Lit in Progress

our unnursery, the brightest room with no furniture
a shoebox as luminous as the flesh of a mango

The sky presses its light, heat, its muggy thickness down,
arching smooth and hard, the white roof of an oyster.

“I had this, once, too,” the woman said, over the needle in my hand.
“You know it’s okay to be sad?”
My legs sweat under the blanket; I talk too much.

Heaven drips its muddy rain over brick houses in domino rows.
Drops slap against windows, splash in empty birdbaths

I wake in recovery, unrecovered.

Cry at the sight of prenatal vitamins, ignore the laundry
Spend time on messageboards, guiltily.

A pickup truck, a white crib in its bed
with pink printed linens dappling without a cover
turned wood bars curved, delicate, waiting
to be gnawed, bumped, grasped in wrinkled, inarticulate hands.

I’m a gas tank, a casket, a dry deep-throated gourd
with peeling paint, suspended from a mimosa tree
uninhabited

abreast of conscientious elephants,
great wrinkled knees like knuckles
without the same dexterity –
offering plastic buckets, stale grain,
frowning at concrete vestibules
heels clarnking against blown-up pictures
of orangutans.

watching the pool of blood between my thighs,
through the week, flowering red, rust, brown
warm and soft, an archaic cleansing wisdom

.

there needs to be another verse here.

.

pawn-like houses face
one another across a
well-curbed concrete street

shoulder to shoulder,
blinking their plantation blinds
and comparing trims

dotted birds in their
houses, floating, wonder how
they ended up here

businesses and malls,
wal-marts and theatres like
brambles hedge them in

sentinal dogs bark
as cats smile, sunning themselves
while everyone sleeps

I have freckles in inopportune places.

Horses bite each other with their big blunt teeth
Saying things
About power, place,
About
The hierarchy of hay and grain and salt licks
With sweat running down their legs, and
the arid wind fingering its way
into the coarseness of their manes
the horse-smell is thrown like kicks at each others’ sides
they circle, feint, advance, retreat,
their teeth snap, dust
engulfing their hooves like ash
their heads shaking like battle flags

give them sugar and pretend

Bosh conflibletating
Shrooshnigle queran zipists
Trying to give words meaning.

Dust drifts thick over the pane
pressing him into this cold white place
The gleaming door will close them in,
throwing their images at each other
like shrapnel,
watching as they scrub and scrub
until they smell of soap scum
on the sink they share
with their small clean selves
there inside a bathroom mirror
touching grey lines
with his fingers, her bottled face
cracking like glass . creasing like linen
the one he owns, the one with dark hair

February 8th, 2006