To live is to know
And yet never know
Finality
If you measure from here
To your beginning
The exact instance is always
Slightly off
Don’t think about it too deeply
Instead rub your organs
Against time
Like the palm of a woman
Across her belly
Rub
Your belly
Not because they told you it can help
But because you should love
A face like polished glass
That finds you
Burning
An attempt at a hand
Because you can
Make logic
Of your hand
Make a cracked bloom of your
Diameter
Take your voice and turn it
Into a fiery
Creek river
Now make it five
Thousand years spent
On an oceanic table
A kindly
Walk through the fox-heads
In the morning
Make
A leafless face
Singed moth
Bald
Sheet of paper
Make arms and legs and dissonance
Possible in the miniature
You are a Creator
Who can pleat her legs
Tell yourself you are better
For this
Capacity
Convince yourself that you are
Like the other animals
Of a certain species
And sentimentality
Convince yourself that you will photograph
Holding your heft like a prized calf
At the state fair in August
Convince yourself you too will take to
Documenting the disarming stages
Of an eyeless pupa
That you
Will thoroughly love white horses
Picture windows
Even
Sea minerals
Believe
Your stream is right
Figs and watercress make a tablescape of beauty
Believe it so
Very deeply
That this one aptitude
Carrying around wet elixir
Is isolated
When they congratulate you
On your inflated melon
Anguished balloon
Say thank you for your
Ubiquity
That someone is like you
Is everyone
All at once and
Simultaneously
Let them fill your hole
Lose
Yourself
In a flock of irises
A herd of ankles
The pang of basic
Laws of Nature
You are
Statistical recurrence
Become one of them
Then become them
In your ratted eyes and oversized onesie
You
Mammoth Human of a Unitard
You my dear have won
Life
Dripping in their suburban viscosity
The simple shrubbery of
Their palms
Your tongue will soon lick tablecloths printed
With chrysanthemums
Your feet emerging as fine cuts
Of leather
Lucky lucky
Lucky
You
Skin of Orange Trim
Left Eye of
Matching Tumbler
You can wash your hair two times a day
From a mythical river of un
Digested food
Hold yourself up like despair
In the shower
Wishing for endless menthols
And glasses of bourbon
In the sun
To crush your sadness
Go to the turn
Run to the sea
Nullify your productivity
Stand outside the deserted hotel
Believe in God
Wing His deliberation
Polish your finely ribbed teeth
Act like a vintner’s daughter
Troll the dying woman
Copy and paste
Buy the $500 quartz
Wear max color
Weep beside the moon
Make a pilgrimage to a medieval castle
Confound history
Partially complete a crossword puzzle
Crawl on your knees in the desert
Threaten a medical professional
Take tea in bed
Act something Grecian
When I say Grecian I mean
Rip open your breast for public use
Heart a picture of a palm tree
Let money tell you where to go
Call it indecision
Photograph the sunrise
To remember sunrise
Plate your lips with fuchsia
Arrive in Spring
Fix upon the room
Curtain the sky
Burn through like your mother
And her mothers’ mother
Skip among the brambles
Tremble weirdly in the meadow
Squat on a fat poppy
Steep in the grass
Like a maiden
Your skin is surely jerking you
Into cleanliness
See
You are warmly and pink
With child
You are not a murderess
You are not Mary Ann Cotton
Lizzie Borden
Not even Jodi Arias
You are so full of water and folic acid
You are becoming more
Than jowls without interruption
In fact you are Chosen
Holy Holy Holy
Blessed Inventory
Touch the Greatness of Your Being
Sober
Touch the angled
Flutter between your legs
The bulbous cramp of a
Waistline
Hold the paper rib of your little woman
And feel Predetermined
This
Is Everyday Elevated
You are
Pear-Like Elocution
You are inside
A freshly stitch of tinsel
A cream cake before the big party
The underside
Of Jesus
Cultivate the glow of a full moon in
Sagittarius on a Saturday night in April
And remember it is no longer April
The air is hot and the cottonwood is spiraling like ash
And pirating the lawn into whiteness
And the peonies are full
As full as bosoms
And there are thick purple areola
Raised little bumps of atmosphere
And the green is all around quieting a bed
and there is a smell of death
Of old deer among the crows and within the grass and there
Is the grass and its washing through you and there is you
And you try to run to be free to feel and enclosed
Is like a spectacular wreckage
Your belly and its tired calamity
Stamina appendaging
Syllables boned and deboning
Feet stringed in silk meat
Or else gums
Or otherwise teeth
And there are names for this wreckage
For your dissolving light
List of names
On napkins
In text
Under a floating fish in a paperweight
Names of German derivation Norwegian root
Warrior Princess Goddess
Sanskrit love Creek benediction Slavic
Butter Beautiful Happy Industrious Radiant Radiant Industrious Blessed Noble
Honorable Majestic Exalted Radiant Happy Beautiful
And there are your thoughts of all the people who think
They can will a form into beauty and
There are your thoughts of how
You just want to live alone in the failed red of summer
And how it is summer and and soon
There will be Turkish towels and soon slivers of cheese
And there will be paring knives and halved fruit and screen doors edged in color
And soon cold beer and salami and quarries and crinkled linen muslin
And soon red skin to peel and cherries from the side of the road
Red cherries so warm as to burst in anger and soon
Jumping
And jumping and water and disappearing through
And then inevitably there will be
A great sanitarium of happy explosives
When people find you
To tell you
Don’t
Consume
Drink
Sing
Dance
Skip
Talk
Whisper
Stand
Fold
Breathe
Fill
Sway
Swell
Into uselessness
Look for their jingoistic happiness
Look for their peppering hatchwork
Look for their their wild sky
The mucked-up axiom of night
And brim
With the growing inside you
The tar and sputter and heat
Mercurial eye
An eye watching
Watching
Watching
Ask for Its
Her
Forgiveness
For her narrow
Inheritance
That sip of beer
The one piece of glistening
Deli meat
You place solemnly at
The feet of her altar
Ask Her to forgive
As much as can be forgiven
Forgive the sin of this planetary weight
Forgive the heat of light stabbing
Forgive the cuts between the trees
Their mathematics
Their falling
Forgive the field mouse running across the floor
That you don’t have a broom to sweep it
Forgive the redbird trapped in the attic
The one you chase deliciously with a hammer
Forgive the fantastic horns of your cry trough winter
Forgive your old employers
Your boss
And his boss
Forgive your sad father
Forgive your shock of nerves
That dance in you as embarrassment
Forgive your most northern extremity
The one you touch from the far side of the bed
Forgive your want for a bodysuit
Fern
Excess sugar
Expensive light
Sucking in the drum of your stomach
Then have Her forgive the doctors
They know not what they say
Making you feel like a woman
Stuffing her mouth
With money
Mirtazapine
Hydroxyzine
Seroquel
Clonazepam
A piece of fired clay buzzing thick with fruit flies
Hungry not with the latitude to be
Perfect
Right
Exacting
O
To have been
Powerful and Battery-
Operated
A mother so
Frighteningly discreet
As to slip into spill-proof suction
A brilliant space-saving body
That clips into anywhere
Not the wild erring
Of you
You
Who drapes her Saturnalian body
For the pharmacy
To collect her 30
Pills
You who
Pricks the bulbs of her fingers
Filling their tragic pits
With sticky tissue
You who
Unknowingly carved a hole like relief
Mixed blood and estrogen in its mortar
Freed water
Yielded seed
Made firmament in the midst
Brought forth the Grass
And Herb
And hallowed it
Said let there be
A creeping thing
Let there be
Gathering
On the third day
And there was
The dimensionality of a gill
Then a second
Lobe of pearl
Hook of limb
Picket of pink
Gum
You
Regal
Tumor
Immaculate Billow
Woman Mother
You
Who only ever wanted
Really
Wanted
To become the ground
To know the great
Flood of it