it's been coming out as hollow pockets of lung.  as misshaped incantations.  the murmurs clock at every four seconds.  i watch it, the digital, like it's something to hold onto.  like i have one hand and one sensation left.  you are reaching.  green light permeates.  nervousness.  shadows.  i shape lotus blossoms from the dingy brown belly of my sweatshirt.  release the new bud when you say 'here' and pass me the clips.  gauze on the second shelf next to lipton and band-aids.  we've been thinking about sewing ourselves up, lacing our skin in pretty black ribbon, pulling the stitches tight, digesting all this the way it was meant to be digested.  believing in all this the way it was meant to be believed in.  boiling & rising & never coming down.  the words are flurries, stutters.  we make poems out of wisps, air conditioner coils, wind chimes & heat, empty rolling rock bottles.  you decipher the sound, i the meaning.  it is delicious.  the way our bodies absorb the scene.  the way skin stretched against skin becomes the scene.  our scene.  first slice of something bigger than our selves.  you hold it.  rock it.  feed the baby & let go.


the lady across the street, the one who has taken so swiftly to prancing behind glass in white pajamas.  the one with asthmatic fingertips, bi-polarish knuckles & roses the shape of east ky. pearls.  she says sweet ornaments will kill us like jewels in the mouth, like soft blue murmurs, like high fevered poesy scribbled at midnight on heavy thighs.  she says we are foundlings wrapped in good things, you and i.  says she's got answers somewhere on her ankles.  lost them there in '82.  the year of the big ice storm.  the year of the big heartbreak & big love.  she's got her theories.  an inkling where we're headed.  ideas on tornadoes & rain & why sometimes the boy doesn't ever come back.  i, myself, can not explain the consistency of our voices.  why your elbows slide underneath my ribcage in sullen moments.  why my fingertips crawl against your collarbone when we're quiet.  perhaps this is the way a woman feels when she falls into stories, the way she feels when lights turn ochre after midnight & her man twists on his side, flip flops on a mattress & the back she once claimed, the shoulders she fell in love with, are freckled with kisses that are not her own.  the lady across the street says all this will end.  says it's been twenty years.  her knees are aching.  the ice storm is coming.  i've had my big love.


inconsistencies.  tied four in a bundle.  coming out in measures, our poems don't flow quite like our blood flows.  frenzy.  pulsations.  mine is washed our watercolor.  thin, not thick.  a series of blues & black on white canvas.  here.  it is all here.  the mint green sink is empty.  toilet bowl white.  not a speck in the shower drain.  i have not lost it.  thank god for that.  three stars have turned purple, ripped against a 12 am sky.  died.  the meth is running low & you are not satisfied with my idiosyncracies.  not so definite anymore about our existence.  rather, we are shadows stalking the living, following vibrant souls to the corner of mill st. & main where they eat, sleep, dream, fuck.  perhaps it would be best to curl inside this darkness, to become the hardened woman recalling words of the pros: fluttery goddesses in sleek vinyl A-lines, the ones who spewed prophecies & vision before us, wore a well-fuck-me laidback serenity disguised as lip gloss & smudged coal liner on days when rain threatened to beat pavement into submission.  perhaps it would be best to render the rights & wrongs, to re-think the workings of your skin, slide back into my own.  dim the lamps in the living room.  leave the words, kisses, scratchings, scene, our scene & ask the lady across the street exactly what happens,




if the girl doesn't ever come back.