Poems

animal girl (I-IV)

I. dupont circle
animal girl might live in a demon’s head
she doesn’t mind being a machination
so much as the endless epistemological dread
tearing through her boyfriend’s mind. station–
airy, stuck, plucked, he doesn’t have much to give
every thought can be untaught by doubt.
renounce this leaky pipe, his will to live,
renounce cartesian chains and get her out!
animal girl paints her nails blue as a bruise
soaks in a hot tub, shivers on ice,
checks passenger pigeon and palm pilot for news,
scrounges for company in the sewers,
ignores her churning stomach – I love you –
downs a shot and mumbles – if he only knew.

II. capitol south
animal girl confesses each week
others blab to a therapist or a priest
she screams at metro center or potomac yard,
chasing bankers and their credit cards
she confesses to her brother rat and sister crow,
receives absolution from a broken window
animal girl will eat shit if you ask her
die if you tell her. she’ll gargle with nails,
mosaic her toes with broken glass
dancing barefoot in the alleyways.
animal girl worships the golden gods
worships the sewers, the bike lanes and bus stops
she slurps at the fountains, swims naked through the reflection pool
she bows to the obelisk penetrating the sky.

III. columbia heights
animal girl is a domestic goddess
she’ll castrate you on her kitchen table
simmer your children into a stew and feed it to you.
sure, she can’t peel a potato or burp a baby,
but she pops out puppies between train stops,
squirting afterbirth in the storm drain
to feed the dolphins, dripping fluids down the drain
an alley sleeper drenched in acid rain.
Papier-mâchéd in yesterdays post
her old man tying chicken bones into her hair
his totem, his doublewide fertility goddess
while grateful rats suckle on her overfull breasts
she pats their fat bottoms contentedly
love streaming back into the streets where it belongs.

IV. stadium-armory
animal girl is new-rot-ick
and bored. another poet-suicide
another woman, yawning rotisserie chicken,
a bluberous cetacean birthed in the bath
caught in an egg sac, her euphoria burns quickly to wrath
lonelier than God– twice damned with satan
animal girl will croak like roadkill
pounded into the side of the road
or frozen in her coleman tent,
butchered and stashed in a suitcase bobbing to the surface
of the anacostia some spring.
she dreams of retirement
in a plain pine box, a room of one’s own,
until the rats visit. no one dies alone.

Florida Man

Amputees

Certain days sting forever, embedding themselves into our beings
Like flesh eating bacteria. A scab emerges above the wound.
Our worst fears actualized, we try to codify loss in tissue and sinew,
If only this ghost would incarnate, to haunt at least visibly.
So I paint self-portraits of the terrorizing, insistent scrape
Of the raw glass edge.

And what then, for the ordinary Tuesday? A midweek
Sandpapering after this hollow horrible wounding.
How then, the midnight visitations
Of unfriendly ghosts, faces better forgotten?
Why then, the open casket? The paperwhite blossoms
Grinning grimly upon the mourners—mocking.
And oh! Almost worse than gone, your papier-mâché face
Swings, a phantom piñata daring me to wonder
How those doctors of the after-death pasted
You together and in their denial of your bullet-blasted head
Made you only more horrific, a curiosity trotted out
For the village to gawk upon—the boy whose power
Misfired against himself.

And when we meet again, will you be restored truly?
Not with a silly putty brow but enfleshed again. Shall we,
Hobble down the heavenly streets? Or will heaven unstitch
The nimble surgeon’s sutures that restored me? Regrow
My snapped off branches? Or will we amputees hop into heaven—even
Roll if we must?