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I’m every goddess and gorgon in one.
I am Kali. I am Medusa.
I speak death with the depth of my eyes.
I, I,
I, Aphrodite and Athena.
My love is war
and only in death can you escape.
Plunge into me before I plunder you
for the blood/lust.
For the foaming mouths.
For the heads in tight lines.
Go still deeper into the past to know me:
Do you remember Inanna?
Do you remember Isis?
I am both Durga and demoness,
the necrophile who consumates murder with rape.
The mortal brain can’t carry these truths
unless it succumbs to the shadow.
That is where,
cavedwelling,
corpseeating,
shrieking and
sobbing and
shackled,
I live.

All of my past loves stand in a circle holding hands, surrounding a table on which I lie.

“Relax,” they say to me in unison.

“I can’t! You’re hurting me!” I cry.

“We aren’t doing anything to you,” they say.

“But I’m in so much pain,” I exclaim.

“Just relax.“

“If I relax you’ll leave.” I am sobbing.

“We will leave if you can’t relax.“

“I knew it. You’re going to leave. I can’t relax.”

I wake up. I chase isolation. In the desert flats with no life around me, I can’t relax. On an empty campus field at night, I can’t relax. In my own bed, I can’t relax.

When there is nowhere left to run, I crack open and out spills pain.

Into this last remaining companion, I finally relax.

Every day after
I find a gilded hair
in a different spot.
You obviously left a trail
for me to follow,
leaving discernment behind
like breadcrumbs to be swept
up by the birds.

That is how I find myself in
mucky caves once a year,
disappointed to be left
alone to squeeze out
the drip drip that collects in
my hat, the memories.

As a child in my
mother’s van back in the day,
I’d hold my breath each time
the horizon disappeared as we
careened across the overpass
on the way home.
For those fleeting moments I’d fly,
feeling like an astral dust bunny
skating on Saturn’s rings
beholden to gravity’s grasp.

That’s what love feels like
as an adult;
a yank in my navel lifts me until
I lose sight of the ground.
Goading clouds taunt me into flight
but the weight of another’s Soul
pulls me back underground
into filthy reality.

For some this happens just once,
for some it never comes.
Am I lucky, then, to be such an
avid spelunker?
Whom else would chart depths
so damp and dark to chase
unknowable shadows,
following fictitious signs
rather than choosing the stars?

– november 2020

No touch, no,
and no kiss.
Nothing but a note, jotted in the early hours of an august day, professing what I knew you already knew.
An open window in which we sat and smoked for 4 nights and days,
an ache in my chest that I haven’t felt in years,
and no mementos but a memory.
The memory of the first time our eyes met, and the look on your face–
that of a startled baby bird having fallen out of its nest mid-sleep.
I flew home, and you’ve flown god knows where by now.
I never want to see you again, for I’m not in love with you:
I’m in love with an idea of a memory of a feeling of an experience.
And it’s left me quaking and it’s rendered me mute more often, lately,
as I try to extract you, somehow, in silence.

Astrology. Archetypes.
Slowly, I heal.
The stones they stuffed in my belly
begin to loosen
rubbing to grit.
I face each mythical monster,
three swords held in my heart
for my three sorrows.
One: my womb;
two: earth, the planet;
three: genocide.

Our capacity to grieve becomes
stymied when funeral ceremonies
are banned. For in our fear
of death we forget to love it, too.
We drink and smoke away the pain
to bury it instead.
I choose celibacy over sobriety
to nurse my self back to health.
Squatting over pots of herbs,
assisted by smoke,
I pray and come.

In the sandstorms
I keep forgetting to breath.
Losing practice, it becomes harder to do;
I gasp awake each night.
I try to meditate at Mara, knowing this desert
is an old one, as the skies above burn.
From where I sit I can see Death Valley
and its mass graves.
“Heal your self to heal the world.”
I weep.

– september 2020

This is a love story a lifetime coming.
I have known you, intimately;
but until we were quarantined,
I didn’t realize the possibilities
of our communion.
There is no post-pandemic
just as there is no pre-pandemic
when every day has been an unpaid sick day
under suppressive and oppressive regimes.
From this understanding comes another,
equally profound:
we deserve comfort.
No one is entitled to my legs.
Slacks are straightjackets for the colonized ass,
and my colonized ass is over it.
Sweatpants, you are everything.
You love me with space, with softness,
with the steadiness of a tumble dry cycle
beating late into the night.
You hold the love handles other lovers have pinched.
You give me room to breathe and bend.
You caress the ankles that have been banged up,
left out in the cold, and shamed into hiding.
I’m never going back to the painful excuse for love
that was doled out for years, confined to the streets.
We’re in the sheets now, but clothed and caressing.
I’ve decided: I’m taking you public.
I’m coming out this fall
when the summer sun fades
and earth continues to turn
and we are told to go back to normal.
I love myself too much for that.

Something melted in me, too
after that final Southern snow.
So long had I clenched limbs to torso
that I forgot I was more than chest or groin.
On that ancient river bank,
I began to flow again.
I dared to stare at you looking inward, eyes closed.
In the timeless wind I remembered desire.
When the possibility of a future
is so defined by the past,
path dependence becomes codependence
becomes destiny.
It didn’t feel like fate, though,
forcing myself to commit the present to memory
just to have something to hold
on the slow walk home.
So as we followed the trail back through the woods,
I chose to lay each feeling to rest
on the soft-needled bed of that forest floor.

– march 2020

The ocean, too, refracted red-ish
as the sun set.
When paradise burned, it was
blamed on the whores.
What civilizations of sluts
walked this coastline before us!
We converted the nipple-baring
heathens with a bell and a crook.
Deep we drilled
we killed
we blood thirsted over black and gold,
and the red flowed
in salt water stream beds.
It rained ash while my
tears synchronized with the ebbing sea.
I bled, too, but swallowed
my sobs so as not to breach the dam.
Instead I was corralled
by the tide on my atoll,
angry white waves spewing rage
at my ankles.
Thinking I had a way with
words, I sang to them to be
gentle, knowing they’d only listen
if I was among them.
So I set sail needing to grieve alone,
yet solitude could not be found
anywhere except on the sand.
If it never cools down again,
this is where I want to be
entombed.