(you are eating an orange.)

You are eating an orange.
Your fingers are sticky.

You are listening to a song for the memories it brings.

You remember her hair, dark. Ukuleles. People singing.

You remember dirt beneath your fingernails, baked into the creases on the backs of your hands. Eight days' worth of sweat gathers like layers of sediment beneath your breasts, in the folds of your armpits, behind your ears.  

You pee beside a tree then peel off your clothes, like unwrapping maple candy in summer. Sticky.

You walk into the center of the river, to its deepest. It's only a few feet but it'll do. You press your elbows into a rock and stretch your legs-- hairy, strong-- across the eddies to another boulder. Prop your feet up. Tilt your head back. Close your eyes. Stay there.

The water pools around and then crests over you, tickling, making you laugh. It is cold, ever-changing, clean.

(Things to Think)

THINGS TO THINK
by Robert Bly

Think in ways you've never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you've ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

(here is how the world is changed)

Define me! Define me! Define me!

I swoon. come to in a pig sty black eye blackening. the cat hugs the piglet walks away on its hind paws. check the stopwatch return to the pumpkin patch three hours prior. we must not be seen.

uncle twists scratchy rope round the basket and tosses it over the bridge. Caddy is screaming. years later children hunt golf balls in the creek. the earwig burrows deeper.

here is how the world is changed: grip the sun. swirl your fingers through thick stripes of color. brush your hair, touch your jaw bone, finger the half-scarf black at his neck. take off your clothes.

I am naked from the waist down. my elbows are a rainbow. the guitar sits in its case on the floor. play me.

(we're swimming in it!)

you are what you read.

I am beginning to accept that I will continually reinvent myself for the rest of my life.

oh, heaven is the lakes and trails of maine and pennsylvania, and maybe licking an ice cream cone in a small town in vermont. the shores of lake george, purple lightning tap-tap-tapping the tops of trees. touching my lips to the soft creases of a horse's nose. my face pressed into the steady breath of a dreaming dog's stomach. the rise and, equally, falling.

I am a big fish I am a big fish I am a big fish ain't nobody got time for jokes about the sea. we're swimming in it!

yesterday Claudine asked me if I was happy. I said who the fuck are you Claudine I just made you up in my head. then I walked down 52nd street, turned a corner, and disappeared

(I am a prophetesse with my eyes open)

I am a prophetesse with my eyes open. I do not tell him who I am so I may continue to be a prophetesse. I wear a long flowing gown. Caesar quivers on hard gray stones. I open my lips to speak.

A brown swallow dashes from between my teeth. In one fist-grab he is feathers and bones.

My hair smells of coconut. My earrings hang from a navy blue placemat tacked into the wall. I choose my prepositions carefully.

Down down down we go under the water where the current drags and the chains run deep. The ship pulls hard against its sails. Brown boards and rotten planks, a knife clasped between my teeth as I hang from the bowsprit hauling at lines. How I wanted to be a seawoman.

I eat the grapefruit section by section, like my old lover taught me. All is diagrams and Latin names.

sunflowers burst from the darkness. water kneads my dimples like jelly. relax the backs of your thighs.


Yesterday I was a bowl full of water. we drank four quarts of liquid and still we got sick. still we managed to dig the trenches, diversions for floods and the safety of wolves.

arthritic fingers turn rust-red wheels in a begrudging neocortex. to write exactly what you are feeling!

I am a prophetesse with my eyes open. I open to the world in sleep. 

(I finger the cardboard but do not pick up my brushes)

I have shopped at the forbidden planet and I have located la reux san michel and I have taught myself these words, if spelled incorrectly, by listening to a man speak softly into my ears so no one else could hear.


At times I am afraid of his body for reasons that seem obstructed by clouds. I blame the news, partly, and a certain book of short stories.

At the time I did not say no. Nor did Pam, topless, but that doesn't make it consensual. Nor did he do anything wrong according to law. And still he did something wrong. These things are more complicated than we like to acknowledge. It is so much more comforting: "no" versus "yes". We forget that we speak with more than our mouths and feel with more than our bodies. Though they may quiver, though we may be both pleasured and afraid.

I pull apart the ether and grasp at fistfuls of air. All I have to bet with: a bottle of cider and acrylic paints in eight colors. I finger the cardboard but do not pick up my brushes.

(I will sew you into my thighs and crochet my eyes across your biceps)

Here is a feeling that I struggle with: the need to have my suffering acknowledged. It is what makes me consider what it would be like if you killed yourself in the shower, and I had to tell people.

I do not want to be appropriated. My day did not go as planned. I poured myself into him. I dripped liquid.

The scarf is almost finished I will sew you into my thighs and crochet my eyes across your biceps. I hold my fingers in the flames until my flesh drips onto your flesh.

I smash my face into your face. My forehead molds to your cheek. Colors explode out of the canvas, textures and slipstreams bursting bright light.




Dear,

In another life I will marry you. I will hold your shaking hands until we sleep.