Her name isn't Eve

She holds pale snake and bitten apple
like she's the first woman on earth like
the first time you tasted your own
blood like a child punished for hunger
but her name is not Eve

She bears the world on her shoulders
bent like a softer version of Atlas like
a thousand people have loved her and
left like ocean grinds down solid stone
but her name was never Eve

She carries light bulb promise in her hip
bones and your salt salvation in her thin
breasts like the name you always forget
like desire always finds a way to ground
but her name isn't Eve

She walks prickle footed and sunburn shy
with witchcraft in her hair and flint in her
chest for when they knife her, when she's cut
she will spark and scar you, she knows burn
but her name is never Eve

If my trauma could talk

Today my trauma wants a poem written about it. It wants to be heard like the fierce crack of thunder when everyone is looking at the gorgeous lightning. It wants to be made more beautiful than it is, to be wrapped up in metaphor and disguised on stretched canvas.
It wants to escape the soft trembling cage of my body and scamper around stepping on people's toes and scratching their legs and licking their faces and saying look, look what she carries inside her.

See how she says no to the right people and yes to the wrong ones. See how she plunges into healing like tumbling off a cliff during a storm. How she can't help dragging the sandpaper of memory across her tender skin. How she forgets that safety feels like pulling the blankets up around her ears at night. Like quiet, like sunshine and dappled shade. Like a purring cat that won't leave her alone. Like kisses that don't make her tremble. That love doesn't have to feel like it's going to blow up inside her.

My trauma wants to be all alone like a lighthouse, a beacon for where not to go. It wants company that can stroke its raised hackles but doesn't know what that means or how to ask. It wants to change its name into an un-pronounce-able calm. It wants to tell you everything, like the rings of a tree hold history. It wants to forget everything.  It doesn't know how to end this poem.

Feral

who taught my heart to live
outside my body? as if it were
a creature always looking for a home
I am more than a shell but still
it leaps lion-bold after new smiles
frog hopping towards tiny fingers
growing wings at the sight of sunsets

sometimes I have to chase it down
when it's given itself to someone far
away, only the elastic of my veins to
keep me on the trail of the hunt

sometimes it tries to run in every
direction at once, aspiring to crimson
starburst, a carmine firework overhead
I ache, I ache

I had it locked away once, caged so
it could only sniff at the scent of
others passing; rattling my bones and
murmuring in my sleep. I tried to hide
its teeth and claws, its yellow eyes,
the hunger, the hunger. I still carry
the padlock of fear, rusted with resolve
but it does not hold for long

every time the beast escapes me
it feeds, grows. my skeleton grows brittle. when someone hands back
my heart, torn and bruised
strangely sated - it hurts
to squeeze it back
into the cave of my chest

I have to nurse it back to health
together we water the garden
beds of my ribs and watch the
tender shoots of peace curl up
and I rearrange my innards
making room for what we've taken
in, what was learned

but it's restless, this impish heart
and quiet days alone do not sate
it for long. Soon it will be hungry again
nipping at the underside of my skin
thumping     hungry    hungry
find it, find them, find him!

Who taught my heart to live
outside my body, hunting for
the love of anyone
but me?

An unplanned tribute to Leonard Cohen

If cracks are how the light
gets in, I must be beaming
glowing the carmine temples
of my ventricles, twinkling
the elastic of my tender lungs,
radiant like I've stored decades
of sunlight in the quiet
honeycomb of my bones

If love is kintsukuroi to the
vessels of my clay palms,
threaded into my porcelain
back and belly bowl, holding
together the fallen vases of
my calves - I am treasure, now
fit for a pirate. Come, beloved
plunder the gold in my heart

The arsonist

I have burned
so many bridges
I'm surprised
there is anywhere
left to go

All the rage

I'm not going to tell you it's all
in your head because it's not only
there it's your stomach that tightens
like a hermit crab ducking into
the borrowed shell of your bones
it's in your blood - can't you
see it? your veins are blue
waterfalls of fury plunging
back towards your heart

it's the solar flare in your eyes
that burn in the cheek that betrays
the furnace of a mind tended
too well, stoked to an inferno with
no chimney to breathe out
    all
          that
               smoke

tucked inside these warehouses
we call bodies nailed onto
the train-tracks we name memory
scorched into the moorings of
this ship     this boat we have bailed
        out so many times       still floating!
is that electricity that crackles up
the rod of your uncoiling spine
   is the lightning still looking
for a home outside itself
   is all the rage brother

and not for all
the love can I
stand in it
    for you
        again

Litany for the clumsy

My heart is made of glass or maybe
it was fire.
     Forged? Metal rooster crows
like windchimes, like blacksmith's hammer songs.   
                     I forget.

Or maybe it changed from day to
day (I am alchemy after all. How
else could a chameleon
like you find a mirror in me?)
Anyway I took it out of the cabinet.

Pried open my ribs with the crowbar
of your affection and placed it
gleaming, crystalline     now fingerprinted

into your hands. Such hands.
Masculine like
the back of your calves and that thick neck
I loved with my mouth and every other part
of my cabinet. I mean body

my body loved you and yours.
     Still does, but nobody is asking that question.      Out loud, it's impolite.

My fingerprinted heart in your clumsy hands. Your clumsy heart. You eager bull
to my shop of fragiles, bucking 

the bonds of love. How dare I think to rope you! So

much shattered glass to sweep up after.
I tell you some of it was old shit
nobody was going to buy it anyway. You call my bluff.      Or did you buy it?

A hesitant no is still not a yes. There's no alchemy to be had there.

And I'm still picking splinters out of my feet. My fingerprinted heart back in 

it's cage, I'm picking splinters out with my teeth because my hands are bound. You are still holding them, begging for another 

pass at the shelves. What kind of fool keeps cattle in a china shop anyway?

This is an invocation for reprieve. Forgive me

I have not forgotten you yet. Glass does not forget, only cracks. Spiderwebs under pressure

crackling in the daylight. Scuttle back under the rock I came from. The sting in my tail. Water bearer you are more dangerous than God gave you credit for.

Stop.

      Just stop.

Glass doesn't bruise, so why do my lungs hurt? Maybe this is alchemy still transmuting into flesh.      There is no china shop, no rodeo, no splinters, only bruises yellowing
like sunrise.

I always mix metaphors because I was never clear about you
except when you kissed me on that mountain. How dare you use the sunset against my defenses
my prison-window habits. I wanted out and you busted in
like you owned the place. Nobody wants to hear this story
again. My heart. Your clumsy. Fingerprints.

We still don't who left more evidence.

When a man tells you...

When a man tells you your mouth was made for his
It's okay to get weak all the way down to your knees, even your toes
You should swoon and let him kiss you more, and again
Just remember your mouth is the cave
and he has not yet met your blind words
Flying out of the darkness to meet the twilight outside

When a man says that your bodies were made to fit
You are allowed to believe him, to measure
the intersections of your limbs. To mould
your yielding flesh to his questing hands
First, make sure he has heard you howl
That he sees the strength in your bones
the vastness of your hungry mind
the crone looking out from your eyes

When a man says that he wants to love you
You can want him to. You can yield
surrender to the roar in your chest
But learn first what keeps your precious
fires burning, and steady. The difference between
"I don't want to lose you" and "I want to keep you"

He believes you are moths to each other's  flame
But yours is the fire of the stars

'Moth and flame' by Dynasthai

Sun

He thinks he is
a moon caught
in fixed orbit
about the world
he was born to
the past he was
     cratered by

I loved
the pale light
of his face in the
darkness, believing
a volcano hid
in his chest

nobody taught me
that moons are just
grey mirrors for hot
stars to glimpse
themselves in

I didn't know small
planets whirled around
me because they
had no choice
that they never get
close enough because
I burn. no one told me
the earth does not
bloom without me

they name me for
my blazing heart
but sun is just
another name for
star to those
caught in her gravity

and galaxies are made
of stars with dark spaces
in between

Bloody

There is poetry in my
body but I can't get it out
it fills my thirsty veins
pushes through the chambers
of my livid heart, gives me
headaches when I sleep
the only way
to get it out is to break
the skin

I have spent the
time since you healing these
canyon wounds and the scars
make a landscape of my flesh
like ink bleeding into
paper they tell stories holding in
memory long as mountains

Yet my blood sings to
be freed again to be seen
who will pierce me next to
hear its siren call, the bloody
thump of my tireless heart?
will they leave me stained
with my own carmine poetry
or join their eager blood with mine?

Splitting/gratitude

To the man who
split me open like
an earthquake does
to careful highways

The man who cracked
my flesh with his against
the concrete of our lusts

Man who ripped out
the roots of my restraint
like a gardener angry with
overgrown weeds

Who never learned that
stop
and      no
are sacred words

Thank you

For changing everything
for shattering my
carapace for wounding
my foundations so I
could learn to trust
the oceans in me

Every love and rage
and ache now spills
from me in waves
trickles
waterfalls
rivers

you cracked me and
I will never recover
I am large and fierce
heavy with love

Cast the runes (poem)

If I had cast the runes
before we met would they
have told me of our collision?
How we would come together
like asteroids, burning through
sky? How for one this would
only be a perihelion but the
other would blaze to earth.

If I had cast the runes
would they have told me of
my unfolding, smoothing out
the creases of habits, talismans
held up against the darkness
of my own desires? Of brittle limbs
turned to clinging liquid in the
flaring heat of our fleshly worship?

If I had cast the runes
would they have told me
how a heart can break open
and break again over itself?
How it feels like nothing will
ever recover? But it's only the skin
of a snake cracking and peeling
back to let a larger creature out

Chronicles 2012 (1)

We wait, steady on the tarmac
watching others come in
They look so fragile on the wing
dipping and swaying lower
last minute adjustments
as the ground rushes up
to touch in a cough of smoke

Now we inch forward
turning from the land
and then the rush, the gravity
My belly is feathery, fluttering
the power catches my breath
Up, up, impossibly airborne
on wings of metal and wire
weighted with scraps of our lives

My attendants are both men
one beautiful and shiny, lovely
but his soft edges, a lilt to
the voice and hips, a slick
of lipgloss betray his allegiance
The other is sculpted in face
his hair rising to a peak
an accent, pale eyes, a smile
for the ladies. A set to his
mouth reminiscent of a smirk.
He's not my cup of tea
---- though he serves me a coffee
(it's airplane coffee, watery
with a dribble of milk
but it induces a sense of
working towards wakefulness)

Two women a row behind me
laugh the same laugh, in sync
once, twice, peals like waves
a man is the cause I'm sure
I smile to myself and the window

Dream for my brother

They were coming for you
a They we only knew to run from
I never questioned that I would aid you
I never asked what you had done

I gave you a car to go from us faster
a car that wasn't mine to give
it was the colour of courage
I gave you the colour of strength

when you veered off the highway
the car you drove was white
the colour of beginning, or of death
now wedged in a crack in the earth

I crawled through the wreckage
crumpled at both ends like paper
gathering up your abandoned keys
fat bunches of keys to everything

brother, where are you running to?
do you know what you left behind?
your gods cannot love you as I do
follow them, but take your keys

(2011)

Thoughts after a yoga class

It is not for the strangers who have told me
that the icecream I eat in public
will go straight to my hips. Or the
old man at a train station
who told me
     just the other day
that I should exercise instead of
standing still on an escalator.

It is not so I can
get a better summer body
in just thirty days for
one easy payment of -
      My body is FINE

It is not for the man who
got aroused when he discovered
I could do the splits while I was drunk
and later wouldn't pay attention
when I tried to move out
from underneath him, until I pushed. Or the
one who said - before he'd even met me
that he would pay
anything to watch me do it.

It is not for the men who think
my dancing is for their titillation, not for
the ones who like to watch. It is not
to emphasise the way my waist
curves into my hip so that men
can want me harder and straight-waisted women can 

throw their acid envy in my face.

It is not for the people
who can only compliment me
about my body when I have whittled
down my flesh to less
than it was
when we last met.

I go to yoga to find the peace of mind that this world so often steals from me.

I go to yoga for the sensation of breathing in time
with a room full of strangers
in a city where there are so many people that they cannot even see me

I go to yoga to discover with childlike delight and entirely 

adult pride that my body can do things I did not know a body could do.

I go to to yoga to remember that my body feels good to live in.

To remember that my body is entirely mine.

The way paper and embers should never meet

He's hesitant, folded in
on himself like a napkin.
His creases ease out slightly
as he gulps a single beer

He took two awkward lessons
in break dancing once: I laugh.
I tell him I've always had a thing
for guys who work in IT: he's sure
they have a thing for me too

I shake his hand as we meet
but we'll never touch again.
He'll tell me he's spent
a lot to keep women in
his company. Next time
he'll react wasp-stung
when I try to pay for dinner
and lean away from my
chocolate-icecream-eating
body for an entire movie.

Alongside his crumpled-navy-jumpered
carrot-thin-fingered, height-apologetic slouch
I feel like coals. I am
dense red heat looking for something
to set alight

Bird

Your heart is giving you trouble
again, keeping you from the indigo
rest that makes long days bearable
Maybe it's the starlight piercing
your restless eyelids. Maybe it was
the way someone spoke your name
when you weren't looking for it

There's no way but to push through
the ache, that thing caged in your chest
like a bird beating its wings against the bars
of your ribs, snapping pinion feathers and
bruising bones meant for flight

It's the pulsing wound-red heat of it
that keeps you awake at night, this night, the
bloody thumping inside you, the hunger to meet
its mate. Even muffled through the patient walls
of two bodies it will know that song, that unmistakable
call. Perhaps then you will feel it settle
for the first time, cooing like a happy pigeon

Great expectations

I ask my lovers to pick
locks so old I have
forgotten where I
left the key

A question of volcanoes

The only men who tell me
they love me are my cat
and my somnolent brother

The first by rolling around
in my sheets when I make
the bed and making me sit
cat-lapped still when I have
things to do and butting his
grey-masked head against
my shins and my ears - that purr!

The latter by rolling around on my
sofa bed all weekend and every night
patting my head when I'm feeling
feisty and laughing at my choices
in men, wishing I could see myself
He likes kissing my forehead and
each cheek when I'm tired and
strung out like frayed flannel

The others don't know what to
do with me - I can see it in
their postures and their poems
they turn my name into a question
I'm afraid to answer until
I'm sure and I'm never really
sure so I keep my volcanic
desires tightly to myself
waiting for the earthquake
that will bring me undone

Bone

There's a poem lodged
in my throat like the
clear bone of a fish
thin and prickle-ended
a filament of clarity that
I swallowed in the night
giving way to the heavy
drape of unrequited sleep

It's jammed in that place
before air can become a word
stubborn as a memory
so I cough and harrumph
swallow and stretch, trying
to dislodge the bone of a
poem wedged in my throat

Any way is fine, up or down
I don't mind if only I can
get it out, unstuck. I have
better uses for my throat
for my scratched voice: today
I must warble like a magpie