a long arm extended 
from the center of a lashless 
eye grasping at emptied fog 
space holes like the commanding 
hand that keeps you flat 
against the mattress eaten through 
with moths that just barely touching 
your skin plunge into fire heat 
emerging more fashionably seen. 
long hairs cover every surface. 
my imagination wants but never
reveals its object. a disappearing 
act in low-res: 
          camera + body = image? 
          image - referent = woman? 
or just 
          image + image + image + image … 
the way through soaked in 
your juices that seep into my 
boots poorly laced and stolen 
from that darkened room where 
I saw myself, a slow simmered 
reduction drizzled over artisanal
food that I am too poor 
to eat.  

The violet field is sunk low beneath the horizon 
Where my pony runs in instrumental timing 
Its high grass a shivering 
Body and each blade twists in unison shrieking

Laughing on the velvet wind 
Gone cold, cotton wind atop a seeded brush of milkweed 
Soil still wet from prolonged inaction 
And the halting progeny of rooted desire

My pony’s copper hair 
A silk rope I slip into my mouth

I slip my mouth into 
My pony’s braying prayer 
When the clamor reaches midnight
Moonlighted by the creases in my grass-stained satin dress 
The hills caked in thick foam light expanding

And I smoke the pony eyelid tremors a softening 
Just once, I dig a hole to make a canvas 
On brown and use my pony’s fine copper tail as a brush 
To paint our future beyond the dream fence and the hill foam

Where visions of residual touches take this wet curled commitment 
And put it in the crossed pocket grass-stained 
Satin dress itself sewn to the rhythm 
Of beam and cross

My pony is a climatologist 
My pony is a soothsayer 
My pony is a mean streak running jagged 

And the flowers crowd and watch 
Our gummed chest intercourse 

things you thought were there but aren’t; peripheral vision; seeing things other people can’t; fortune telling; superficiality, vanity, desire; violence; other dimensions; tarot; astrological planets; foresight; hindsight; night vision glasses; drones; near- and farsightedness; blindness; detached corneas; visible light and color; mirrors; possession; dreams; memory; post-traumatic stress disorder; triggers; prediction, chance; from very high places; from very low places; from the grave ;;

I am coming of age in the new economy 
of transfixion, little daughter 
in the age of daughterlessness, 
a flammability, an insurance policy. 
I am moving along a steaming promise 
with eyes on the center, which is never not water, 
which is never not words. I raise my throat to it 
and your throat meets me there, 
calm and tendril. I am the daughter of nothing 
and you are the daughter of me. I knew 
you were my daughter when you 
came out of me sideways, slip-knotted and feral, 
crouched behind my pelvis. Wet rocks for a face, 
slick shoulders heaving, blue-red daughter. 
You’re a daughter like a mirror 
is a daughter, and your hiding will always be reflected 
down a long dark hall not of your making. 
The fear of exposure flattening the desire  
to be exposed. Contradiction is you 
on your back, your small chin raised 
as if wanting to be fed. Your open mouth 
an obscene glistening pearl. 
You’ll be surprised how easily 
shame confronts you like a dead end, dusty rose 
-colored but bolder than that. More like 
a stirring sound without a source. 
An open door letting the cold in, daughter, 
and you will be the one to close 
the door. Sharpening your teeth on its handle 
until your mouth is an catalogue of glittering triangles. 
What should I teach you except how to steal 
away the things that I cannot teach? 
Because this is not science, only reproduction, 
and that means we must bite our way 
to the surface, or at least to a place
where fear is called out by its name, so that it might 
turn and shrink in recognition. Daughters 
like a myth. And when we’re finally seen, we will 
appear in the form of what’s unbearable, 
dead or alive.

the move is hardly ever sweet enough to abate sickness 
limbs stretch away 

internal toxins 
a greased knot

pulled from the lean throat 
of a yoga instructor 

i come from a place 
where life depends on the reading 
and bodies are a composite

of the most tender 
folds, yes 
where your puckered mouth

perfects its shapeliness 
against the stiffness 
of starched cotton

it feels miles away 
from my own mouth

the wet between us 
waiting

i cry in the wet 
with the sickness

with the stone drop 
with the appetite 
of a large giggling animal 

that has a mouth that’s kissed 
everything

my sick animal head 
deliberating its weaponry 
the move hardly ever sweet enough

for a fight 
i exhale dreams of your 
puckering 

and the sickness 
my arched animal 
spine

its death 
another recourse 

quiet spreads over the trimmed grass
and into the house,
          and then another, the whole block
a geography prone to secrecy and
                                                           duplication

speaking in symbols
over email           do you ever feel
                          like a white crane
                          on the side of a highway

they’ve rearranged the furniture for your arrival
if you ever make it,        your heart
palpitates,
                       you’ve told no one

        but you’re sure
the animals will know, the way
        they can smell cocaine or sense
        an on-coming seizure

you’re taking the train      you’re
        the master of deception
but your skill slowly deflates in the face
of 20,000 floor plans

        there are five variations of an original
architecture perfectly disciplined
     to   the familial
             no man’s      land

who lays the interminable gravel
and what’s the         sound
      congealing in the      thick     fog
   that’s settled on top of it

          this is the question
that
                 precedes your going limp
the damp cave       of your
      chest            fluttering
a skip in your throat (not
   unpleasurable)    and cosmic tightness
                   you smell
                                 a flowerbed
it has        a funereal quality to it
      and a brightness       beyond
bright
               like the scalloped edges
          of your vision
   are beyond    the suburban
       trappings
            of
                   commerce

The woman inside death is wet
Her body

A coldly decorated infinite detention center
On the wall a sign that reads
LOVE IS ACCEPTING, NEVER EXPECTING
Beneath it somatic memories
Like plaster
An interiority with a skin that speaks of open-air navigation, mass movement,
Gestures excavated from the deep recesses of capital’s lethal gossamer

And the smiling
And the stillness
And the secrecy

Anti-natality

*

Clean men and women pass through open doors
She stands behind them watching their gold rings shine off
The surface of plastic wombs swollen and floating across the Mediterranean
Where they will eventually fill with water and sink to the bottom

Of whatever
Where their graves will be marked with nothing
But the words of the living
Promising not to forget them

She sees these clean men and women and she wants to kill them
She feels it like hunger
Like the first time she felt salt water

It shines inside of her medallion stomach
Like a fever wound that won’t stop bleeding out the past
-tense of future violence

And how can something be graceless and also godly
A bodily instinction and a spiritual imperative

And her hunger is a dream of what doesn’t happen

To eat and devour and shrink
And fill up the world with glowering light
Until it shatters like glass

*

As the brown dust recedes at a pace in time to her heartbeat
And the opacity of the skyline is fundamentally different now
The city dusk is a hushing
Crawl beneath her eyelids the trembling clay whispers

Do you remember your soul? Do you feel it moving?

*

The boat is over capacity
The slave ship and the Carnival cruise
And the migrant who is nothing but wind on a sail

Left out of official
Memory down below she sleeps with the unnameable things
Faces from the past that look like hers
But not

Caught underneath the construction of logic 
A deep gash, an outpouring of alien matter creating a centrifugal black hole in a field of trash and old technology 
I am quiet in the field, typing an email on a crumbling laptop 
The swirling cloud of black flies around my head are fat with evidence against me 
My birth was a predetermined guilty verdict 
A timeless herald, immune to our fragile responsive interior 
Our built environment on rubber stilts

My struggling objective: 
To disgorge the burden of happiness 
Upend the sticky-handed exchanges 
That pave the dark path to namelessness 
And the motored dialectic of expand & contract

But I am always a double agent in the project of my demise 
Whole days go by without memory 
Just the cyclical pleas for reason and panic in the constancy of disaster 
What other climate but this 
Could produce such a sure stranglehold around the fabric of language

I am filled with the placating hymn of belated hysteria

I am screaming with it 

My friends…

Forgive me for my failures and also my clumsy rebirth 
All of the immiseration that keeps our arrhythmic impulses locked to the dusty and immovable “I" 
We want the dissolution of everything 
There are times when we have felt this & been sure of it 
While the sunrise underneath our eyes points towards an empty timeline

… 

……

To write with the expectancy of not being read… 

In order to excavate our counter testimony we must get close to death 
And the skin peeling back to reveal the poems or blue feathers 
Which themselves are made legible through the compacted mirrored maze 
Of capitalist value forms, the spatial arrangement of life chances

Stock prices changing in your sleep 
While you dream dreams of bad faith 

My iridescent aching

And I don’t write I just don’t do it 
Beyond the tailspin of words that occasionally burst out with no where else to go 
When the deepest parts of me are too dark even for this 
Not for lack of trying 
More like an unchartedness that is mistaken for bravery or strength

You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?

…

And even after all of this, the petrified face 
Of an empty page like a blank rock wall moments before its blasted apart 
To make a more beautiful kind of dying 

But is it writing? No, it’s not writing.