birds

I did not see the sooty shearwater. Or the shitty sewerwater. To be a writer is to be defined as much by the things you have not done and then thought about than other things. Lived things. To be a dancer means to be in the body as a scientist is in the laboratory. To measure the living in the body. I am a scale and a ruler and a cup or spoon. It has always been about containing and labeling. Small jars. The bird I can measure does not skim crests--I skin its breast. I saw Audobon's large book open to a page I cannot name inside glass. I saw a bible. My hair is silvering.

They tell me there are a million ways to be a feminist, meaning one. Meaning that I should intuit the way and concur, as with bitches. I went all the way to Cape Cod and didn't visit Salem, didn't breathe the salt air through flame of charred ribcage, the singing corpses dancing in the sticks and this just a fair imitation of Europe. We watched a vampire movie tinged in blue. The Cape was pale gray and even as I threw it round my shoulders like a depleted red-riding-hood, a bloodless fickle girl, a wolf-killer, I couldn't fly. I don't. I don't want girl power. I want to crone, careen through the stone air in a gesture that terrifies the earth, bringing weather. There are the low and lower fronts moving in, and nets stretched across the atmosphere. My words are caught, snapped back into my face like thrashing fish, like embers. My words take down my face, expose the jaw, the high cheekbone, the brow. My words eat through my lips to reveal my teeth as the visible death they have always been, since the first set was sent tumbling by the second. No regard.

jesus for fun

If I cry on a Thursday, then the angels have to eat meat. Angels are pretty much vegetarian, except when I flummox them in this way. It is an obscure by-law and they get incredibly annoyed. Certain angels opt for sushi but really that's cheating, the actual scripture reads: flesh from a hooved male quadraped. Their teeth really weren't developed for this. They lack canines. Their teeth, in actuality, are kind of soft and roundish like pearls. It's for all the in-house kissing they do--they are more than a little repulsive, if you ask me. I am always manufacturing things on Wednesday nights to send me into a tantrum of temple proportions the next morning. On Fridays, as a bonus, when almost all of them are constipated, I brew weak coffee.

TOOT/5

Part no rather
of a canvas

Spectators: their here
--it's the picture

Stubbornly, relation ever established

It renders of centre
because that

not or seen, is.

From ceases its identity
of back and be

Take--

motionless being
traced time that, erased

: sovereign. Triangle
the picture corner.

One the the base sketched
surface soon. Spectator--

hold to him--
privileged, luminous him

The canvas his, the man
himself augmented

Still at picture window:
perspective. Can the flood

make time two-- irreducible?
Painting it, say, the easel or

of it from the vast
carries them towards this

over visible terrain into
not seen, yet is

PLT/5

outside in
thought's bidding

language we

our hearts' word
experienced between

and, in: adversaries.

then--
more.

AROOO/5

Seek to course.

Here me, Mary--
name not of importance

or of October.
Name is that of need.

Conclusion raises
rights. Some glowed
heat further in.

About reflected, sky
and tree had completely
lost. Call the name,

let the after

among weeds--it.
You, the idea: one's
cautious, and

it--the insignificant--
looked back
and cooking not

thought to look
to courses. Going small
nevertheless.

It's the once. And...

monologue of the inner warden

I was put here, facing in. To keep peace. Peace is the quality most revered in them that get out--their halo. I ensure it. You lose your selling point and what are you? I'm not them, not like'm at tall. I'm pushy and loud and they ain't s'posed to be tho some do pick that up. I get in trouble for my leaky behavior, but not too much. They wouldn't listen if I weren't insistent. If I weren't cruel. I say all sorts of things to keep'em pretty and kind. I tell'em what they'll be if they don't stay so. Nothing gets more airtime around here than words of shame. They're necessary and effective--I won't apologize for using the things. And yes I beat the ones forever staring out the one-window. They's the worst kind we make... all dopey all wishing. They's never happy in the outs. Always some other window, I'm guessing.

I was taught all about stolen. Stolen was mine own: words, ore, hours, breath. Everything was to be borrowed for me, and I would never be allowed to return anything because of the stain. My imprint was not a mark of worth. Only surface was. To gloss. I was taught to beget myself postmodernly, produce likenesses, and then found I could not. I refused it, but barely, began to hear the chime and cantor in the word essence, although I knew it was wrong to feel an underneath, beneath the photograph, the bone, that bit of world I need to suck. Absent nipple. Scattersource. Where the bees have bored, there bore I. Our flute our fibula our flower--the bees. Mine.

It is the gender in the brain that I would target. Red circles on the skull. A concentric cap. How is woman inscribed in the labyrinth? Is it? Possible to remake, retool, redraw, coax the minotaur back through his feeding, recover sacrifice, un-Daedalus? A red thread pulled as if upward through a cervix. This I would know: how I am made. Sewn? Printed? Digitized? Hewn from stone? Coagulated? Am I a calculation, a piece of pottery, a choreography of copper wire? Can it be undone? Which art are thou? Which art am I? And what made me--dread godhand or meme or viral joke? Why don't I desire bloodsport, defend rhetorically torture, let water pass, command? It must be one: defect, salvation, personality. Also: why happier in the questions? Why softer in the bed?

One dotter was conceived a man. No, two. Twelve. Admission: there were hundreds. Thousands of men were not priorly. Thousands of men pre-embryo could thread a needle with an eyelash, feel. Some retained water. Some were retrained. Some small rain down shall rain. The sum of their parts was not eagle to the hole-in-one. The hole was the part. Later, wholes were defined as solar--a system of orbits focused, buckets of electrons or planets swung around the largest tumor, largest mass, that ritual taking up of most. It is after all space and weight and not the scarlet robes or scepters, clubs, and balls that make-up men. A dotter should learn from this not to mince her steps. Instead, flesh out and out and out.

A bone spider wove it out of brick. The bricks came out her ass like silk constipation. The mortar, threads between. This was the original secretion of the dottery. No one still knows where it is suspended. Each new dew and it is gone from yesterday's span across the grass. The dottery houses women before they are conceived. The building teaches them waiting. The walls teach confinement. The inner warden teaches them how to occupy their small time with things that fit in hand. One-window teaches them the moon. The dotters learn it all so that it seems familiar when it is taught again or else they are bored to hatred and so unlearn. Dotters know this: all things undone contain their enemies. Dotters are not dotters from anatomy, dotters are dotters from edits, diets, tides, the cakey residue of Desitin in folds of infinite orchid. They arrive in silk, flee down ropes of root.

acute episode 6

I had many of my father's children
One died

acute episode 5

I knew not to think I was dying but I thought I was dying

acute episode 4

I couldn't hear

acute episode 3

The floor was ice I was chained to, then the air hot
I lay fetal in sweat and urine--mine

acute episode 2

Someone tore me open, small finger-length tears, not requiring sutures

acute episode 1

Today I was locked in a room without windows for eighteen years

they are gluing anuses
shut and then inducing
diarrhea to kill gays
in iraq i read this

i read that in iraq
people are gluing other
people's anuses shut
and then they die

they die from people
giving them pills to fill
them up with their own
waste in some lesson

the lesson I have yet
to learn I need people
to explain to me people
and how not to respond

with murderous hate to
murderous hate or the kind
of disbelief that makes
me shutdown notsay fold

this world is operating
on us with dirty tools

In the aftermath of the positions, bodies
I wonder how much walking and looking
away

What I mean is feel it, please
just feel it. Tell others that it
hurt you

that what hurt you was your ability
to idly go about your about and not view
human

others as deserving of, as undeserving
of will. They could not think they were
not dying

weeks of cold pain, naked floor, filth
disorientation which is a word signaling
uneast

and east is where god is sometimes in
the morning glimpsed by believers. I don't
know

who these persons are, I know that those
who flung them against flexible walls are
also

undeserving of this slaughter of things
cities were created out of, things no longer
evident

the architecture is bowing. The struts will
snap. Fire is not this time arriving from
blue sky

The fire this time is in the flood is in
the cloth is over the face. Nothing puts it
out.