In The Belly

We haven’t left the house for six and a half days. We were only snowed in for three but it hasn’t been warmer than minus ten since the storm. The people in town dug themselves out in a day, but town people are like that; always wanting to get somewhere else. In the country, you start getting strategic: how often do we have to go start the truck to keep the battery working, whose bad knee or incipient cough excuses them from having a take a turn. 

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[buy The New Territory, Issue 16: Cut to Joy]

 

 

 

 

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By The Chimney, With Care

The children listened. Faintly, there came the sound of sleigh bells, muffled by snow. We sighed silently in relief, even as we kept up the chanting of the ancient carol, without even a single stop to interrupt its discordant wail.

Read: Christmas of the Dead: Krampus Kountry

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[buy this anthology from Wicked Shadow Press]

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recitation

wonder how many times i'm going to write this line:

i'm never going to get what i want

before it stops feeling like a cut,

like a piece torn off

i'm never going to get what i want

does it get easier, writing it? does it

start to feel true, as factual and inoffensive as

gravity, climate change?

she's never going to give me what i want

i've tried handwriting it, typing it,

reciting it, practiced saying it calmly,

an observation through glass

she's never going to give me what i want

of course i've tried screaming it

she's never going to

but there's no one to scream to

give me

like when you try to scream in a dream

what i

but nothing comes out except a gasp

want

and then you wake up

risk management

all i want
is to say i love you
to people i love
but somehow i know
it would lead to bloodshed
which would be okay
if i could be sure
it would just be
mine

query letter

someday i'm going to write a book

about how to heal what you didn't know was broken

and how to locate what you didn't know was lost.

from a marketing perspective, it will be a terrible book

because it won't be written for people who know
that they are broken, or that they are lost 
(there are other books for those people)

(like, a lot of other books)

but will instead be for people who are fine,

people who are normal,
high-functioning, reasonably happy people,
even people who might sometimes be unreasonably happy
(but not so often that they start to seem weird)

(those people also have other books they can read).

anyway, this book for people who are fine: 

the marketers will hate it but so will
anyone who reads it, because each page
will be a map to a part of yourself that was 

(regretfully)
(so sad but)
(what else could be done)

walled off and floated out to sea
at certain points during the journey
the one that brought you to fine.

it will not be a good book to give as a gift

except that it will be
(you must have known)

(you were in this poem)
a gift intended for you.
  

dormancy

don't worry,
my gifts are long-lived, patient,
well-armored.

they can thrive on unsaid words,
unmade connections,
fumes.

i have enough and more than enough,
so that i can simply hope
for the once in a decade (or longer),
lasting perhaps only one night,
long-awaited,
bloom.

[ [ [ unbeauty ] ] ]

[...]

we only wished to be as beautiful
as the buildings we saw in modern

architecture magazines, all light and space
structural elements defining the shape
of the building without taking up any of it.
we were as far as it is possible to be

from trying to be pretty, the aspiration of sex appeal:
we carved away sexuality along with our breasts
and hips. [...]

Read: The Fem, January 2017