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. 

let us pour over the archives, and mark

yes, this many to him, and these to him

and all this petty stack of words to her

note down the tallying of hours, waking and dreaming

devoted to each one, and let my flesh be divided

a knuckle bone to everyone who ever lost me sleep

The neck that does not turn so fully yet, the hands that shake, the foot that shifts, all my breaking bones do go to all of you. I want to reach into your guts, make light of all that slick and dark interior, I want to braid the hair inside our bodies and make you value breath so I might learn. 

Strange American men leaning on the sides of pickup trucks in light rain, voices meant for radio buzzing against my neck, the kind of lives that lead to broken bottles and ever-forwarding mail, I just want to lasso myself in to something with a form, and it seems I can trick myself a thousand times with that old golden ploy, pretending that someone clever’s sticky thighs will pluck the fever from my head and give it shape. 

Learning the ways in which a heart is broken by design. My mouth is filled with matted bits of clementine, little bones, your name. Slide that palette knife across us both to get the color right. I am not a safe woman, but I am predictable at worst. Give me your dirty hands to wipe my skirt on. Give me all the pretty boys and girls to make the scapegoat gleam. oh well, oh well, oh well, the lilting set of hinging time abets all criminals and I am only a beast of desire. I raise my hand to my brow to think and find it sticky with the recollection of your face.