Horoscope

You have lost faith in something, MoonChild.
Cut
loose, let gravity forget, (even just for a second).
Hold soul music in your hands, let those bones
absorb that.

Let the milk turn your coffee
turbulent and shoo them flies away. Don't let
'em eat your skin.

Oh, Moon baby, find the rhythm. Make shit
shift, slowly:
the quiver of summer leaves and the plates
rubbing - lovers in sweat.

Let those big words crash right into your face.
Tides on tides on tides for days. Fight the
fault, baby glow, it isn't yours.

Young Business

Boy at the bar: he
mentions my nose. I know he
thinks about fucking. (make a mark on my bed-
post for the what-ifs. Nick my collarbone with the sex
that could have.)

Hips like Willendorf, he thinks of a baby on my
arm, breasts twice as big. I am the snake eating
the lizard; woman eating the man.

But he has had practice with drunk crescendos; he
croons about my perfection. perfection. perfection. I sip
the bourbon - the deep history I need.

Everything is holy and so
on and so on. And so on.

Forever Young

Listen closely to me. One day I will die.

Let my brothers look through my books first. Even the ones I've borrowed and never returned. This is important.

I want you to touch my dead face. Just so you can take it with you that it's all real. Yes, her cheek is cold. Yes.

Someone tell the story of the first day I saw a loon dive.

If you have my secrets, please keep them. And one day when you're old, you can reminisce about this one time there was this one girl who died. How sad, you might think. And if you remember then, at that moment, tell the world. Until, put my words in a quiet box.

Put them in that quiet box with me.

I'm That Kind

 I am not surprised. I'm the kind of girl who gets rabies. And who breaks her foot before the race. I'm magnetic in all the wrong ways. I feel things too much in my bones. I fall in love with all vibrations. I feel that blue collar catastrophe, personally. I want a sharp hair line and the kind of collar bone that perfectly spills into shoulders. Maybe beer on the couch is best. Or red wine in the morning, in a coffee mug. And stars beaming through electronics. I'm that kind. The ruiner kind.

Things end.

What It's Like to be Murdered by Your Muse

First, she lets you remember the sun
on your ex-lover's back as you fold
into each other like fresh
laundry near the window.
She whispers. And you, you remember
the contours as he moves like sound-
waves.

Next, she brings out
her weapon; possibly a shank, sharp
like November nights when frost can slice
you slant-wise along your ribs.

Gentle and quick-like, she splits
your neck; a cheap smile to an empty room.
    (Brace yourself, baby, it's gonna’ sting.)

Finally, blood laps against your feet; one last
Tennessee lake as you sit.

Dying.

Indiana Shorebird: Part 1

What would it be killing the first Black-
Bellied Plover?

1871 and for science.
1871 and for feathers (possibly
                for hats).
1871 after migration (for food,

                for sex)

Who doesn't run for sex
Who doesn't die for science

Cherokee & North Highland

After pumping gas I realized I had lint tangled in my braid. How many people noticed?
Probably none.
Instead, they saw the sleeping horses inside my chest; only an hour before,
thundering around my rib cage with no restraint.

Balmy days are best at regarding my confessions:
silent Hail, Mary's until I bleed.
                   sorry. sorry. sorry. sorry. sorry. 
                   and sorry to you, especially.

Picking at the black speck in my flax, my soul remembers:
                   blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs
                   is the kingdom of heaven.
And, I might add,
                  broken are their bones under the weight
                 of grief.