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rose-clouds lead me to you,
your white pear breath
sweeping over my skin,
your american spirit stained
lips, your lexington soul
marred with new york city—
its smoke and its loss.
I think of your pale hands
touching my waist on the second flood balcony,
a cigarette between my teeth,
my red red neck
marked up with you.

we kissed in a champagne haze,
my summer green skirt
scrunched on the cobblestones,
the purity of my white linen
slashed with black dirt-lines.
we rode back to my father
and his lackluster truth
on the first b train we could find,
your head pressing to my stomach—
all life was a fever dream,
mighty and illuminated with neon signs
and hot breath in January nights.
you broke it, my 104 degrees,
your body almost touching mine
in that punk rock paradise with Styrofoam walls. 

apartment 2B

and god, I loved you all my life,
your nike sweetness,
white marble broken,
hookah smoke enveloping
tingled with rose mint.

ineffable soul,
you could never be mine
as I was hopelessly yours,
you venus de milo swaying
in your marlboro cloud.

neptune avenue
shone gold and gray
around us,
your fingers stroking
my thin wrists,
i glow in the waves of your kiss.

you touched me,
cabernet sweet,
on emmons
on coney island,
under the white wooden coasters
where you lulled me to love.

Shame

I touched her electric skin in the tangerine morning,

Fingers of rose-haze coming quietly over the horizon—

I loved her then, before I knew

She was a ghost, needle marks running up

Her arms, black thread sewn over her torturous tendons. 

We staggered around the middlesex fairgrounds

And its flattened grasses, riding the tilt-a-whirl

When we could barely stand—

And I touched her skin in contempt of something,

Of who we were and who I was,

Of the child that was lost,

Taking with it my familial beliefs,   

Of our kitchen covered in shards

From my mother’s throwing plates against the wall,

Of my father’s lost job, his lost law. 

But she took me from all the bad he stood for

And all the falsity he poured forth,

When she kissed my skin

And let me kiss hers, tasting of salt, gardenias,

And victorious nectarines, soft with summer. 

New Mexico

Loving you was like capsizing into december’s cold ocean,

And it was raining, bringing the end through

With a bang and a cliché,

And I remember wondering

If this year would pass so I could forget

The whole thing, our orthodox mistake,

Where we drank black coffee and fought over

Who would get the milk, so the corn flakes were always dry,

And the little house always messy, that house

With the cobalt front door and the clay walls,

Rising up from a long expanse of flat. 

I planted the bluebells there, out in the dust

Hoping they would grow in New Mexico,

I watched the plateaus stay still and grow older,

And I met god in the dream I had for a month straight,

Where the sky turned mauve and bright yellow,

Striped and hailing down pancakes

Like in that children’s book I read to the kids I babysat

When I was sixteen, and they would laugh

When I told them that it was cloudy,

And they would ask about the chance of meatballs. 

Remembering

All that I remember from Apocalypse Now

Is the fire over the gum trees

And the doors singing about the end. 

The Lieutenant screaming

Over the camouflage helicopter’s roar

As Marlon Brando looks at shards of a reflection

In brown ripples, napalm and steel bullets

Taking over a country.

Francis Coppola was narrating the terror

Because my parents couldn’t turn it off

And Coppola told us he was in Manila

Listening to the World Series

On a wind up radio and Michael sheen

Was outside with fake blood

Caked over his body. 

The narration ends in my father’s voice who’s

Singing over Jim Morrison

In a bellowing tenor, because he wants to forget

That he was there too in Cambodia,

Washing the bloody mud off his calves in the sick river. 

Angelbreath a.k.a mania

Lord, lord, you are a fever.
my molly
my cigarettes,
unfiltered
scraping
I do not recall
the dreamland
of death
(that was what it was
not love)
and yet
you left me tearing this chain
from my neck
pressing burning milds
to my lips
carving nail marks
in my palms,
crying out in sleep
to let me go.

Rust (a very first draft)

I used to love her
In her tequila sunset
All ruddy wet blooming
Over our rose bud heaven.
Spilling over the bed
Was her golden hair
Shimmering like a wet pearl.
Below the horizon
I watch her pass person to person
On missed connections
And F train subway cars, but
Past lives defined her, mine,
Lying on my bed
Her back arching
My fingers arching
Arching into her paleness,
Salty and warm.
No one remembers her, meek,
Swimming without ripple
Towards the plastic siding
Of our backyard pool;
My mother cannot remember her name,
Her name so sweet against my tongue
Her name pressing against my throat
Her name clenched against my palm,
I will never let it go.