MIDCENTURY (POEM IN WHICH I’M A MAN)

dark wood & hot oil

a haven, of sorts

how you spit your toothpaste with violence

& worship is no overstatement

it’s how i fall to my knees

at the decisive curve of your wrist

as you reach across me for the salt

(whispering)

& i love it when you touch me

& don’t even take your gloves off

dead leather & my euphoric snarl

after coffee, before eggs

& the colour red, or reddening

you spit, i polish

your stern desk, hard & thoughtful

& the clock loud with seconds

& my excited listening

for your asparagus piss as heard through the wall

& everything static with potential

NATURE HELD ME CLOSE AND SEEMED TO FIND NO FAULT WITH ME

For Ramina, title from Stone Butch Blues

You explain the difference
between orange grove and orangery

I am often surprised by what you know                      
what silent knowledge you carry

something shines when you tell me:    
if you pick the blossom you don’t get the fruit.

So tell it! Tell it to those who see in you:
posey, prize, bouquet

instead of old-growth forest,
root system, vines coiling.

Your hands already know what to do,
coaxing possibility from the quiet of seed

earth under nails, in the you-shaped pattern
of your fingertips, swirling.

In the soil you found forgiveness
and offered it in return

found a place that welcomed you,       
just as you are.

I eat your herbs in a cold yoghurt soup
with cucumber, walnuts and petals

the silken and the soured        
both surprising and known

you take what you can from your life
and feed it to me.

DOGSITTING

Ru’s eyes          dart around a dream       

tracking a spectre            I can’t know

swaddled tight in your t-shirt               to be at home in your scent

four paws punch code             like a dozy pianola      

rolling for your homecoming               unseen summoning

I touch her belly with reverence           that unarmoured part

note her indifference                or perhaps ease

it’s been three summers           gone in your bedroom

watching the four-storey-birch bow in deference

to winds that graze       restlessly

clutching at diamond leaves     with urgent fists

yearly we are rattled into something new

CONCH

After I cut all my hair, the air
started whistling          

                           as I walked

as if my skull
were a shell

that I could put my ear to

and hear the tides
inside myself
changing

‘HOT’ OR HOW IT ACCUMULATES  

Some guy replies ‘hot’ to an old picture of me,
aged 13 maybe 14 on a family holiday. Guess he
likes what he sees

I see: Dad behind the camera. Baby face with
heavy cheeks. Small person folding child hands
upon abdomen, a shield. Core braced for what
was to follow, starting to deflect  

That reflex his words recalled in me had
softened for a time. It’s petrified in my
marrow, a store of unsafe through the pith of
my household. He says it’s a joke, deflects

 and I prickle.

I want to shout: Don’t, not yet!

Can’t you see it was the morning of my life? Can’t you
see I was still drowsy from dreams of worlds you had
yet to law claws in?

There were so many times I didn’t know what
I could do for us, so I did nothing. It wasn’t
my fault but it set us up early, a primer for life
as ‘girl’ / as receptacle / as bearer of outside
will framed as personal choice / framed as
agency / framed as fun / as bearer of ‘you
started it so finish it.’

And even though I hardly know him and I
never gave him anything, he doesn’t know me
either, but he still tries to get something. He
doesn’t even know that when he talks all I hear
is hounds at the door, back of the head, face
flat on the wall. He talks and all I hear are
implications. He talks and all I hear is the
silence after ‘no thank you’ and ‘don’t act like an
adult if you don’t want to get treated like an adult’.
He talks and all I hear is that pat on the flank
and ‘you took it like a dog,’ wafting through the
years from a smouldering pit. I leg it, heave
water onto it, throw the remains over the wall,
I deflect. And all those relentless fists pawing
my youth…

Not resigned to the death of a thousand cuts,
I tell him not to from a place of incision. I
remember it as the one hand on my arm as I
turn to leave for a decade or more. That grip
of the figure you don’t see from behind, but
the arm still speaks to the eyes’ hunger. Put
that suckling mouth down. To the photograph
I whisper:

Go back to your black-ringed eyes, sullen longing and
lace, sweet. Go back to your suspicion without
conviction, without feelings to put to the baiting words.
You can stay in unknowing for just a bit longer. Hear
me when I say these men will burn. And if you want
to, you can step behind me, my body is stone tissue now,
it can deflect and feel nothing.

HERE’S WHERE I FOLD THE DAYS INTO THEMSELVES

Walking past the Williamsburg ping-pod         I see a guy
playing against the machine          so hungry for ping pong
he needed neither company      nor conversation      I look away
embarrassed      walk on         alone        past the artisanal greengrocers
the diner         with the 25 dollar French toast        not including coffee
taxes       service charge or tip.         I re-read your messages often
partly to keep you close         partly to internalise the ways in which
you love me             taking my time       like mopping
up egg yolk with buttered toast          and though I don’t see many
people on the street most days       I hear them       hear cars   
the hoover in the corridor         the scuttle of life between
floorboards .        Last week in Louisiana           I drew up alongside
a freight train        on one green container:          ‘Jamie in Arizona        
will you be my old lady?’         I wondered if they were both still             
waiting for their train to call.       In the beginning       I was so
precious                they kept the skin that fell from my body                  
first and last moments             of enmeshment            between
mother and child           enshrined by pink ribbon         faint and young         
locks of hair                         a plastic clip           on inches of cord
held in the top drawer            these days we save much less        
though when aimless              I focus on gathering the grains     
slipping through my days:         picnic tables       under the freeway
pine ponderosa         tattered plastic          on razor wire      
the Changing Tomorrow academy                  the word ‘luncheonette’     
dream-flavoured coke             a single car            driving out
into the thick night        not sure      who disappears first       the car      
or me

IN OFFERANCE (A FEVER DREAM)

I insert
the glass thermometer
under my furred tongue

it clinks teeth
toasting to my good health
as I resist the urge
            to bite down

Mercury is in retrograde again
and I’m home alone
for days on end, not a single word
spoken aloud
from my sick mouth

            the mercury informs me
            that I am peaking at 38.2°C

somewhere
lovers are telling each other
they’re the perfect temperature
but all they’re feeling

is the warmth
as it leaves.

To know the true heat
            the real burning centre

I would kneel beneath you
in a devotional posture

hands clasped

awaiting a liquid
warmed by the glove
of your body

made in thirst
and in wanting–

here I am, in offerance
asking to be bathed
to be soiled and so

to be quenched

o brush my fevered skin
with your humble 37°C,
and cool me off

I am ill.

I rinse the thermometer
under the cool tap

watch the red
slink downwards

like that biro you flip
to see the dress
float off of a lady

SLEEPING AT YOUR PLACE  

When it gets late, you sleep on the sofa and I sleep in your bed

it’s like how
             waves break

             I feel the space that
             closeness asks                    

                                                           as a breeze that winds 
                                                                             between us

                      ruffles your hair     and   

                                                                                                                   blows my shirt 
                                                                                                            taken in     
                                                                                                                   as breath

            One day I might see you       
            in the midst of a      
                                                     dream

                                                                                         and your face                

                                                                                         will be like a mirror     
                                                                                         that I am not standing in front of,

                                                                                                        and in the morning, you make tea 
                                                                                                        and we eat breakfast together

LIGHT WORK

given time,
your touch

makes
light work

of dark
years

they fall
away

and
if only

for a
moment

I am
washed

and I am
untouched

by fear

CRUISING

Mostly, I think of you with
other men, slinking toward
warm denim in the night.
I’m at home in my pyjamas
wondering what one has to
swallow to arrive and then
how one person might give
another anything. But what
I would offer to be faceless
and other, slammed against
trees and concrete and dirt,
the sap and the milk and the
musk of my body thickening,
as if a life of physical
infringements never was.
Imagine being fucked
for fun?

WOODY ALLEN

the X they marked as the place  where your  usefulness lies was
misleading.  you’ve   been  combing  out  the  lice  and  the  lint,
otherwise   known   as    the   dirt  of   what   they  showed  you,
otherwise known as their rot. sunken like graphite  from pencil
pushed   to   thigh,   the  shape  of   your  body’s  yielding  but  a
pinprick  behind  skin.  you  used  to  show  it around, but these
days  seldom  do. and just  as  you  live  with  it, so  you forget it
was ever otherwise. fury sprouts like a bitter kernel, a  smoking
ember,  the  final  hope. if  you  know  how  to  listen  it will tell
you: killing Woody Allen would be inner child work.

MARGINALIA

I am reading your Anne Carson books now
as if lapping water cupped from your palm
it’s a question of appetite, really
and I gasp it straight to the throat.
In your absence there are fervent annotations
a parallel reading, a fire scribble, a hard intent
I trace an imperceptible dog ear, a pause once,
snaring now. Sloped lines veer wildly
half cross a sentence
I read a mark shaken by a country bus
on the backroad, a pencil gripped
lying down. If the notes start only part way
were you waking up to the words then
startled, aflame?

Just like your old nets cast out
for clues and kinship
(poems Sylvia and Emily
receive especially ardent attention)
I lean towards another you that I will
never know and neither did another me
though we sweep our crumbs from the table daily
– I lick my fingers to turn the page