Sin Eater
This is what it took to get me here. I don’t want to talk about it, what surrounds
the unspeakable. One body entering another body going. A heart exploding, refusing to clean
up its own spill. A mop. Letting her go. Never letting go. Stealing milk to feed the hot baby.
Licking the throat of a wrist. Watching legs burn and then smolder into a purple ash.
What is a sin anyway? If an arm folds into us, it may take us back to a place
we’ve never been but have to go. They are all we’ve got to coat us, the mistakes we knowingly make.
We put them in us, they make us whole. Become a part of the inside. Into an extra stomach, a churn.
If we don’t ruin it, then we are not doing it right. Go.
Published in Sawbuck
This is what it took to get me here. I don’t want to talk about it, what surrounds
the unspeakable. One body entering another body going. A heart exploding, refusing to clean
up its own spill. A mop. Letting her go. Never letting go. Stealing milk to feed the hot baby.
Licking the throat of a wrist. Watching legs burn and then smolder into a purple ash.
What is a sin anyway? If an arm folds into us, it may take us back to a place
we’ve never been but have to go. They are all we’ve got to coat us, the mistakes we knowingly make.
We put them in us, they make us whole. Become a part of the inside. Into an extra stomach, a churn.
If we don’t ruin it, then we are not doing it right. Go.
Published in Sawbuck
Under the Pond
A one-legged duck struggles to swim and the others mimic a male swan
jealous of its white prowl and uncomfortable beauty you have become webbed
and undone waiting until there isn’t anymore sunlight until the day becomes
aggressive and turns all over you ten feet away is an apartment you cannot afford
and chicken legs are cold in the fridge and you don’t eat meat off the bone
under the pond must be a sound place black and flapping like an unmade bed pillows underwater
Published in Poetalk
Howard Dates Ate Elmer’s Glue
in the 5th grade. Sucked it from the orange nozzle, let it dribble like marshmallow into his
mouth. That’s what I pretended it was to keep me from throwing up. Ms. Zoccoli never
noticed. Was busy at her desk cutting bird shapes out of blue paper. Birds with no eyes
and sad wings, feathers that would never be attached
I imagined how the glue must stick his organs together
a clump of a heart stuck to a lung stuck to a liver stuck to a stomach. And when he would
look up at me, a plastic bottle half empty in his dark hands desperate to gross me out –
I would imagine his hands glued to his ears, his beatless wing, a claw hooked in his eye.
Published in Touchstone: The University of Kansas Press
in the 5th grade. Sucked it from the orange nozzle, let it dribble like marshmallow into his
mouth. That’s what I pretended it was to keep me from throwing up. Ms. Zoccoli never
noticed. Was busy at her desk cutting bird shapes out of blue paper. Birds with no eyes
and sad wings, feathers that would never be attached
I imagined how the glue must stick his organs together
a clump of a heart stuck to a lung stuck to a liver stuck to a stomach. And when he would
look up at me, a plastic bottle half empty in his dark hands desperate to gross me out –
I would imagine his hands glued to his ears, his beatless wing, a claw hooked in his eye.
Published in Touchstone: The University of Kansas Press