"the facility"

i made this for you

Vengeance amulet (against recognition)

What you find will be terrible
your lover to challenge

Blood shows up even in daydreams

Wrong are your lists and making yourself the listmaker
wrong is your aggressive elicitation of everyone’s hatred of you
we don’t like hating

your wit is cystic, please stay in that part of California

If I were a sensei I’d guide you to the wall with my eyelashes
I’d become a sensei just in order to do so

If the neurotics only knew they were at a rolling boil
they’d let us throw some salt in
rather than burning us staccato

bursting steamcoat avocado

nobody was paying attention
we had to insult you to get your attention

in the photo you were ripe
but now you only feel ripe

do you see what happens to fruit when its left out

(let it be)

private, not secret

The day wore on the evening for ourselves.
The bubbles in the lawn, babes and sprinklers,
then dusk, and fish.
The dead were present at this barbeque
but not the unborn. All of what we wished
was there, in the form of melancholy,
what we had become, the star of the party.
Huddles formed against the youth,
Who were deluded and headed for trouble.
The swatting of flies, melting casseroles,
A slumping in the eyes of all present.
At the dinner hour there was a sighting
And the startled cries echoed in ripples across the yard.
The lion perched on the brick wall, still,
except for his eyes, witness to bad meat.
Everyone raised their hands, waving,
as if wanting their turn first, as if saying
“Pick me.”

(this is an excerpt from my novel)

It’s hard to write about the sunset or light because words are already too heavy to replicate color. However it’s that particular light that walks me home and settles on the house for an excruciating hour before it is properly dark and the lights start working and I can invent tasks to keep me busy throughout the evening like roasting a whole chicken or baking bread. Sometimes after work I’ll bear the company of the ladies at work just to have company; mostly I scoot out of work like a brush stroke or an exclamation no one can reprove because it is so firm and final under that particular light I mentioned. Sometimes people come out of their houses or stop at their open hatchback with armloads of groceries or hold the mailbox open with letters gripped in their hands, pausing in rapt attention as if there was something to be read there, as if there were answers to be found in that depth in that horrible lonely hour before dark. I’ve tried to find it in the color palettes in my computer, and not even the fanciest software at work can replicate this blue nor even come close. If I found it anyway I don’t know what I’d do with it but at least I’d have it in another place than they sky and then I would know that it is not the color of death, which is what I have suspected for a long time.

what i overheard waking up

"Just because you don't get what you want doesn't mean there isn't anybody watching out for you."

"our limitations are like coordinates." -kim young

i had just rounded the corner, after a long healthy jog,
and there it was, blocking my path.
my sadness.
staring me down like a big, attractive bully.
there was nowhere to go. i couldn't get around it.
i had to address it.

I really enjoy having one follower. Especially, because it is you.

*

Does tornado work a routine? Itself the tedium
it needs? The ends kept in. Inside, a question?

oh oval other

what emptiness means
supple volatile, dingy

inside the question
Am I weather’d? Am I guilty?

I move a pith in gasps
The church’s arches are numbers in a calendar, limbs
of a center’s margin. Quantity is halved
steepled, and thrown. The tune makes a move. The
quality I halved. I halve to process to move? I am one
Turn? I turn once up, but one times “turn” makes the path
down. Can I go? Can I get?
How long of a turn do I get?

What emptiness means is a question.
Am I ferocity? I am resolute?

A question means by its work. Oh, think
it over.

You might enjoy my husband's wonderful poetry here:
http://edizionineve.wordpress.com/
If you can read Italian.

*when meets his lord in a narrow street

I had a strange dream last night. I looked in the mirror and I realized I had no pigment in my eye. The eyeball was now just a white spot, with a thinly drawn circle scratched in, the circle encasing nothing where the color used to be, nothing but a tiny dilated pupil, the pupil floating in white, the pupil also drawn in.
The first nurse said she didn't see what I was talking about. “I don’t see anything,” she said. I began to feel deep alarm. Irreversible damage is a concept I have always had like a birthmark. Like a scar under an arm. No one knows it but it’s there. Anyway, my husband agreed we should look elsewhere.
We went to an emergency doctor. She took me in right away,
but when she got out this little wooden stick and began turning it slowly,
as if trying to tame an invisible honey, I got nervous. She kept twisting the stick, as if trying to catch invisible drippings of something terrifically extraneous. Clearly, she was trying to get the right amount of something.
But I just didn't see how she was going to use that thing on my eye, it seemed the wrong tool altogether. And I was extremely fearful and agitated about my eye. About the look of my eye, you understand. Because I could see it perfectly. It seemed like I had been drained on one side: I could see perfectly into the ends.