cathection

Note: I wrote this last night after reading a particularly realistic and therefore painful assessment of the world’s economic situation. This is the experience of late capitalism writ both eye-level and so large we can’t comprehend it fully.

Cracked riverbeds; pale adobe dust.

I have no more. At this point

it’s all dry heaving, sugar-bile

staining the back of my throat.

I can’t sing. I’ve got bad habits.

Maybe this will make me beautiful.

Maybe if I just own this I’ll be

mirrors, refracted, instead of tethered

to this awkward lumbering seething

pile of gristle, fat and bone. Maybe

you’ll want me. Want me for what?

Batteries improperly disposed of

are leaking into the groundwater.

I have no more. Maybe you won’t

get close enough to the facade.

Maybe we’ll be evicted. Maybe

we will remember. Maybe there is

worth in the scraps. Maybe we are home,

constantly grasping.

hungry ghosts

(Thinking: events in the middle east; safe and illegal abortions; money money money money; the first and second rapes; women in a factory in China make fifteen cents an hour making mardi gras beads which end up littering the streets after the mass hangover begins; dull headache; listening to Les Rallizes Denudes at TOP FUCKING VOLUME is very satisfying; Ferlinghetti; Beowulf and Grendel; the monsters of modernity; bite your tongue?)

It is not necessarily true
that a war needs to
be writ large
to make the news.
(Numbers help: it’s in
the public interest.
Newsprint on the fingertips,
talking heads and static
in dry mouth. She’s been drinking
since three thirty
and it’s only made the
five-pointed star
inside her chest
burn dull.)

Split the sky, bone
cleaved by metal,
bloody-oh and why
we swear our loyalties.
Gunshot wound to the head.
(He missed: whatcha
gonna do? His aim
was true; either case
breath escapes.)

There are no heroes:
war all the time
in the hungry ghost realm.
Sometimes we forget about the missile,
go about our daily business
as if we could not do bodily harm.

variation on a love poem

[Author's note: Long deviation from the word-of-the-day pieces. It's a variation on a poem I wrote a little less than a year ago; similar themes and a couple of lifted phrases. If we don't rip ourselves off, what have we got?]

cat's cradle

Perpetual high noon:
your shadow, cast gentle,
keeps me feeling
that I am carrying home
in my slow breathing:
I shuttered against you
unsure of boarding up
against the winter.

Your body fits around mine
a comma and a question mark
an inkstain on the grass.
Suck in palpable ache
this old accordion
this overextended metaphor
laid to rest. All is clear light.

beyond all means of capture

derogate \DER-uh-gayt\, intransitive verb:
1. To deviate from what is expected.
2. To take away; to detract; — usually with 'from'.

transitive verb:
1. To disparage or belittle; to denigrate.

* Author's note: Another poem. Sometimes I just work better this way. Also, this makes more sense if you put it in context with the song I stole the title from.

Overactive tear-ducts
mimic alcoholic bloat:
red cheeks, dripping nose, thick throat, sinuses pinched.
"You look like you've been …"
(Well, ain't that obvious.)

Fill your cup from the tap;
turn your head;
noble and small.

Yes, you have that report;
and here's your follow-up;
You're watching for my missteps.
Hawk with the snake in your talons;
never an omen. This is no promised land.

her heart is nearly breaking

aspersion \uh-SPUR-zhuhn; -shuhn\, noun:
1. A damaging or derogatory remark; slander.
2. The act of defaming or slandering.
3. A sprinkling with water, especially in religious ceremonies.

** Author's note: I originally started to write a short-short story about being raised in a fundamentalist household. The religious right's rise to power across the global board over the last couple of decades is both horrifying and fascinating to me – raised, by my parents' conscious decision, without any religion at all, I am a total outsider – and the double meaning of this word lent itself perfectly to an exploration of the use of religion in all of its forms (myth, ethical system, community, etc.) as justification for bloodshed. However, because I have no personal knowledge of what this is like, I figured there would be no way I would even be able to approach a fictional facsimile of the experience, and I'd rather not divest my characters of their humanity. I'd rather not look down on the characters I am creating. I see that happen a lot when authors write from outside, whether they mean to or not.

So, instead, I wrote a poem. I can get at images and sensations from outside, I think. I hope. It is a beginning.

They soaked her to strip off her skin
and how that white dress rippled and clung
how it fit her all wrong

his mouth gaping and closing
words nothing but napalm
remaking her features on fire
deaf, mute, hands cut off
but otherwise oh in His image
and the kiln turned her out
cracked and sore
and, despite her total immersion,
parched. This was what she knew.

The screaming was not reserved for
Sunday. It was a thread that ran
through all her days, high-pitched:
only the dogs pricked their ears.

She opened the paper and said
It's such a good thing we're at war
because look at what they're doing to the
women over there

Oh you can cast your blame in iron,
you can ship it overseas to be smelted by cheaper labor,
but she will always come up gasping from dreaming
as if she was rising up fast
from the bottom of the lake.