i sneak in the back to avoid the front porch talk.

April 4: Calliphora

Blue bottle bottle-neck flies swing their bodies
daintily over the edge and walk on sideways,
sticky haired feet that I'm jealous of these days
holding them on to the wall. I run to catch them.

I would shrink my body down into a bun dome
and I would let the world drape that crevassed black shawl
over my new blue hunchback if only I could also
suck my legs into needle thin black and could dance
on the tiniest flexed out toes over the ceiling,
looking down with my eyes big and red and better.

The sun would sink in and through my delicate filmed wings
until I shook off the golden and took, wheeling, down to the alley
to burrow down between the small pieces of the city
that I'll only ever notice with my legs curled under my bottlebee belly.

April 4: studyin's a lonesome sport

There's a swan lives out past the humps of the swamp,
somewhere after the cypress knees curl back under their cypress feet,
that's been calling my name since I learned my letters and numbers.
I always call back to him that the b reminds me of settin' in a chair,
no notion of going anywhere, and he tells me he ain't got a b in his name
so I can't hope to swing that with him
can't hope to steal between the hoops of the 8 and tumble away
back under the stilts of my house in the cool plane of dirt where
a swan can't never dare to go, less he wants to squash his feathers into brown --
look like a common sparrow fattened up on corn meal,
neck dragged out by a gator into some kind of rope flesh.
That poor sparrow shuffles on under the house and curls up warm
on my side so I feel his strong, breaking feathers got soft like baby down
and the curves in a cursive Q. I tell him that he can stay
as long as he like, until the bloating goes down and we can
find him a doctor to shove that neck back down into his chest.
So we crouch under the porch and watch leather clad feet
stomp on to hop into leather shoe-d cars and speed off
leavin' in my name only smoke that smells worse than the dead panther
my older brother found about a mile out the corner of town, tangled in a mangrove.

April 4: Now I know why old ladies lick their thumbs before turning pages

I would tell you I am lost but I would be lying.
I've just stumbled out of where you are into somewhere else
and left a shoelace trailing behind me so you can pick up the pinched plastic end,
stick it into your ear and listen.
I am digging a whole in the center of town and people are watching
as I scratch at the dirt like a chicken so shamefully white
until finally the mud sinks into my beak and I caw out black words
that don't translate well over shoelaces.
I am prancing around with my wings out wide
bobbing my head out and back until the people understand what I'm asking for.
They pour on the pepper and the cumin and the cayenne in sprinkles
like a special sort of faerie dust that sinks in between my feathers.
I can feel that itching even now.
Now the dusk is draping over the tops of the high roofed houses
and falling flat in pools of grays on the flat topped ones,
and there's a flickering in the forest.
I have been blackened and flavored and now I am leaving this end to you,
because I have an appointment to keep in the night.

I would tell you to let me catch up, but I'm enjoying your poetry too much.

April 4: Some things never change

Please remember that no matter
how many times I tell you I'll turn around
but keep walking, looking straight ahead,
you are the one that follows me with your
worn out shoes, tickling the dirt you swore
you'd never touch with the bare balls of your feet.

April 4: Sisters
written with Pengu

you have feathers in your hair.
did you know?
just there.

the dimple of your right cheek
is deeper than the left,
when you smile you seem tilted.

a little more weight on your right foot,
a little more weight round the middle.

i've noticed you eating outside -
the sun kisses the point of your nose
more strongly than everywhere else.

just there under that green tree
where your sister carved her name.
did you know?

she used cursive, because your mother taught her
that night before the world broke in half,
the speckled blue of her ball point
etched into the table
between the lines of the tablecloth
and the knives set out in rows,
ink leaking over into the wood and
you have feathers in your hair,
did you know?

the birds got in while we were sleeping,
i see the dent of their claws
to the side of your eyes,
stepping outward
in a little bitty two step
underneath the attic door,
they got feathers in our hair
and we rushed down stairs
to the smell of breakfast burning again,
eggs black and crisp,
crumbling up the sides,
i could see the leaves in them.

i could see those little bulbs in green and pink
where the blight kisses crumbles and leaves insects.
underneath the see-through veins
they curl up,
keeping the warmth inside their tiny bodies,
even as they congeal into your skin,
slick without purpose or intent.

they remind me of last night
when i waited for sleep to come.
i waited with my eyes pulled open
by your stubbed finger tips
and you bent down over me
with feathers in your hair.
did you know?

i have no roots.
i suck water from the air.
choking on dust
because i have no filter.

did you know?

there are feathers in your hair.
they are small like chicks
nesting in the flick of your fringe -
did you know?
i never asked.

the filter has gone the way of the rains,
and the dust is a sieve in my throat.
i sound like you.

April 4: Heredity

It was weird to find out that the pots my mother gave me
when I moved out of her house and out of the state
and shoved them into my own cupboard instead,
that those amber colored pots like stacking dolls
shrinking as they wobbled from the back to the front,
that those pots she gave me because she said she never used
were pots that my father's parents had owned and sold
and had somehow come back to my mother
even as she tore away from my father
even as I tore away from my mother
and my father crawled into my house while I was sleeping
peeking in the cupboards telling me:
his parents used to own those and cook him dinner in those.
Now I let him sleep on the floor in the kitchen
with his head white and loud next to the cupboard
and sometimes when I wake up in the glare from the light next door,
I see him sitting, peering in and lifting his nose to the quiet air,
smelling a memory I cover with burn marks
when I forget to stir the pasta.

April 5: lost at shore

The girl stores almonds in her eye sockets,
shoving them in with her thumb so they pile up into her head
as she sits beneath the drowning tree
and scatters pieces of the ones she shattered all around.

The sea rolls in two ways – gray liquid, gray gas
and she sees them sepia through striations,
clouding up like sheep skin washed in the stream
on the ribs of a boy who once tasted honey
from the small, white flutes of a clover in her field.

A hand is dangling from that memory to her head,
bowing on the green branch of the tree in shades of
barnacled ship decks and rotting keel ropes and
the fuzz that grows on old, hot meat outside. It brushes
with the tips of its fingernails the strands of her hair
that flyaway in bleak afternoons spent on shore.

At the very top of the drowning tree balances a boat
tip down like a teapot made of planks that her father
ground down with the sand that surrounded their home,
and her brother washed up with the brine that pooled
in the corners of their kitchen and the anemone that was her mother
kneads hard tack and limes together in big barrels in the bedroom,
and the girl reaches in and pulls one out and slips it over her tongue.

April 5: easybake

ginger crumble falls apart in my hands
with the feel of butter too warm to cut
and sugar too sweet to taste, eclipsing
my hands as i try to knead, but i can't
get a grip on the pieces that make up
the whole before baking. i sit with my
hands in the bowl and my hair down,
waiting for the vanilla to pour itself
and the room to fill with the smell of
confidence without my effort at all.

April 5: dreaming of Jesus

I remember then
that God is locked in the freezer
and I contemplate
the day's many warmths.

Spoiler

morning, day, evening, night --
before the icicles dance
their Easter on my eyebrows.

April 5: alveoli

a branch sticks up from the ground and cries
from its torn end to the sky in tones of green,
spring yellow stained again with green.
it screams in sprout-winding sentences,
elliptic around standing trunks and
settling in a cover over the places where buds pressed
through bark to gasp in air with wet, solid longs
sweet of cedar in the early whispers of spring.

the chatter of winter has not yet withdrawn;
it still lays and laughs, reaching pale blue hands up
the sides of the stranded branch, eager to clasp
lid-palms over the would and stifle and capture
and crumple ball up that cry into a small flesh,
lock it in a hard shell, toss it to the wind's guffaws.

but the breath of the sky in rain sings sweet invisible nothings
and from verdant blood a fetal pod unfurls.

April 5: tri-hi-puh-huh-leh-het

i sit in my under-
wear and he sits in his.
staring at the same wall
melting movement to shape:
a dash of apricot,
the twitch of bush birds out
at the sound of a car horn,
brown streaks of flesh across
the open train-filled sky,
but never in my line of sight.

April 6: take out dine in delivery

my chopsticks fall on the floor twice a day and have
conspired to a pile in the same of the pyramids that waver in mirages
through cyan yellow red pixels. i pretend the sweat i feel creeping
in the hairs of my armpits and slinking down my sides is from
trekking over dunes and behind camels, scarf on my head,
sand flung in my face. "when nature gets angry" and the
zoom twists its head around to peer at the back of a panther's
yellow tooth, but my head stays lolling on my shoulder
because there is nothing coming in the window but
through the air conditioner's minced gnashes
and there is nothing coming through the door but bills.

April 6: I'm Not Sure I Want to Tell You

i have a secret.
i don't care for it
but i knew that if i told you
you'd bend over forward and retch
sweet apologies in centipedes to slip underneath the bed.

there is no reason to tell you but to collect
them like palmfuls of spaghetti
in the toe of my sock
and put it back
away.

i pretend the sweat i feel creeping
in the hairs of my armpits and slinking down my sides is from
trekking over dunes and behind camels, scarf on my head,
sand flung in my face. "when nature gets angry" and the
zoom twists its head around to peer at the back of a panther's
yellow tooth, but my head stays lolling on my shoulder
because there is nothing coming in the window but
through the air conditioner's minced gnashes

Loved watching you get wild with the flow here. Decapitalisation was fabulous; added just the dash of secrecy of thought and irritation that this needed. I want to see more of this.