"Dune Flower" (a ghost sonnet)

"dune flower"

I was enticed: your dark and stylish eyes
amongst all that white, those brambles,
dollar weeds. Like the brazen sister of
the Black-Eyed Susans in my Grandmother's
front garden, you rage, even in the frame
of ocean blue and salty mother-air. Splinters,
prickers, sea-oats. To all these Southern Belles
you dance flamenco, a one-act filler play,
a jewel hushed-up. Your skirts spread around
the gaping black fuzz, truncated and fringed,
sinful pink-orange, and yellow. Each petal
seems a slice of fabric, a cut of fruit,
to be stitched up, to cover you, like so
much lace piled up over brown legs.

quatrains in trimeter.

These are also fresh, and strange:

"The Abbey"

Sweet white Elizabeth:
laid flat, bone-bare, regal,
in Westminster Abbey,
(on my street.) I'm tight-lipped,

swaying in the draft below
dizzy rose windows, scared,
feeling round as they, but
colorless. The sun shone

on me for the first time
in months. Flaring nostrils
and wet eyes, silent chanting:
let the bastard child

swing free from my unchaste,
unbloodied hips. give me
a box of shame, a chance.
i'll tell myself i carry

the christ child. And you'll tell
me, in no uncertain
terms, that i have sinned.
Oh, how I suffer for it.


"Afternoon at the Chemist"

Half drunk with fear, the scarf
comes sliding down my throat.
Burst in, scour, feel sick
in line. Ten pounds, I race

to my flat, around a
corner. You can't say, "I
gotta piss." here, I think.
Piss is drunk. I'm dying.

Five floors in the lift. Slow,
then ding, then running, teal
walls give way to pale yellow.
Five minutes, two lines. We're

safe, it tells me. I call,
you wake. It's eight a.m.
in The States. Hysterical,
I tell you all. Strangely,

you thank me for wanting
to know. You are too small,
child, to have one. You can't
live in the ebb and flow.

Even that has left you,
your own body saying
it's final "no." Lovie
eat your mash, and more.

The Body Sequence

These are a bit controversial. And I have literally written them in the last half-hour. So, here they are, rough and (not) ready:

"To my ribcage"

Ribs resting like fallow fields,
furrowed, dusty roads, silt-colored.
I know, you think I choose this,
but I don't. Eve stole the fruit
that I cannot eat. I do not know
why she turned from me
and said, starve this one,
so she doesn't bleed.
Make her body blind to the changing
moon, her mind deaf to the tide.
If she lives, it will be because
she wills it, in the end, (instead
of allowing the fields to fallow.)


"to my breasts"

not so round, peaked, tired
hungry for nothing and no one
hungers them. the kitten only
kneading at the sound of a tiny
motor, presses up close,
chooses you, milk white, pink
planets of slow growth.
a source of shame, a loss,
unknown, above the fields,
the plane, the crater, and on.


"to my pelvis"

french weeds lie low and tangled
with the ground, burnt, offered
as crumbling ash in wiry columns.
i want to know, why don't you
bloom like lovely wisteria?
why don't you tumble up a trellis,
or sigh, carrying your petaled heads
toward the sunshine?
lay low, you french weeds, under
a broken tree. indecent.


"to my thighs"

symbols of the eroding planet,
turning the color of dunes in mid-winter,
shrinking, rolling back, sucked under
a crumbling fence and nothing
of your once-high luster.
the houses will go under in tiny tides.
you don't notice the gentle wane,
the lack of breadth, the emptying
pant leg. the dunes don't choose
to shrink away. the dunes aren't angry.
only me, wishing they were more powerful,
wishing they looked "enough" to bear children.

more photos from the olden camera.

Photos from the Canon A-1: my first roll, room to grow.

"Stay Purdy"

an original, fresh from my mouth...