They call it writer's block

but all you can think of are stacks of alphabet blocks, towers of them tumbling from their wobbly height: there goes E; R; T! There goes the raw solitude of sitting criss-cross applesauce alone in the clean silence of your bedroom. You were a child once. You played with the alphabet, spelling in a sloppy row, not really knowing how to spell, trying out your mama's name. Do you remember your own pink, fat, two-year-old fingers? Fat smudgy fumblers. Somewhere, probably in the dim far away cave of the living room, your parents hissed and grimaced. You built your trembling ABC towers. You just kept piling them up. Little baby alphabet-carpenter. A humid breeze pushed through your window, told you the world's strange secrets. Strange secrets, ninety-four degrees.

It is different now. Those secrets wrapped and hung your ribcage, green and serpentine, years years ago. You learned them all by heart, by degree. Now you are thirty-two and the blocks are smaller, duller. You sit criss-cross applesauce on a wooden chair in front of your typewriter. The chair sags--the years have promised nothing. Still the alphabet eludes you and trembles at its great height. Careful primaries: A--B--C. You keep the letters in absolute order. The jungle breeze hits you differently, a thick hot hand on your cheek. Traffic jams your nerves. The endless shimmer of metal-to-metal clogs your moody arteries. Still your fingers do things without you--they are thin now, sore and pink as ballerinas, invasive and shaky; anorexic maybe. One is necklaced by a wedding ring. It winks at you sweetly. Monkeys breed and stomp in your heart. Words swing from tree to tree, evasive and screaming---your typewriter waits like a patient wife, a clot of letters and symphonies right there under you: only air between your fingertip and the faded L key. How do you spell the words for it hurts; I can't breathe; my god, stop talking? How do you know their bright, special colors? How do you cry in a different language; keen in silence; get down the iambic of grownup savagery?

These days you type from a different country; you watch the sun rise like nuclear citrus. There is nothing between you and the alphabet: nothing but the salt-burn of A to Z.

There Is Husband or No

Say I have a husband

Guilt is magical

And what I really have is a ladder
leaning against
an antiquated barn

Where hay snores
like a man and passes days full
of needles like a heroin addict

or a methadone clinic
and I am one of those swearing
smoking women

withdrawing on
the couch

Guilt is magical

my baby is a thirteen month old fever
crawling the walls
and the walls are not nearly

punishment enough
for having a baby with
no husband to keep

me from
Marlboros

from the coup
of my sultry
addiction

Guilt: lovely, magical

and addiction claws at itself
mercilessly in the chicken’s opium den
at the dull edge

of the hay there is
husband or no

husband and always the
singing scream of a kid,
plenty of guilt to go round.

Plenty of easy, say like sleeping
your way up the ladder.

MIDNIGHT CALL TO A TAXI DISPATCHER


Hi, could you have Carl call his wife
if he has a moment? Yes, I'm sure he's driving

tonight. You know, I'm on the brutal brink of the wineglass
and I just need

to tell him that Jesus Christ himself
couldn't have done

any better really please tell him I love him tell him
the sky is emptying itself like a bladder

the rain you know is ammonia oh and also tell him

the world

is a blunt object doing its violence again

tell him there is something to be said for what cannot be
said

my sweetheart, my rubberneck!

You know the accident was atrocious
but I tell you next day brought a blue filament of sky and

a whiff of the end but there was a moment when there were children

laughing

I swear I heard them laughing
despite the metal twisting itself into a smile

despite the twisting

So, if he has time, could you please have Carl
call me?

Tell him I cannot stop listening for that soft laughter.
Mr. Dispatcher, I
cannot stop listening.



*Published in Words and Images, 2011. Won 2nd place in the Betsy Sholl Award for Poetry.

UNGRASPING
for Kobi


You get the feeling you are dragging
an empty suitcase. Even sunlight

is suspicious, something cutting off
your vision, your moth-drawn idea of who

you are, full of flame, full of endless
circumstance, the agonizing dance toward

the mirror: one time you found the mirror
empty or was it just brimming with night, was it two o’clock

in the morning when you realized you had lost
the stick, forgotten the baton

had in fact been passed to you
long ago at the last length

of the race. Who did you lose to? Who
did you disappoint in your breathless

attempt to cross the already tattered ribbon,
knees crushed by the humbling weight

of the rest of you. O the deadly frenzy
of packing it in, beating at time with a knotted

stick, looking always behind you and hoping
that one day your shadow will release

with the crisp grace of a leaf, waving good-bye,
good-bye like a hand, a strong hand

ungrasping all it has strictly clung to,
even the graveyard of the suitcase,

even the ghostliness
of aching to be leaving.

WINTER WRENS


Mornings, sunlight spreads like piss
Across the kitchen floor. Birds chant.

What kind of birds

Chant like monks, tiny and sacred
In their sad brown rags?

The day goes by dripping

Gaudy jewelry. Later,
After supper, the sky bleeds rubies.

AFTER SENDING THE MANUSCRIPT

"Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart
when caught and tangled in a woman's body?"--Virginia Woolf


I don't know
if a woman
can win

a poetry contest
with unwashed hair
and unwashed linoleum

I don't think it is possible
to win
with her edges of words

like cliffs stepping off
into boiling canyons
I mean she has no degree

but the degree of her fury
flaming as a wild fire flames
vast and disproportionate

smoking trees like cigarettes
laughing at the pissing hoses
Will the editors in their

jackets hear the crow outside
her window screeching
from its short branch

or the baby snorting awake
in his crib
I doubt it is possible

from the far away
mess and warmth
of her small brown apartment

tripping over plastic toys
to get to her desk
the way other people run

through the gate
knowing already they are too late
for their flight

NATURAL BORN KILLERS


I
I, Lady Lazarus, have been raised to meet my match. The copper smell of blood drives me crazy, the need to kill what haunts and destroys, taunts and infects: the deadly
mouths of fakery. It is the animal in my head, an unnamed wheezing breather who craves the guts to speak, a grand roar, a many-toned truth about living. No vintage
notions of freedom, Kerouac's dead roads through dusty towns in an America that no longer exists. The map back is burning. The smoking trail of stones could kill,
sharp as a politician’s smile, sharp as the knife in America’s back.
I am no longer torn but aligned in algebraic fever with the killers of the bride and groom, the marriage of Soulless and Fearless who have plenty of nothing to lose.
Ginsberg long ago asked America, why are your libraries full of tears? The answer
was static, illiterate with fear. My country, there is no one now to greet you soft at the door, no angelheaded hipster sweetening the threshold between less and more.
Our cities are cold and poisoned. There are hungry children scrape-kneed at your door
but you are not home anymore.

II
We were born into gardens pastel and hostile, our mother’s Martha Stewart blooms. Now hours of television tantrums and cellphones chanting electric songs.
Call out the bloodhounds, sniff out the antique beauty of bedroom sex, the lure of love or a continent. Born, born into our father’s pill bottles, bowls loaded with pills, pills to kill the Vietnam memories, the vague echoes I can’t help hear because all my life I’ve lived in the black light of his eyes and no pill can ease the fury of murder gone by like a season, cast into a memory-ditch and expected to rust, dust to dust. My father was a carpenter
trying to build a house with no hammer. We were born full of rusty tools, bellies round with debt. Momma says What kind of attitude is that?
Momma, I am shivering with fever, cannot deliver this bluesy baby. A yowl in my belly, sermon in my brain. Maybe the nauseous riot in my soul is mine alone but no, no
we are born killers and it is not enough to write a poem or smash a fist against the wall. It is not enough to fuck with bored casual violence---losing face won’t abate
the sin of being born into the great white alarm that sounds HUSH, sends a rush of salt into the wound.

III
A young soldier’s face contorts fantastically as he hauls another drink; I ask what he thinks of this bloody desert madness---me in my sparkle-shining dress, mascara mess,
craving to control his stiff ache, the weight of his uniform ugly on stooped shoulders. He is fresh from Iraq, drinking himself into a private dark room. Again I ask but he keeps his secret cocked, a weapon. His sanity now depends on it. And later there is viciousness in the kitchen, my swerving voice hissing something about the purity of rage and hubby says You're not old enough to hate this way. I tell him the fear of hellfire saves. Shit man, he says, I’m going to bed. You're a fucking lunatic. Love this, domestic bliss. Maybe I am not Lady Lazarus but instead halfdead and howling for Jesus. We were born into the world naked and believing but isn’t it the old cold human policy
to kill without rhyme, meter, rhythm, or reason.