How can a small thought open the door
to the swollen river, a kissing mouth,
an avocado changing on the shelf?
How often have you counted your toes
before going to sleep?

The magnolia’s golden leaves
belong to the traveler, but he lost
the roses on his cheeks.
Night as a beautiful arrow.

Night as your cold fingers rewrite this
to include the entrance and the exit.
Is it true you are a broken sundial?
Did you see the owl land in the saguaro?

Dust is consequence and there is
a sacrifice inside the cottonwood,
green beetles pasting words into the bark,
losing half their light as the rain begins.

all things collapsing

upon you, the ground.

Feel about that.

Or air boiling.

Every side is right side up.

Everyone has twisted towards you

with a scythe or crown of planets:

you’re going to be hurt by this.

You’ll need a false cornice, multiple skies,

a cloud for every lion, comets,

horses, registers of cloth

like shores for bodies.

With no horizon it can seem

like you are in a grave.

A room becoming ruined

can’t mean what I want,

no matter what I want, how

combing my hair

feels so romantic

despite everything else.

The ceiling is translated.

Prepare for it to say

you are dead,

not by seeing but thinking.

It haunts the room above.

And after a death, face it,

what works is forgetting.

rips my exhale so away,
disgusting world, I can’t confess
anymore: how can a man
be tougher than the world?

Fluorescent daylight pressed
like a desert when you died,
sky on ice, sheets of sand, white,
like stars all day.

I could not accept my reward.
Bodies disappear. That’s the story.
I found where I was by following
the dead hero following me.

New ones appear. I felt nothing
but thank you. I would say to

let darkness come next to you,
close, very close right next to you.

Is that you, writing obscenities on my bones?
Is that you, crouched in my liver, eating a Danish?

As my mother would say, child please.
I say use what you like and leave the rest

behind. This is summer now, time for the taking
of all my parts: mind funk and magnolia,

sugar in the raw and hot sauce.
Wasps gather on my wrists as you nest

in my heart, o woman-god, o you.

Walk away. Hold your head in both hands.

Lose all your money.

Don’t speak for a year.

Cut your clothes into shreds.

Sleep in your car during the day.

Crash it at night.

Remember what it felt like to dream in a bed, your hands on top of a blanket, gravity holding you down.

Hunker down on a bench in the shade.

Stay close to strangers.

Find a purse under your bench.

Leave it be, except for the nail clippers.

Cut your fingernails and toenails down to the quick.

Cross the street to the beach.

Feel the sand hot on top, cool below.

Walk backward toward the ocean, watching the footsteps behind you that lead away toward the city.

Let the small waves pool around your ankles.

Now your khakis are wet to the knee.

And the sun smacks your face.

Marvel at how the ocean is a body,

And you are a body,

And that a body can enter a body

And a body can surround a body,

Leaving both bodies changed and unchanged, and the sky, blue or black, is still the sky, and you.

At the hospice house, we tell the nurses
they don’t need to call until after breakfast.

But then what to do with total strangers?
The phone rings. It’s 1 a.m. 2 a.m. 3 a.m.
This morning it was 2:49. Fritz Faulkner.
Remember? You saw him once playing dominos.
We thought you would want to know.

I opened the door on a please.
And at a certain distance

followers became flowers.
Cilantro, bees, police.

I was merely a pedestrian, my thumb
pumping traffic from the center-lane.

I took pictures, left alive,

a canister of film
rasping in my pocket

like fly-paper.
Where are you going?

To soap the windows, I said,
wearing the only shoes I own.

Where I come from
it is hard to know

what is dangerous: parsley,
                           beetle,
                           taxi?

 
 
 
 
 
Note: words and line counts for this poem were generated through the card game Royalty, in which players build and capture words until all the cards are exhausted.

I see you aim Confederate pistols at a daymoon.
Lunar afternoons dig tracks for school buses,
where children push their faces to windows
and scream bullets into your chamber, their teeth are
spit-shined firing pins. You know what they expect:
cake icing and mop buckets. But you don’t ladle,
Lady, you don’t wring, and we only sing happy birthday
because we haven’t discovered another way to talk about dying.

II.

Lady, polish every wind of winter into your arms.
Children hustle home to mudpies, beat one another
till the twigs break. They scramble their days uphill,
climb into belts that snap across their legs,
whelps full of old leather. Rub some dirt on it.

III.

How I would hold you: my teeth clenched on a Marlboro Red,
one hand tugs your nape and another on your hip.
The pistols silent beneath your pillow. You lock your fingers,
draw your mouth in a barrel to mine. I taste brass
and cotton, warm revolver click of your tongue.

IV.

I find you by the catfish pond and think you’re skipping rocks.
Cheap Georgia fabric stretched over your bones and your fingers
aching to push through. You’re waiting for their heads to surface,
taking crowhops to the grass-wrapped edge, flinging stones into
their skulls, listening for a crack. I want my first time in your
tomato garden. Cut my fruit, Lady, spill my seed on a halter top.

V.

I’m in love with a screw-handle steak knife
climbing from your blue jean pocket. Let me wash
your hair in well water, your neck goosebumps soft
along a cinder block. Tie it up wet with a small engine belt.

VI.

This double-wide is a goddamn mansion, kudzu wishes and
venison dreams. Lady, soak yourself in hairspray
and dollar perfume, let bad gold fake your fingers green.
Swing a scythe at beef jerky drying in the barn.
I’ll cry enough for us both, enough to fill a brim bed.