Category: Poetry for mojo 9

After a bird dies its family doesn’t eat worms.
                            Instead, they fill their beaks with water from a blue lake
or stream, and if there aren’t bodies of water close by,
                                                            they scavenge the gutters of houses,

               and if there aren’t houses they nibble on grass or sticks
                                             to wet their tongues. The water’s important

                            and the birds can’t swallow any of it.
At sunrise they lift the limp bird miles above
                                             a particular large cloud. When the air thins

                            the family opens their mouths, spilling the water
               from their beaks, and releases the dead bird.

The falling water forms a cloud the size of a child’s shoebox,
                                             and inside that shoebox the bird rests,
                            where it sinks into the large cloud.

               This is where clouds come from.
                                                            This is how they float.

A finger simulator where you live as a finger

And do only those things which fingers are permitted to do

For twenty years, so that when you are finally released

The thought of living as other than a finger is so horrific

You cut the rest of your body off

A stomping of you in a laborious dance

Wherein they wear your foot skin as a shoe

A combine that harvests your dreams

And marinates them in incepted traumas

Making there be no home in your memory

Where you can live in

Should the present be treating you unkindly

A hook that brings internal organs

Into the exterior of the body

Strictly for pain purposes, beating, say,

The liver with a length of rope

The spraying of your back with bactic acid

A machine that tells you the truth about

The things your life has been conducted

As an elaborate means of avoiding

Dear Hairless Naomi,

 

I’m just made of smoke today,

so don’t be surprised if these words

feel wispy. Don’t be surprised

if some of them shift in time

with the ceiling fan on the lowest

setting, or drift out of the vents.

I’ve got a dream I’ve been trying

to get back to, so I’m going to try

to do that now, here, together with you.

Since you don’t have any hair,

I’ll explain it slow & soft, & you

might be able to feel my smoke

across yr various hairlessnesses,

or maybe you won’t. It’s hard

to say with smoke.

The dream had me inside the beating

chest of a dog, a healthy one

who knew where all of his bones were,

which is saying something because

even I don’t know that.

The walls were red & pink & all

my favorite colors & they beat in

on me sometimes like I was some

blood-thing. Like I had places to go.

I was carrying a spear I didn’t want

to hurt her with (the dog I mean)

but the spear was too long for the heart.

Can you see where this is going?

Because as those muscles got

torn & shredded I started to get scared

not just because the dog seemed so

nice & smart, but also scared that

this was some kind of a metaphor.

Turns out it wasn’t though, Hairless.

Turns out my dog died that night.

Turns out it was his heart that got

all torn up like the time he got into

the picnic basket & used every one

of his teeth on our juice boxes.

Just like that.

 

But the thing that worries me,

the real problem, was that the vet

showed me another thing they found

in there. Inside the dog when they

we’re trying to save him, to see if he

could even be saved. Deep in there

they found a tiny person.

A little me. She looked just like me.

Looked just like me but dead.

All swollen up with bee stings.

 

We can only take so many

steps toward what we want

before it has to come to us, Hairless N.

It has to be that way.

 

Hope this finds you well,

Sara

Adam’s penis:

a small thing draped over

a thigh:

a larger thing being held up

by cherubim and pushed

down by a serpent:

nothing but five feet of belly

in the dust, five feet

of back to the sun with,

at the tip of these two sides meeting,

a mind, the best mind connected

to the best mouth in the heavens:

wherever we think we don’t belong

because of how good it is.