My Body, Your Choice Chromatic prism, ultraviolet light waves toward my flat black pupil a record shuffling the same few songs. Isn’t that what womanness has been about? Repeated scenes: the bonnet-donned bonnie forking at the hay bail the fish wife catching her baby...

Wheels It began in our bodies, parts of us craving release, the Let It Go of Elsa’s icy power, the freedom of her frozen solitude. You, car-seated chanteuse, fresh from Montessori Pre-K, I, your chauffeur grandmother joining you in a ramped-up CD sing along, chanted...

Exhalations untethered from my daydreams my husband says ¿Que te pasa? ¿Por que tanto suspiro? it’s even a joke now—my fictional characters respond to every line of dialogue with sighs. Like me. We’re illegible, scrawling out the only possible response, knee-deep in...

Zigzags If I knew Socrates told us to question everything I would have been better equipped to tell my mother why I disagreed with her why I lacked her enthusiasm for being born with curly hair that went in every direction off the top of my head like a field of unruly...

The Pilosity of Memory  Although mindful to remember but unwilling to commemorate, during our nation’s holidays,   during grade school, I carried our flag, hoping it would end my parents’ wars.   That might be why I still gaze at armies with suspicion, why...

Hee Haw We walk where the blade talks high wire of a divide between schemes of dreams and the certain verdict in the capital trial called living   All walks punish with wishes We wander dead ground a travail through felled trees of knowledge   The hee in the...

Bodies We found them rolled together in a sack, soaked by runoff at the bottom of a grass embankment. Tossed from a car, no doubt. We peeled them apart and laid them on a bare log in a skinny roadside copse to dry. We were nine with little idea of what we beheld;...

Grass and Marble There’s a harmonica in my pocket, a spider crawling out of my mouth and on my backside a lovely long tail that’s been hiding, tucked in my pants. Instead of arms I have wings lacy but strong. Out of my belly button three or four babies spill out,...

francis bacon’s black mouths: a love poem painted over and over because he wanted to perfect blackness in different states of mouthness the black before the scream i’ve printed ‘em to put over the bed folded into origami orgasms as if doing squats over a speed bump...

This is Kansas, Toto There is a two-headed man living just outside Topeka who rarely goes into town. On Friday nights quite late he’ll wander into the roadhouse and order two Heinekens. He’ll draw the odd stare, but as long as he puts a twenty on the bar the drinks...

Thumbprints and Tree Rings   Are basically the same, yeah? Circular markings on living beings that show we originate from one genius source, one brilliant astral scientist who saw the stunning in all creation and said, I think I’ll leave them symbols of their...

Trauma, according to Webster's "An injury caused by an extrinsic agent or behavioral state resulting from considerable mental disruption and duress; acute physical suffering or emotional upset inflicted by a mechanism or force that causes trauma." I've spent years...

terminal ii How quiet a mouse must be underfoot as it feeds on human destruction. This house changes with the seasons, its long steps shaped like a mailbox & languishes in the snowmelt, freezing and refreezing as the days grow longer and nights lengthen as a ruler...

The days are suddenly shorter; the scent of brisk air when I wake, inviting melancholy   tied to winter need. Instinct buried deep, that sunshine and sustenance will soon grow   scarce? But there’s comforting memory as well: heat from the fireplace blaze, a...