Beauty has frost bite and is just
going to live that way.
The stench is aggressive.
I have been living whichever way is out of sight
from Age and Lust.
Beauty and I go way back
to a year I only remember as a pile of sugar to play in.
Skin scrubs keep Age away.
The truth is Beauty and Lust have never met,
though some think they are a couple.
Lust’s eyes are inverted in her face,
her longings contorted and her hearth
cold.
Slim sunsets sink slowly.
I am a lemon. I am a thorn.
I hurl.
Water finds me grotesque.
Sometimes I sit under hospital beds
and eat away at lives
like bitter battery acid.
Was it because I loved you that I siphoned your contentment
or because I have a funnel where my heart should be?
She is stove-mouthed
and thinks hideously.
Between her teeth are scrolls
from cities asleep.
Death cartwheels on my lawn
mostly to impress her,
And because in his spare time he has a pinwheel fetish.
After dark she will write my eulogy and
I will thank her
and never know her name.
The cessation of Fire
in me is like a white wall of Holy cold.
I manufacture crosses.
I carry most of them.
Others I strap to my man and my baby.
Suffering sleeps at the end of my bed,
takes up space.
drives me away in the middle of the night.
Sometimes I drive to a gold mine and wish for another God
if I cannot have another me.
Grateful skirts swirl in a breeze maybe meant for them.
Design is Holy,
is enamored of its Designer,
is a crossroads of means and ends.
A housewife manufactures sunshine in her laboratory,
the beakers from the store always having a sale,
her thesis supervised by green,
and critiqued by her children.
After 20 years who will know whether the
skirts were mended or replaced?
Just that they were infused with laughter
and smelled like mother in the living room
living with her eyes full.
Translated into Afrikaans and Xhosa, then back:
Skirts twirl in the grateful air
they were meant for.
Design and the Holy Spirit,
are enamored
of each other.
Is the intersection of the cross where it all begins?
The woman who produced the sun in her lab,
is studying all the ways you make happiness from the mundane.
Her thesis is green from watching her children.
After 20 years will you know that
the aprons can be repaired or replaced?
You will appreciate the humor.
She won’t.
skirts and gratitude for the atmosphere,
either of them.
Design and Holy Spirit,
make enamored designs,
are the ends on the cross.
The woman who makes the sun in her lab,
Her laboratory in Delaware furnished by a company
in Hong Kong.
Her thesis supervision is green.
So is the clock looking at her children’s energy,
their youth,
her youth.
After 20 years you will know that
the skirts can be repaired or replaced.
As you appreciate the humor in
And sort mothers by whether they baked cookies or used the microwave.
In her eyes you live fully,
live fully alone.
Clear candles overwhelm me with a thirst for light.
I love transparency,
translucency,
transmissions from stars.
What is it about the see through
that is so luxurious and soulful?
A congress of confetti has decreed
every wind must blow up.
The ground breathes.
I look like Marilyn Monroe as a housewife,
standing in my yard with my dress billowing around me.
My husband sees me with his eyes shut.
Hands open.
The hours I have given him clump between his fingers like cat litter
I will wash them with aloe.
I will dry them in silence.
Our daughter has been sequestered with the sequins
and she has sewn a shining dress.
See her straddle the breeze.
She learns from me.
Passing the Bechdel Test
A voice from a blouse
A skirt of leaves
They have immolated their wicker man.
They talk of flowers and the physics of particles,
of vacuous clothing and sumptuous books.
Yet beneath brocade and bead work and sneaking mist
there is a want
they feel
but cannot remember.
Food is excellent,
almost smells necessary.
So does everything that possesses you
If only people could turn off the clock and wean themselves from his
nefarious purposes…
You feel five feet wide and are at least 1.
On the counter,
chocolate in all his attractions. Do not listen to him.
Eat your salad.
This is hate.
Your teeth flicker on and off.
Your bones shrink in disgrace.
