Silverjaw Minnow

Each time, it gets harder

In the evening half-light
filtered through trees and across distance and
red-green,

I wonder how you see me
sometimes I think that it is tall and beautiful and unattainable
and at other times I think that it is silly and childish and clumsy

I spent the day in the water, walking far out toward Long Island, past the waders and swimmers in bikinis with long hair, out to where the boats were and the seaweed was tall and the sand was silky and the water was cold

and I dug deep in the sand, to where there were fish eggs and shells and translucent rocks, and there was a child beside me but we did not speak, because we were both building, piling the sand and mosaicing it with the rocks we had found, digging moats for the minnows and crabs and repairing the toddler-damage to our fortified walls.

I wonder how you see me, because sometimes I am the girl riding the plastic sea-turtle around and around in circles and laughing from deep inside,

but sometimes I am the woman, sitting back, deep in the back of my skull, planning and thinking and analyzing, the very old woman with steady hands and a wrinkled breast that is a pillow for all who are weary, having lived out its reprosexual purposes and been upcycled...

and sometimes I dance in bars.
Sometimes it is in short skirts.

So on nights like this, when the light makes the trees black against its brightness and the sun considers setting,
Those women watch it.
Those women watch it, and they wonder
if you could love one of us at all
and which of us it is

Lisa, 2009

“Listen,” he said, putting a finger to her lips.

“What?”

“Just listen.”  And there was a sound, through the window, a cooing sound that trailed through the night.

Stomping Days

After the rain

Falls after snapping

Turtles who hibernate in the

Ether, after our

Regurgitated rhythms

Walk through the skulls of every school-

Aged girl who looks for a good time in high heels

Run through the Fields and the Woods and

Damn the Ground

Saying:

“Agriculture is not God, nor are

Forests turned to

TImber nor

Evergreen trees crossed through with

Rusting 

Wire nor

Aquamarine crayons melted down and

Run across our Hair and Fingernails, Bodies

Dragged through 

Sand is not God

And you with 

Five-dollar bills between 

Toenails and permutations of 

Elicit images are mutations of

Red

Wood

And I am the 

Real thing I do not burn so

Dare me to

See if I won’t”

After the world goes down,

Feeling fingertips

Tangled with 

Electric lines and

Radio Signals,

Wombat and Rabbit make 

A new

Rambit which makes

Drugs for the 

Sellers

After the world goes down,

Fire upon the

Tangles of hair, burning,

Everyone is

Run to the cellars,

Wistfully recalling their stomping days.

Alligator boots with

Reticent smiles and

Dogged glances will

See us down