You’re nothing but a bad pomme,
grainy fruit (not pome), a globose
berry from which we’ve garnered
garnets, grange, gram, and grenadine.

Your task is to gamble on limited
light and space and face the
meadow, alkali mallow, let light
lick your basal rosette and bloom
bottle thistle through your bearded
creeper.

It’s a vocabulary of old country
songs, unfaithful women
and open roads, a scratchy
vinyl itching in her thighs.
This fear of swimming pools
and gas station bathrooms. 

This tiny thing breathing between us that aches something awful.
By summer, I am slipping all the complimentary mints in my coat pockets
while you pay the check. Gripping the railings on bridges to keep
diving over. Some dark dog in my throat when I say hello.

For years, I dreamt of the child who, when I reached out to her,
turned into a sheet of paper, and so, in waking hours, I wrote and
wrote and wrote and my friends consoled me: see, you have book
babies; this, while I looked on at other women who knit bibs and
booties, so many booties, such small socks. 

Caught in the belly of a whale within a turgid sea and among me the sorry remains of little fish. There is no color of blood. (You see, the island will be full of strange foreboding.)

The west was a patchwork of color flung over a racing sky,
The wind was a lover’s whisper that needed no reply,
The strip was of weed-torn concrete, scarring the desert floor,
And a derelict came flying,
Flying, flying,
A derelict came flying,
Long final to zero four.

I hear you walking in the night;
You think I’m fast asleep.
I know your sounds of loneliness;
I hear you pray and weep.

The
sea urchin
is a repository
for the souls
of mariners
reaped by the sea

It was Spring but that gave her a feeling of Christmas, this rush of people with bags and parcels all a gift to her and she felt so in control of the direction her life was taking moment by moment as she crisscrossed the city underneath in such a crowd, stood close to the doors so she could always read the blue-tiled station names, unfamiliar and all seductive. Then a hand moved up her thigh.