spring 2004; Editor's Choice for the 2003 James Wright Poetry Award)

Description of a Vase

2004-03-01T13:15:00.010-05:00

Description of a Vase

Possibly you are wondering why this is description of a vase and not just a vase. Well I don’t see any vase here, do you?

(from Good Foot Issue 5 Winter 2004)

Vase

2004-03-01T13:14:00.000-05:00

Vase

a tangible thing; a word

for a tangible thing; a place

to put other, smaller things;

a place to put other,

smaller words;

a word to put

other things in place.

(from Good Foot Issue 5 Winter 2004)

Notes on a Memo That Began as Follows: I Wanted to Extend Reminders About Three Issues

2004-03-01T13:10:00.001-05:00

1. The wet mount form should bear a stamp.

The year of my diagnosis my mother buys me a front door sign, the words Go Away, painted and swift on a creamy piece of ceramic. Meanwhile, my single neighbor can’t believe my luck. Three proposals and I still haven’t done it. “Maybe I should get herpes,” she says. “No one asks to marry me, and I’m pretty.”

2. Problems are inevitable in any health care setting.

No one goes to the pharmacy happy. Late afternoon at the pill farm, the white coats pluck scripts from rows of shelves like farm hands picking crops—sifting and counting their oblong berries into a long, thin bottle—when I am suddenly contained in someone’s arms. So this is how it happens, I think. One minute you’re buying medicine, the next you’re being squeezed to death. I turn my head to a lover’s view of this stranger’s toothy face. The face blurts her concern: “Honey, are you all right?”

3. Solutions should be dated and replaced.

The sign on the door never worked. The more I looked to be alone, the longer each one stayed.

“I don’t love you,” I said.

“I don’t care,” they replied.

“I am sick and find you ugly. Make me tea and leave your money.”

“Here it is and here it is and here I am,” they each replied.

Summary:

Me and the cat both shedding, only one of us asymptomatic. There is a skip in my body that makes it repeat: always just one more for the road. Centrifuge, autoclave, incubate, encore. Encore, one more encore. I need you to know, if only this once, I’m avoiding the stairs, not breakfast.

(from Good Foot Issue 5 Winter 2004)