He's Having a Baby / My Belly is Empty


i just french inhaled, sputtered out o's.
goody for me.

gutter outside virginia
east of everything,
near the path of righteousness.
i'm headed for the boy
who tore my insides with a nail
back in '97 when the wind still slept in pine ridge.

brown sweater for protection
warm coffee as a means of preservation
the shakes, i've got them, can't pinpoint the donor.
maybe it's an accumulation of rainstorms
of messes, quick fixes, push backs & forgets,
memories shredded with the shrapnel of reality--


the choice of weapon was not mine.


2 a.m.  hair in knots.  knuckles white.
the sky will not stop moving &
i will not let go.

to lie awake at night with the dreaming
is to fall outside the atmosphere
bottoms up, feet dangling, scratching for a thread of reason.
but it might also be, sometimes, to fall back in.


( he's having a baby.     my belly is empty. )


there's something about shaking out the screams
spending a year trying to uncover
the drowsiness of purple blue black yellow

e v e r y t h i n g

tying yourself in knots, re-tying, double checking for slack,
that leaves a girl wondering how much of her soul has hatched
and which parts might still be inside the shell
fighting for breath.


4:17 a.m.  stale coffee.  stiff knees.
morning birds as a means of penetration.
somewhere on a blankete north of everything he was,
i am reminding myself in small ways, that the path is still outlined
that the words are still here, swimming inside my collarbone
though the voice has quieted & fingertips slowed to a halt.

just choking on swallows that won't go to the glistening down there
where he held the girl and her world, knowing that the bone
& tenderness of it all would fall asleep with the turning of june.

flirting with the idea of self-inflicted love, aged wounds
that turn my eyes to aqua, to aquatic seriousness, to serious contemplation
beneath the silence and gulps of left-over dreaming.

rewinding until the still screen is a black & white speck
stuck permanently on pause, inhaling, exhaling beneath the static
of all this inevitable.

to lose the moment, the history, his history, our history
is to lose my collection of hoarded everything

and i need my everything

to remind me that sometimes the hand of god
leaves fingerprints on my forehead, forces me
to run, to turn, to fall in & out & away
from the complexity of a love that was never mine.

i am nothing if i can not decipher the mystery of those prints,
understand my tendency to side-step miracles
when the turbulence of constellations
begins to brew into something that looks like infinity

but more resembles the girl i was yesterday
holding skin & self & bone--

pieces he never touched but fancied

because sometimes,
he said sometimes,
he couldn't understand


my love for things




u n s e e n


.