25 - You Only Get What You Give

Girl knew she would have troubles.

The church handed her womanhood

on a silver platter. They said:

“Make sure everyone is served.”

21 - A Feeling

When all my color bled out, the white room was left,
where I learned I’m not the source of my own desire.
You gloved your fingers safe, to “take a look inside.”
I owe you this feeling; you know it is dangerous for me to be empty.
Your face, frontispiece to knowing all about me, rises close.
“My head is filled with you”
and
“This is what you want, too.”
I have a vision of that milky seed pod bursting.
For now, I am shut up in the mind of a rigid bud.

Brittling stalk of papyrus sedge, my body plied gets bent.
When you had gotten what you came for
I also took something from you.
I took the probing hand and I keep it inside;
it gives me a feeling.
And it teaches me
And it points me
To flowers grown from my white paper,
your soiled gloves left to rot with the reeds.

5 - A Kind of Treason

Level-headed.

In that home, poise was a virtue honed through

a sardonic attitude toward the use of books:

The gravitas of classics and

weight of histories were transmuted

farcically into literal gravity,

to calibrate a muscular keenness for

interpreting imbalance,

adjusting response.

Columnar girls,

holding up virgin

tomes, with the straightest spines.

Yes, it was still like that recently.

Who knew this prim tutorial in

feminine comportment—

to help grim sisters stiffly pallbear

their uncracked, funereal lives—

was necessity encrypted, an urgent warning

obscured by its own

comic obsolescence.

The stuff of old films.

Funny and sad.

These days, I bear myself,

an atlas of cryptogeography in

two hands.

I balance the glass orb of my

empty eye,

refracting cartographic distortions

when I tip.

It rolls, and

I scry this crystal ball for direction

but it changes.

My arms have tired of keeping such a fragile balance,

the way a still head

never made me tired.