Writing Portfolio
I dreamed you
came to me
asking to tattoo the night sky
on my body
starting small, you
cut into me
and marked the constellations
across my skin
Pegasus on my pinkie
Cassiopeia on my collarbone
Lyra on my lip
Hydra on my heart
After that, you
Swept across me
Mapped the nebulae until
I was full
With no space left, you
cleared away your inks and left me
unfinished and incomplete –
a partial galaxy
Nightmare, by Artie Shaw and his Orchestra.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W59FzOwYIs)
The sound is smoky and
close. The trudge comes:
a march through honey.
I can feel my rusty heart
align itself to the heavy
thunderous pulse, as
the scorched pitch of the
trumpets wheeze out their
melodies with dry throats.
From nowhere, a narrow
squealing clarinet pours up
and down the stave, like oil.
Your kind of jazz beats me
over the head and shoves its
fingers into my open throat.
I am found,
just by chance,
in the clammy, whitewashed hours
of morning: laid
upon the earth.
My sunken heart
is rolled around
behind the quick-closed door of death:
a silent bell in
a baby’s rattle.
Soon after, I am
lifted into a box,
which is stuffed like a fat goose
with offered elegies,
and then sealed.
Sodden and limp,
the smell of me gone off,
the lamplights of my eyes put out:
all my body,
dun and done.
My mouth is a treasure chest
a pit of language
my tongue stirs this cauldron
sounds swell
and drop out of my mouth
like heavy stones
each a swollen fruit
of differing flavours
too rich to swallow
puce
plump
pearl
colossal marbles clacking
against my palette
I savour all
sunk in the noise of it
and too drunk on sound
to climb out
Lay down
on my quilt
wrap yourself in
the tale it tells
feel nothing
in feeling everything
stretch out your hands
feel the weight
of yourself and
thread your veins
into the patchwork
bound beneath you
stitch yourself in
For just a minute
let me pretend
you aren’t there
and that the sounds
I can hear
are the sounds
of trees
softly brushing
against the sky
of rain
softly sousing
the earth
and not your
beautiful hands
softly closing
the door
between us.
When we were kids we’d sometimes
sneak out into the plum orchard
and steal our parents’ wine to drink.
In the dead of night, like jailbirds hidden
beneath the trees, we picked at branches
and planned for foreign days ahead.
It’s funny now to think we never seemed to
eat a plum in time, being always so
bitter, or sick and wet with ferment and rot.
Each season brought a purple harvest;
the sweetly cankerous smell
hanging low above the slack, damp ground.
Even now I sometimes remember
us, and how the whispers of
anxious leaves would rustle up the dawn.
Though we don’t know each other now –
and isn’t that always the way? –
I remember when we weighed our futures
and how for us, the dark, rank fruits
burst their vernix jackets, and spilled
violet ink beneath a chasmal sky.
