Indigo’s Voice

The soul singer, she was shot

and my father cries because

she looks like me and I

look like my mother,

although he leaves that last part

out.

We drink red wine

until we can’t help but talk

about the way she had to crush

the bones of love again and again

until they could not heal

and infection forced him to give up

and let her go

free.

I will choose my lovers better

I will not lose myself

for them to be.

I will not be my lovers’ debtor

nor punish them

for loving me.

Let the stones fall from my wet mouth in

Gentle heaves, for

They have pitted themselves

Too deep, and too long

Rotting out my guts to blackened soil

Some even swelled and split with seed

Took root, and climbed to curl inside my throat

Like the rigging of a living ship.

I purge the poison only, or

I try-

It’s hard to account for everything that’s lost

When morning comes.

After three years of cutting teeth

Unable to evolve,

We sit in the river, trying

To meet each other,

Finally.

On this, the last night

Of our grand game

Of House, which we have always

Played to win.

I mean to encounter you,

To push through the skin of mind

And know the flavor of your thoughts

Before they’re shaped like words, but

I am too busy tightening

My stomach, making myself smaller,

Easier for you to hold on to

Even as the current

Tugs me away.

I move to fill

up space. I am moved

to make full that which

hungers.

By age ten, I loved

to climb down into the caves and press

my body to the cool sandstone that has

forever smelled of fertile silence,

between the breathless black

jaws of some unclaimed tomb

no bigger than my own living

vessel, I would

rest.

The earth himself would hold me

within my body’s borders,

tuck me beneath his tongue to

smother my unyielding urge to gobble

up stagnant spaces like a rabid dog

who can’t bear to waste a drop

of this free life.

When you left

I did not stay

on my side

of the bed. I swelled

out like the tide until I took

up this whole ocean of quilt

I pour

my blind and gaseous longing like wet smoke

into the awkward pits at dinner

parties, disguised in a charade

of mirth, playing the hysteric fool to

unite strangers in their incredulity-

it was meant

to be a gift.

They say life is not perfect

but the craving for life is

Perfect.

It was meant to be

a gift but all too often I swallow

up the many timbred voices that compose

a well-cultivated room,

exhuming and exhausting myself as

a black hole must exhaust herself from kissing

the mirror again and again

until lipstick mars the emptiness

that gazes back at me,

filling me with her

craving.

I wrote this about a year ago at the beginning of my sobriety and the end of my relationship during the covid lockdown, just before I quit smoking, all while my city burned with the BLM riots.

I.

The Walmarts all are empty, shelves gaping toothless

Breathless, and there are no gatherings

And when there are

You better hope they’re worth it.

People don’t shake hands anymore,

except with those they’d happily go down with

Same ship, same crew

And we kiss each other too,

And share cigarettes, as we pass them our eyes lock

In a silent pact, a prayer,

A bow to the plague

And to each other

And to the fragility of

Things.

Somehow, Spring still comes.

The lake is molting,

Coughing chunks of herself upon the banks

Huge plates of ice collapsed on each other like

Damsels in heat

And it is beautiful.

I only hope she is purging the poison

And not dying of it.

II.

The chaos has set in,

It reels like rabid pinwheel behind your eyes

And you dance along, embrace it like a cool drink

Even as it scorches every cavity of your face, your chest,

Your mind,

You are prone to

Disintegration.

My body wants to make art out of you,

Wants to push you through my pores with heavy breathing

To taste your hunger and claw at one another

To make a way back in, back home

To nothingness

Even if this means

Blood.

I want to be a leaden blanket

silencing your reckless thoughts

That rattle and hiss and

chew at the inside of your skull

And the meats of your eyes.

Instead I stand in your doorway,

My arms full of my own clothes

hanging limply like poached game around my thighs,

And ask you if you truly

have nothing

To say.

An overworked executioner scrounging

For last words before the plug

Is pulled,

Anything to remind her

Why she even got into this line of work.

“I’m sorry” you decide

So I drop my spoils and collapse

One last time, gather you fiercely

Like you are poems

Stolen by the wind

And strewn about the street.

I linger twice, once for each of us,

Your head upon my knee

And then

Let go

For I think much too highly of you

To be party to this

Degradation, this slap in the face

Of your beloved self;

I have seen you fight too hard

To betray the one

Who loves you

Best, he’s

Reading this now and

He knows you

Mean well,

He was never angry

That this is so hard.

This is so hard.

III.

Outside I guess the world is also ending

Well worn haunts become strange territory

Suddenly, I am a child again

Building fairy houses on a battlefield,

I am not ready.

I wish someone would call me in for dinner

Scrub the dirt from behind my ears,

Hold my heart for a moment so that I might

Collapse, dissolve

I am prone to

Disintegration.

Instead I am stronger

Than I ever wanted to have to be;

I raise myself.

So I sit here with my skin peeling off,

My hair falling out on the table

Wrestling with wildness.

You are a great beast

Not to be neutered down to civility,

I relish it in you.

It was never my intention

To suppress your appetite,

Do not hoard

Your teeth deeper within you.

There must be a practice of some sort

Where you, in all your carnal glory

Can catch the scent of blood

And need neither pounce nor cower-

I can not bear the thought of you suspended

In the fear of your own impulses.

Breathe into your own power

But do not learn the song of your claws

Against another throat,

Especially your own, sweet savage

Which somehow tears my skin as well

Even across this city

Of caged, assimilated bears

Who can’t tell where the circus ends

And they begin.

Published in Atomic Flyswatter Vol. 1, 2020

Withered and acrid

are these stinging-nettle boys.

Their shallow, blackened sneers cuff my ankles in red lace

and my mother, pitiless, shrugs the blood away

having clearly given up on my

wearing shoes.

I ran by night,

from what I did

not know.

By that first pillowing of dawn I found

my legs etched raw,

as if by dying captive men that count the days

on walls of tide choked caves,

and prison cells

and on the ribs of tombs

when one gets mixed up in that unsavory business

of being buried alive.

They scored my skin to play a round

of tic-tac-toe to pass their time

incarcerate, and still

I sing only

of their thorns.

Published in Indicia Literary Journal, Volume 4.1, Winter/Spring 2020

The butterhung wind licks summer skin like sugar dog tongues,

golden as the space your belly laugh once

carved out of this very room.

Now I rent it out at storage rates.

Meanwhile, a man jumps off a bridge.

he is on fire.

These days you look like a grave

that something is trying to crawl out of,

and I am addicted to the darkness

between worlds.

So here I am,

back to pick my teeth with perfect bones

nestled among the corporeal

undercarriages of my mother’s

parrot tulips.

I buried you,

yet here you are.

It was Jung’s Red Book. The boy is irrelevant. Published in Atomic Fly-Swatter Vol. 1

You thunder, silver-tongued

about your alien planet

like a junkyard guard dog,

dislodge thick snarls from your throat,

taste the rusted air for fear.

I do not know the climate here.

I do not care to-

this wasteland is too crowded as it is,

there is no place for me to rest

among all these damn mirrors that reek of

restlessness and

wine.

If only I could close my eyes

and let the ancient howl of your spirit’s storm

engulf me,

make me have to remember

to breathe.

But I do not know the climate here.

I do not care to.

A brief eye opening heartache that may or may not have happened entirely in my imagination, 2020

For Barbara. Published in the spring/summer issue of Newtown Literary Journal, 2020. My father beat on the walls like a

prisoner, while his mother

hung chunks of herself out to dry as if she were

venison, a Hail Mary still wet on her

lips and the maps

God drew standing out blue

across the backs of her wind-weathered hands.

I memorized them

baby-powder musk and all

while she read me to sleep with her

voice so small, when I was still

The Problem,

when I was still an accident made

by someone else,

and not yet by my own

mistakes.

Perhaps I am like her.

She would shoot the moon

in every hand of hearts, but still

they say she was

crazy, too.

And beautiful in red.

She loves God

like an addict; she sings about it

all the time.

She loves me, too

though she caught me stealing wine

last summer at the

reception.

Maybe clean on the surface

isn’t the same as

perfection.