INITIATION
your genitals deserve something gentle. first a name that doesn't sound like a punchline. names are everything, one misstep & you're in another country. there's something new in new england: the slips in the cobblestone streets, those grooves. i love the border of things. here is where it becomes there. i'm ending. this is my natural limit. you peak like a mountain. nature is such a tease, such a star. look, up, the moon would like to spin in your orbit. when did you get so good at gravity? what would your hand like to show my hand? have you ever really known a woman? not a flower or an ocean. i mean, the flesh. not a mother, not a girl. ever touched the tip of an iceberg? sorry, not an iceberg. ever listened to a plaintive cry? the plaintiff of my heart would like to say a few words about the color marigold, to spread over the rug in your basement. don't you keep the best things in the worst places? worst is another word for evil. evil is a secret code for live. i'm living on you. you make me come alive. you make me arrive. i'm here. this space is waiting for you to follow me: sweet alice, down the rabbit hole, into the forest of weird & wonderful. will you move those still-tender legs? will you let me bring you to the ground?
TIME OF ARRIVAL
you are going to die. probably not today, so you might as well come to terms with the body you are. if you could change it, you would change it out of yesterday's dirty underwear. remember, someone wanted to buy you underwear, someone wanted to peel it off with her mouth. if that was hot to you then, it was hot because her mouth was hot. do you only feel sexy imagining the eye of a camera? she could've called you tiger. really, you are a pussy. when it comes to love, you might as well be dead. when it comes to sex, you might as well welcome them in. this is your secret club: here are the people who know you, can recognize your bartholin gland by touch. if it only swells when you are too indulgent, maybe you should want less. you'd think a woman would know what to do with you. you would've lived better with a ghost, a man haunting through your phone. he really did eat you. in some world, that's how you die. in this one, you're coming to life, and as this body, yours, floods, blooms, echoes in scene, you think stranger things like the stranger girl everyone saw you to be, the one you are finally allowing lungs to breathe. now with the white hair, now with the corned foot, now with the aching hips. lord, those child hips, how you knocked into everything. you could knock on the door of someone's heart with all that, and when they come to answer, that someone, waiting, pining, life opening, you can't believe in the power of your body: even its shadow, everything it is, everything it almost touches, everything that disappears when you die, probably not today, everything everyone, yes you too, will miss.