This gallery contains 9 photos.
Suburbia is an unexpected spider weaving us deep into its intricately crafted traps. I slit, cut, and peel away each layer of my eye, straining to see through the thick cloudy silk.
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This Is Found
Tag Archives: poetry
Ritual No. 8
She cuts the edge of the lawn with the tiniest of scissors, each spear a strand of thread dripping of weld and woad. Between concrete and harvest she kneels towards ache and atrophy. She makes an art of the contrast that rests in that barrier. Float and crust and cool and keep. She weaves the words, “I am like you,” her voice the velvety slope. The sun at her sweaty neck burns its mark into her skin. Cut, cut, cut, and patch. Each gash and slit of yellow nubs releases abundant bitter milk. Warp and weft and dream and sleep. Bloated toads heave in the dirt, discarded buried beating hearts.
Ritual No. 24
Dogwood petals fill the gutters like a fluttering snowdrift. See the women scurry, living sacramentals, unlocked from each box. A rush of brooms and rakes sweep and scrape, purging all proof of the fleeting blooms. On low branches the skinks bask in the sun, speaking their own truth and untruth, flicking their blue tails as they turn away. Hoses uncoil to wash the gutters clean. Pinned to the sky, above the tree, a mass of bumblebees hovers and hums. Along the edge of the hill below there comes a quiet crash. Children crush plastic birds and doll hands to meet the flood of petals flowing towards the sewage drain. So soon the street is the clearest gray. Only a shadow of tree remains. Running up the hill the children pluck the skinks from the dry bark. Each box locks again. Curls glisten under glowing clouds. Thin blue worms twitch, pinched between tiny fingers and thumbs.
The Rented House in Spring
I invade unworthy of the reds, purples, yellows, pinks. You are gone to God knows where now. He is dead. I am sleeping in a clear glass bed in the deep night of the front lawn. Entangled, like vines, your secrets fall out of my ears. My eyes ache. The ground curves, swells, ruptures, as each tulip speaks words as smooth as milk. Your mail just keeps coming. Letters spilling from the box. The season’s last frost rests, then melts, on my skin. I wake with torn eyes, cut and split by every lush bloom emerging from your gardens–hyacinth, lilac, wild phlox, climbing rose, jasmine. The most gorgeous inheritance. Darkness can be found beneath the mossy wooden border, under carefully placed rocks, stone lambs, worn bricks. I pick them up to find the worms, entwined, sensuously busy at their work. At night the moon falls to the ground, explodes, covers the creeping Jenny with its juices.
Paradox No. 4
See how she empties
the vase, eats
the browned edges
of the festered
bindweed flowers. This is her sacred disease,
this cyst on the eye of her soul,
this silence, an edible
stillness pushing her
toward a state of suffocation. She is seized. Taken.
Overcome. All is still. She takes these shards
and this water into her hands. See the wound that falls
between the curve
of her hips. The browned edges
come up to bite her.
She sits locked. Petals fall. Take these shards and this water,
these perfumed remains.
Break skin. Purify.
the vase, eats
the browned edges
of the festered
bindweed flowers. This is her sacred disease,
this cyst on the eye of her soul,
this silence, an edible
stillness pushing her
toward a state of suffocation. She is seized. Taken.
Overcome. All is still. She takes these shards
and this water into her hands. See the wound that falls
between the curve
of her hips. The browned edges
come up to bite her.
She sits locked. Petals fall. Take these shards and this water,
these perfumed remains.
Break skin. Purify.
Dear Suburbia 