GIRLS I HAVE KNOWN (i)
so much that is forgotten
comes from being hollowed
out by time times time equals
a sign I ask respite from
gather my thoughts in blood
under-sink coffee canisters
punctured by screwdrivers
and stuffed with a stillborn
baby or bacon fat white & thick
in the fridge like what we’re
not taught by parents who
are never present moths held
gingerly by the wings & shaken
or pressed between the pages
of a field guide home to all
the birds you know and can
name and those you cannot
GIRLS I HAVE KNOWN (ii)
pistol pistol blood spatter
pattern pardon my reach
sister another day in which
arms are not enough to hold
your body at arm’s length from
tragedy a new skull hole I
maybe never knew you in
the way no one actually
knows a teenager the body
a series of fantastic obliterating
orbits of oppositional
chemicals and electric
pulses dangling stupid child
hood stupid body by stupid
threads bullet enters never
exits your body reverbs
against your boyfriend he
absorbs your impact an
accident blooms within
the stupid brain stupid bullet
reaching out from another world
CONSCIOUS UNCOUPLING
As opposed to drifting, your paramour’s stomach
or breasts or backside the shore which gradually
recedes into a movie sunset, and which starlight
makes a fool of nearly as often as the sun does
the moon. A lack that exists, the slack muscles
an apparatus for loving, or sleeping, a deeply
photogenic form of somnambulism touched by
discovery of our more lurid parts. Putting down
an old dog after placing an order for a puppy
with a online breeder. All those layers of onion
battered and fried. At last it arrives, unharmed
and miraculously intact and in question format.
Why not measure love in knots and nautical miles—
the length of your skirt divided by time—steeped
in a warm bath like a bag of tea? To ask is to believe
there is an answer, to swerve before the trunk of an
enormous tree split by lightning. To remove your
stomach in hopes of avoiding a consuming hunger.
Glint Literary Journal 