how a martyr makes a home:
makes my blanket from her flesh

red day-coat embalmed
in primary yellow
chapped in your soiled oil

i can't feel my toes. i can see the polish, blood lacquer. the train vibrates under me. i feel it through the street, through the bench i sit on. this man walks aswagger- another to the drumming from the dance complex adjacent hubba hubba, the fetish store (they don't even have thigh-high heels). are they having a drum circle up there? an older gentleman flirts with the shopgirl who closes the grate at hubba hubba. he wears a pageboy cap and nonchalance. he jokes at her imprisonment in the shop this evening. what am i doing here? still can't feel my toes. earlier i tried to give a homeless woman gourmet jelly beans. what the fuck is wrong with me?

seasonal threats

dried white roses, mint, blood and chalk i watch melting in the rain all taste the same on a shade tumeric brick lips. and i know we enter winter. though elsewhere spring arrives in her soft-celled self. time grinds my scapulae together as i try to hold my clavicles straight lest they clap book-like and sink into my breast together. but forsoothe forsythia. yellow paper you over riveting eyes and i shall love you, marrows having greened profoundly. clarity. beeswax. antagonism. on a flat wet stone i want to break all your fingers. i want to kiss their colors as they heal.
---
deep deep frigidity tremors through me. i listen for the sound of my eyelashes on my cheekbones. there. so soft. still alive. touching everything. sheets, glass, lonely earring in the corner of a masque's mouth, the masque, ribbons, my hair, heels, a spoon, neck, the peony paper, butterfly, velvet rose, plastic mermaid from a shampoo bottle, hot wax- stop there. peel the prints off and set them back toward the flame. there is a wanderlust in me. i want to live anonymously on temporary loves and travel until there is no psychological homelessness. i want our bodies to crumble into lavender, to keep living in the fields. maybe on some days the farmer sucks an orange and throws us the rinds or a girl on bicycle nearly faints at our redolence. we are strong forever. plowed under and re-grown.

sending you:
an ant covered peony,
a wet feather,
a purple eyelid,
a sock in a bottle,
an empty paper boat,
a lacquered baby toe,
a rotting rice bag,
a white powdered elbow,
a slain hart,
a blue can of teeth,
a waxed leaf,
a curled wave in a bellybutton,
a willow stump standing,
an unvociable letting out
in a crying woman,
broken eyelashes,
coiled vengeance,
a premature sigh.