Floe
I was born in a room with no angles.
A contagious strain of why
took over my blood.
Road, ice, sky—
I want sentences made up of knots—
hair, ears, snow—
I get up, go outside,
linger with winter
to ensure cold infuses my words here.
The English language is
a hunting snake
constricting thought—
if I knew eighty languages
accuracy might be
possible, like when
an old woman standing behind
a mother in labor
rattles off random names
and the child comes out of the womb
when she hears herself called.
Drool Kings
I climbed a hill to look at what
the fog was doing
which took ten minutes and then
I went home to make lemonade
with fruit from Mexico,
well water bloody
with iron. And now I can’t
get over the fact I start to think
without knowing
where I’m going.
In an experiment
subjects were shown video
of someone eating lemons.
Those who produced
the most spit, who drooled
heavily on a cotton wad watching
the lemon eater also
scored high on a questionnaire
testing levels of empathy,
a noun I was taught is a tool
like a sweet hammer for humans
to use on each other,
but now I picture a mouth
proficient in slobbering.
Nociceptor
You forgot how to ride a bike.
You sat in the rain like a happy mushroom,
you sat in the rain like the reproductive structure of some fungus.
There, in the working model of reality, you sat
forming a small army of thoughts:
People are not normal.
We know because we have met them.
They live inside us to this day,
part of a brain-run economy…
While you were thinking that, I drew two curious eye stalks
over the mirror, I bought
a guide to shells, which was
unnecessary
since I know how to find a lump in the mud
and be a lump in the mud.
Then the two of us were eating a sandwich.
Then the two of us were speaking a private language.
But I forgot how to word thin-skinned.
I sat in the pain like a prize neuron.
What a crisis of presence, I said to the world.
Now
I fight for time to eke out thoughts.
Once, unemployment left the fluffy
corpses of days at my door, but nothing
killed me. Nice try, brain. Good try, men.
Nice eff ort, America with the thick
layer of shit slapped over marble. Go
team. Go home. Go to bed. Dream about
teeth falling out and wake up with
teeth falling out. Read how King Leopold
never even saw the Congo. Read up
on shame. Enter the shamescape. Buy
a vitamin to stimulate hair growth. Kill me
later. I need to think on how I’d like to go.
Someone recently asked if they were
terminal, would I smother them to death
with my breasts. I said yes. Of course
he chose to die by sexy mommy. If I was
your sexy mom, our house would be in
Arizona. I would bake you breast milk flan.
