2004 - Vol. 1, Issue 1

"Immunity"

Sometimes I shake when people touch me
and I can't stop, the way wind dusts the shore
for handprints. Sometimes we are waves, and
sometimes the undertow. My doctor cannot
explain this. Bodies tremble, we are afraid.
Even the poultice of skin is no comfort. It is
some essential tremor, like any movement,
an antigen to stasis itself. Perhaps I am dying
slowly, like everything else. I look into a
face, any face, and it is the one face, and I
shake. But we are religious when we suffer
and this should keep us immune.

                   However,
A stiff house could easily exist in one place
but not another, or blood form of bricks
and of poppies. I've made love on improbable
faultlines, always lying when the clock fell.
I shelter natural killer cells, but were they
really born for war? How to kill if I can't even
touch without trembling? How to not kill what
I love? If the militia creates roses in the marshland
of your crevices, how do we stop ourselves from
dancing? How do we keep from bleeding dry?

One hard December weekend on the Cape
wind sloughing off the long-dead and just imagined
with deep exhaustion in the driftwood of my bones
I pressed against the zephyr to return to our room.
It was my birthday; we used my pills
for poker chips. I won almost every hand
and the sand, thick as mud, coated everything.
I felt immune, inside, with you. We drew
outlines of our bodies in the heated air
where they would exist only for a moment.

I confess I close my fingers around doorknobs
to remember crocus bulbs in Winter. Conjure
fingerprints on dollars whose whorls form
sketches, limbs, communion, every tiny
revolution. I lick decades from your skin;
I'd lick the Plague just to go within you,
exploring every venue where a kiss, a touch,
the very act of breathing means disease.
I ease inside of you, and you in me. My body's
bed is ancient and it creaks. But in that moment
there is amnesty. This freedom, all I need.

"How I Wake Up"

Somehow in the vertigo of sickness, I take a drag
on certain words. Hope, so close to Home
though we know the old house has been torn
down, the family moved away without us.

Crime sounds like crying if you say it fast
five times. When grandpa put a gun
to his head in the bathroom, thinking he was sick,
the only crime was that everyone forgot to grieve,
wrapping our mouths around the hole
he left and sucking out the air

Even the anti-gravity machine at the fair is flawed
after it spins and suspends people against its walls
the floor pulls up, cracks and mangles someone's legs.
I see her on the news. with several others
who are shocked the centrifugal force
of skin can't hold them in

Mornings I pull my legs out of wet cement
the kind you etch your name into
trying to live longer

Just as certain hands form permanent shadows
of animals on your walls; or the hum
of the center cries out to you

I try angry words, holding the smoke in
long enough to get heady. I love fuck
because it tells it like it is. I hate the ones
that lie to you, hanging you upside down
from the ceiling just to give you more spine;
jellyfish words of empty calories and disembodiment

Here on the pale continent
they have criminalized the air
to keep the trees from whining
when they fall in the forest;
the brooks commit matricide
because it's what they've learned;

And somewhere in the desert, the burned
sand forms a concave mirror in the ground
so that the sky is reflected as round.
I think how quickly we're seduced by this mirage
of a womb, as if we are not children
of the bomb, as if we don't embody it.

"CAT Scan"

Today, they take a 3D picture of you throat
where my hands felt a Gulf Stream of rage,
the rhythms of gills, the breath you hold back
as I move slowly up one thigh with the lightest
touch. If they could only reconstruct
a picture of what really grows within you,
they would see the germination of the living,
how my hand blooms in every shaded city,
and every foreign mass becomes an island
rising up within you, so we may have
someplace to swim to.

"CAT Scan" first appeared in Sinister Wisdom, Spring 2001