Oh sharp diamond, my mother! I could not count the cost of all your faces, your moods that present that I lost. Sweet girl, my deathbed, my jewel-fingered lady...
Let there be seasons so that our tongues will be rich in asparagus and limes.
Loving me with my shoes off means loving my long brown legs, sweet dears, as good as spoons; and my feet, those two children let out to play naked.
O fallen angel, the companion within me, whisper something holy before you pinch me into the grave.
My mouth blooms like a cut.
There is a good look that I wear like a blood clot. I have sewn it over my left breast. I have made a vocation of it.
Dead drunk is the term I think of, insensible, neither cool nor warm, without a head or a foot. To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.
My husband sings Baa Baa black sheep and we pretend that all’s certain and good, that the marriage won’t end.
I am tearing the feathers out of the pillows, waiting, waiting for Daddy to come home and stuff me so full of our infected child that I turn invisible, but married, at last.
When they turn the sun on again I’ll plant children under it, I’ll light up my soul with a match and let it sing...
There is hope. There is hope everywhere. Today God give milk and I have the pail.
Thumbs grow into my throat. I wear slaps like a spot of rouge.
I can only sign over everything, the house, the dog, the ladders, the jewels, the soul, the family tree, the mailbox. Then I can sleep. Maybe.
What a lay me down this is with two pink, two orange, two green, two white goodnights.
My sleeping pill is white. It is a splendid pearl; it floats me out of myself, my stung skin as alien as a loose bolt of cloth.
I remember the stink of the liverwurst. How I was put on a platter and laid between the mayonnaise and the bacon. The rhythm of the refrigerator had been disturbed.
Come, my pretender, my fritter, my bubbler, my chicken biddy! Oh succulent one, it is but one turn in the road and I would be a cannibal!
And thus Snow White became the prince’s bride. The wicked queen was invited to the wedding feast and when she arrived there were red-hot iron shoes, in the manner of red-hot roller skates, clamped upon her feet.
And within the house ashes are being stuffed into my marriage, fury is lapping the walls, dishes crack on the shelves, a strangler needs my throat, the daughter has ceased to eat anything...
Rejoice with the day lily for it is born for a day to live by the mailbox and glorify the roadside.