Sitting in the kitchen
of my childhood home,
longing to be home,
I know I’ve lost another
one, another in a string
of partners, balloons of
many colors floating to
some high-up place
where I thought
we both would be
(originally published in The Stray Branch, Spring 2018)
ambled through snow to my bowl of ice
my calloused tongue on her cold
the bowl’s organ
shriveled
I was a white door
textured and crumbling
in that manticorean dumpster
buds of teeth and name
the mane
where that doorknob would have been
the park on a picnic
her triangular table limbs
white oaks unhinged
the thunderstorm
and her cold drooping javelin wings
(originally published in Peculiar Mormyrid)
She is a seatless unicycle who dangles on a string attached to a wire on a telephone pole. Her pedals spin with the wind. The payphones wonder if still she can ride. They worry she will roll off into the parking lot and strike the black ramshackle Lincoln to gift another dent. Cars in motion on the street will snort and shriek. In saturnalia a brown Boerboel yelps and hurtles and snatches her tire with ferocity in his jaw. He tugs and pulls as her wheel snarls and squeaks. He drags with his fur the weight of concrete. Her rubber hairs become roots she cannot untangle from white oak trees sequestered to forests she cannot reach. The parking lot is gravelly and minuscule. Caterpillars need more space to bloom. Butterfly-eyed people who look like dead poets recite words with aluminum in their tracheas.
(originally published in Corvus Review, Winter 2015)
