cleaning up my studio as we approach the semester’s end, sifting through all the scraps of paper I’ve been writing on the last several months. here are some fragments.

You took my hand and inscribed in it the notion: touch. Your tongue with which I taste.

I watched the darkness walk into you with certain step. The mare, the flame, the rippling pool. We work our foolish magics on the night. 

I am older now than you were then.

We quiet ourselves in soft absorption, the edge of Mina’s eyes before us, untethered. The dampened mats are cry repent, repent, belettered in mist.

Taped to the page, a piece of writing from years and years ago:

you said: I will wait,
I will sit and watch
but which tavern did you speak to?
you know I would stay with you,
a lamb at the edge of the tub,
gleaming

She bends her body into me and says, why don’t you come here anymore? Too tangled up in river weeds and rough men to remember where you come from? To take time for hot stew and soft company? Well, no matter. You can blow me off, but you can’t pick me out your bones.

Our Lady of the Fallen Star

your head, bowed. your eyes, clear. the world, the world.

the shape your eyes made in leaving. the embrace of a wall. the part of you that is always ever and ever without cease disintegrating. the word of acid and the word of blood. I could never, oh I could never–the unhinging of my thought’s jaw the record’s crack unveiling, your little sister a missionary of grace, your body a balloon in spring, the fields are then the field below. we climb the mound and the mound becomes us. the well, then, the well.

uncovering, we loosed our tongues among the matted reeds. our stray unfurling edges bent to please the aching of some distant path, and as our spinster bodies were undone we leapt, like light, from branch to branch, becoming and again the things the world had been to bolster us against.

we let our blood speak for itself.

and the words were like a flood that brought us under, the discovery of some new species living quietly within us, feeding on our terror, and our spit. 

take your long, curling thoughts, and douse me in them; the fire that crawls in will not crawl out. 

notes from this long late winter:

The great something to be said for the presence of hands, the letting out of blood, the weighing of voices, dried, the ever inlet of the body, the night.

Their eyes wet like late-night small-town duck ponds, smoke curling upwards, bodies pulsing in quieted machines, all bathed in grocery store moonlight.

-

Let us speak in the bodies of code: one listing sigh, two pulsing wrists, one blossoming eye. 

Let us speak in the rhythms of time– your breath, my ballooning ribcage, faltering and stiff, the membranes of my thoughts of you that cover me.

Slowly tease the teeth from my mouth, play oracle, be kind and deft and murderous in your dispensation of truth.

-

All my letter-writing could not do what your canine tooth accomplished in one aching moment.

-

Let your long blond hair wrap itself around my teeth, shake the sugar castles in our midst with all our quaking limbs. Turn to me on the end of a bridge and say, “Look, the life that we once clung to, slowly slugging its way downstream. And here, we, above the river, gleaming, are.”

-

I held all her steaming sentiment inside my mouth, the wolf I kept there keening. The littlest of girl smiles like a hunter’s horn. I am drooling for a bloodletting, and so the words seep from out my lips, and I don’t know about the changing of the guard but I know a high wall I could throw you over.