My half sister is Panic.

A manic meteorite in cahoots with the conspiracists

A charismatic child with no sense

Utterly stupid and prone to tantrums

A sobering taunt that brings you out of your world

Pulling you into hers to suffocate you with her foolishness

So that it becomes all you think about

-

How dense she is!

Telling stories about things she’s only ever seen

On TV because she doesn’t read books

Sucking the composure out of you like a Marlboro

Telling lies about a new job or a lost friend

New illness or an old flame come back to haunt

But she is the ghost girl!

Immanuel, I outgrew my cheeks

Adonai built me too combative and weak

Black-eyed and reactive to men like a beaten dog

With a fiercity which cannot be prayed away or upon

Or an ankle-length skirt could hide

I possess a sexual prowess all my mothers would glorify

-

Men are so smart, they know things innate

Machines, laws, anatomy and how to lose weight

They prime our systems to survive like vaccines

1 Corinthians 1:19

It is a charming dogma

To believe a woman’s only armor is karma

As a good bellower with hair unkempt, I shout messily to the sky

Are all you Gods squeamish?

Do you go blind when things turn eye for eye?

-

I am surviving on sativa and Seneca

And a rapid-eye lobotomy

Nothing can pry these memories from the retina

-

I am only good for gaslighting, laced with affectionate

backstories that manufacture empathy

Making me crave a ceremonial womb-like exodus

-

Just to say that my rebirth was a cesarean

And I almost didn’t make it

But now I’m saved, a presbyterian

-

almandine fetus in need of folic acid and iron,

you are dizzying!

featureless murmur in my belly swirling,

one day in September, your fingers will unfurl

soft and pale as gardenias in winter

suctioning through fissure and fuchsia cannon

with an attitude like you've done this before

and this world is an inconvenience

too angry to be a Shannon.

dented brow, coned crown doused in fluid

a soaked jewel squeezing breath from new lungs

siphoning the beauty from everything by being,

benign eyes set behind unruly lids

glass irises take in the mirror of my face

the holiest embrace I will ever hold.

Wind-folded prairies tickle great storms from the sky. Stalks of gold and brass sprout largely, to become bramble in two seasons.

Wet air drenched with sun energizes the oaks, maples and hickory, fatigues the farmer. Thistles, red clovers, chicory sprout easily.

Queen Anne's lace offers second chances to question the venom of the hemlock. Creeks breathe and exhale into great rivers. This place used to be all forest. Can you imagine? What takes more skill? The hawk's hunt or the vulture's scavenge?

Exhausted silos remind us of the sorrows of time's movement. And I think of the families that built them: the daughters who married the neighbor boys, and spoke to the census takers, about the children they lost.

The dirty hems of their dresses, the dirty hands of their sons, the dirty headston...

I was born in the morning, open to the wind, without a witness and ass first under a blue wash of stars.
 Papery and radiant and purgatorial. With a fully intact abalone ego. Little blonde, wild thing. Cloaked in amniotic gossamer, roaring her life's gospel and begging for a drink.

You do not get to harvest in me, what you did not plant.

(Final)

Bad ankles, the 82nd, whatever the reason

As you head into your final season:

-

I will always forgive you

You are still the hero

Even if you can’t save yourself

-

In the midst of the opiate utopia

Know I am missing your deflated mind

And I recognize that you used your last hallelujah

Somewhere in Fallujah

-

None of this is your fault.

-

Your eccentric sister

To the left of your heart like a ventricle,

-

Sissy

The absurdity of luck is being the 13th caller

Winning the last dog at the firehouse,

On the six o’clock news

After a story of a baby left in a dumpster

-

Now there is a whipping tail, thrumming happy welts on our faces

Oh, what cosmetic joy!

Our way of stomaching life between capsules

We find things in the spots, cloud gazing on stiff fur

-

Pronounced heart shape on the ass

A flopped-eared rabbit under the neck

Whatever dulls the pendulum headache

Of debating the black and the white

Under a midnight oasis seeking gnosis

With jaundiced stars, bloated and hopeless

Swollen cerulean cirrhosis

-

I have lost my eye to the left of Orion

Venus is a sharp, bald giant

But of the pleasure she promises, I am hardly compliant

-

Rain seeps like lymphatic drainage

From some soft, heavenly basin

Watery assault to ensure our salvation

-

Like accepting milk from the tit of God

Mouth gaped hungrily in awe

But still reserved to believing it’s a facade from beyond

-

I have gone too little with and too long without

To accept an easy comfort without doubt

Stone bears an inscription blanketed by clover

Calloused chisel marking a hardly legible life blown over

Ant hills and bruised earth grows strong over your name

The sunworked dirt and tired feet push turf to reclaim

Thickening the distance between life and thereafter

Flowerless, lacking tributes, no peony, iris, aster.

-

May memorials seeping grief into thought

I loop twice around the gravel before pulling fixed like a French knot

To find some grave that calls me, away from oaks and elm

Abandoned by descendants left in this realm

I am not of you, we meet by chance in a small effort to be good

Anger sits in my lap and I hold it like a great grand daughter.

An indigenous temper I wield as both scythe and scalpel

The only heirloom I have been given

Both anchor and the maelstrom depending the conditions

Racing through the veiny atlas of my being

My frail braille heart takes tender handed touch to learn

Afflicted with thickly calloused fingers and no patience


Blackened and coal-soaked on cracked linoleum, begging to be felt

An open woman is an open wound

She holds a stiff arrow poised for anti-cupid archery, 
 toward a corroded carotid artery

to take out her misery heartily.

The men with their pens

In a scribbling fury again

‘I possess three states of being

Ketamine, cayenne or zen’

-

The mosaic of eyes are clinical

These ones peacock green and biblical

Wanting to offer me salvation in capsule form

Abilify, rispideral

-

They’re here to clean house

By examining the houses in which I’ve lived

And the houses I’ve built in myself

They always miss a spot

-

Find your fissure, Mr.

The smudge in the criteria

I’m inside all the textbooks on the hysterically misbehaved

Which renders me less observant and infer...

(7-syllable terza rima)

Greeting veiled strangers through glass

Little eye speaks words from paths

Traveled sometime in the past

-

By fingertips achievement

We have resolved bereavement

While tempting God’s vehement

-

A chance to reanimate

A soul gone to germinate

Not equipped to incarnate

-

A move ‘Yes’ to then swift ‘No’

Good odds to apprehend hope

Of conscious beyond our bones

-

Bridge to a distant era

Via pine planchette antenna

Grief leaves a stain like henna

-

A quick extinguish of wick

Followed a map of varicose veins on my heels,

The same which forded you passage across the big ol’ veil

Putting the bitter over our shoulders like an old wives tale

Greeting Death with a “Did-I-forget-to-turn-the-oven-off?” exhale

-

There's anger in the stars tonight, you say in windspeak, grab your coat

Soundlessly take your licks until you fold like an old envelope

Guiding me steady from heaven like a Sunday horoscope,

You are not as close as you think you are to the end of your rope

beneath every stone in the stream

a crawdad is crowded by dreams

of a little girls hand

unafraid of the land

and the claw that pinches too mean

Loneliness is my complexion. It is hereditary.

(Final)