Moonsong

My love
shames rivals into oblivion
blackens them
until all that is left in the sky is my orb,
its one gleaming eyeball
white as sand
on foreign beaches,
hollow as dust.

You slid in
to find mountains, craters.
and lava spew.

Now you are afraid
of my solitary anger,
the coiled serpent
at the base of my spine.

You are afraid
of its nameless hungers,
its slow uncurling down the length
of your body.

You are afraid
it will stalk you in dreams.

You are afraid
of my haunted face in the night,
my fragilities —
the white space
at the base of my throat,
the fine line of my collar bone.

You are afraid they will unravel you.

You who have spent a lifetime
simplifying yourself.

A Violence Done

The sugary smell of aftershave
bursts over her skin like bubbles.

The taste of rotting leaves
in her mouth and behind clinched
eyelids, the black churns
like gnashing seas.

Her legs
cycle the air so tightly
to hurl his heft out.

Against the murky pane,
a fly drums its hope
with a single pair of wings.

The fan is white, flecked
with brown, noiseless.

Outside,
the sounds of an ordinary day
never cease.

All the way back in the bus,
the smell clings
like a low-grade fever.

Her fierce stare is on the sea
and one small hand clenched tight
around the ticket.

The Screams

If I don’t stretch them
into tight little words
or fill them with soil,
they will escape as
empty air, as ether,
as leaf smell, bat song and hiatus,
pure as helium balloons
gasping into the night sky.

They will float
pink and round and transparent,
through town, over inky green gardens,
sleeping cats, barroom brawls,
and Jacaranda trees.
Near your house,
they will drop dead,
deflated and soundless.

Nobody will appreciate them.
They were too pink. They were
the opposite of red, the opposite
of blood, too tame, too unhurried,
too afraid or weedy, too flat,
too shrill, not nuanced enough.
Those screams just didn’t do it for us,

people will say with a frown,
an arched eyebrow or a puzzled sigh,
scratching their thigh or their chin
where a half-day shadow grows.

They just didn’t do.

Instead, I lean over
the toilet bowl
letting its dull white shine
mirror my eyeballs.
I pry them out with finger and thumb.
I pull the flush.