Waveland, Mars
Up in my leathers, my formulas
My grandmother cutting away a wet nightgown
From my mother’s barren legs. What the shining,
The heaven snipers & copper pipes —
Light what up, the mallow of wild
Heart wood, a swung cornet,
Soprano comet, the baroque & invented valves.
Harmonia me into the good weather. If such a thing,
If such a thing exists. I built you the grandest patents,
Neat algorithms felted in goose fat,
The shout, the shout
Get off my throat!
Love is a long time, I know that —
I darned, I sewed machines into revenant hums.
The name of every bird
Married to appetite.
All I see are the lingual ancestors.
Like a bugle, wanting order.
The comet wants fanfare, a comedy
Swamped in bodily fluids. I have a relationship
To the trumpet. Hooks & rotaries, the
Steep & silent shuttle.
Panoply of mars.
A dog sniffing the blood of ripe beef daube.
The interior of a pig, garnet-colored.
A frozen sow, pitched a fourth above the standard.
Your strangled, half-loved fingerings.
A feed dog, a jellied leek.
My mother, with her uneven row of trees.
Vinegar on a hard wood floor.
An ugly stitch. The ripeness of cantaloupe.
Rivers named for wolves.
Fabrics, they taste differently. The needle, it gives you 15 hours.
A hygienic sound. Double, triple tonguing.
A column of air.
Somewhere a ranch. Somewhere a wildfire.
A quilt in American pieces.
The bitter candy of it; a tough & spitting sugar.
My shoulders violins, the wrested
Instrumentation of an ottered heart.
Washing my hair with wave scum.
An extravagance of aromatics,
A girl upon the kitchen counter in her
Pineapple-printed bathing suit.
I loved the awfulness of girlhood, no
Gone-wrong patibulum, no enamored man pleading
Guilty to laying hands on infant skin.
Seated on a doctrine at the equinox.
Indecency, it fucks & milds me.
I dream of Rome the way I dream of daughters,
Histories of angels. A black-painted juniper berried
In a spasm of rain. A rose astonishment
Brought me to the Mount of Olives.
It was a debate about taxation.
Eldered daughters eating from raw jism stars.
Aristotle’s First, unmoving Mover.
A war on girls.
Some say there are four worlds and ours is the last, the island world.
I can take milk into my mouth like anyone.
But you know,
It hurts.
Chapel me, daughter.
I drink three cups of silence.
A rational wiggery.
That you:
Make a fine salad of my intellect. The:
Honey, the lemon, the crushed moon salt.
Some botanists split the hazels, the tropical commons,
Babies in coracles. A scattering of daughter light.
What I quit in a generosity of hip.
The infant brain-fat.
The cultivation of catkins. The hazel flowers, the hedgerows.
A pretty blue train, an Epiphany tree in winter.
The intimacy of jasmines.
A fine and neural powder, forking over buried water.
I draw a circle around myself. A circle. A daughter.
A crown of twigs.
Three pins of hazel wood to protect my flaming,
My given home from fire.
“Waveland, Mars” is from Giantess (YesYes Books, 2018).