Twin five-year-old girls throw balls of bread at the blue heron
standing in the lake. Eye patch.
One woman wears a t-shirt that says “Property of Jesus,” another
wears one that says “Je t’adore.”
Pink hamburger slime. Ammonia
on the heaven sent, on where we went. Dis
in
fect
ant. War
trope, Viet-
nam-era helicopter, heliotrope. This is my token
of friendship. By the end
of the poem, the heron will fall over on his side and die.
Why do you keep asking about the Indian burial ground of my childhood?
Growing collards is easy—you toss some seeds
into the mound and…voilà! But here’s the contaminant:
This life that I hate more than anything.
“Here Pepito, have a 40.” This apartment I despise
more than life. And this lake: just the rambling on
of an idiot. No one word contains
inherent magic, Child Lake!
Let me reiterate: You have my friendship,
but you can’t take my word.
Some sort of giantess shot out of the lake with a yellow feather attached to her big toe.
Made me want to drink and listen to country music even though I’m pregnant.
Have I become this Southern and trashy? Can the paw of a tulip grow
from the mouth of a dead dog? Oh little shepherd boy
of the valley, Oh little Christian checkout boy,
Oh little green apron boy with the crappy gray eyes, let’s watch
the sunrise over Georgia. Gave poetry book I hate five stars on Goodreads; I am such a liar!
What if I step on a syringe and get a disease?
Who’s going to give me a lot of money so I can quit my day job and write this poetry?
A log truck rolled over on my commute
and out spilled the lake trying to communicate by
dragging her circular pilgrims underwater.
What will impress the death cult? The beautiful, vacant
death cult? What will impress the mirror-writing lump,
water’s canto, her cinema,
commerce’s atomic center?
What will impress the cult of death, the cult
of holes, of clothes, the cult of sharp elbows?
The empress of the lake is here, all ninety degree angles.
(Hello, empress of the lake). She answers through her teeth of zeros, in geese.
To move five stones to the right is to enforce
the odds. To pepper-spray a toddler in the springtime, Printemps Paris.
Today Rick Scott fired all the scientists at water management.
So much for documentary poetics. The ure ducts of erica o azy.
Mom says these politicians just ruin people’s lives
and at dinner Emily asks, “Where are all the journalists?”
The lake is the center of some great wheel
of sheer rags. The centrifugal force pulls
the molecules where they don’t want to go.
One scientist packs up the stuff that’s accumulated in her office.
Coffee cups, data, cardboard box.
I want to name her pull—but how?
Much more difficult than
naming an unborn baby.
The song of the lake and the song of the human
the electric chair.
The song of the hand and the syringe
make
the bread maker.
The song of the wheat flour and sticker book
make
the bed.
The song of the house and the tsunami
make
the frogs.
The song of Alice and her walk
make
the crucifix.
Maud gone. So Modernism.
So Yeats, Laertes, skull, origin. Hulk Hogan?
Make no mistake, the lake mocks
your own clay grin. A dandelion?
In the coffee shop one sorority girl compliments
the whiteness of the other girl’s teeth.
Psalm gone. (Problem solved). So Lady Gaga
broken from her
egg of triumph.
Oh gigantic woman of the swept-away!
On my doorstep this morning I found a red feather from your headdress,
the one made from a thousand caterpillar eyes, the one made with the spleens
of a million snow geese.
In your body of waterwheels, in your scales
and skins of figure eights, there were infinite crocodile clocks!
In your ten-thousand minnow fingers and toes carved from the tongue of turtles,
the humongous orgasm-based human origin of falling stomach-pits
mixed counter-clockwise with debris suns
and the moldy decibels of half-eaten hotdog buns.
Sam wrote today and said, “Remember when we had
dinner in San Francisco with your friendly, stoner boyfriend?”
I had a friendly boyfriend? I have no mentor
and I mentor no one.
Rain like scientific notation on the surface
of the lake. A duckling ate a full-grown,
blue heron. The grassy kingdom celebrates
the unlikely king by clinking wine glasses.
I fake the lake skin
the lake lament
the skin the
lake I trim
the lament I make
tackle the cage
I cage the age
of water
liquid eyeliner
Beautiful, lovely, rich women live in New England.
Beautiful, lovely, rich women live in Massachusetts.
Always happy writing surreal poems even when they’re doing porn.
They eat corn mostly and have long hair.
When other women tell the beautiful, lovely, rich women of New England
to cut their hair, the beautiful, lovely, rich women
know it’s a trap! They’ve read Darwin.
They have gone to the depths of the lake and pulled out their
consciousness. They put their breasts on backwards
and call themselves “spiritual.”
How strange to be seven months pregnant and see
the man you used to have sex with so glossy,
confused and embalmed on the pages of SPIN
magazine at a Barnes and Noble
in Tallahassee, Florida; his torso, Lilliputian, no
bigger than the length of the metacarpal
of your third finger. I suppose I could
get back on Facebook and try to friend
him and say “hey” but my interest
is so shallow. The lake—it is shallow too.
Alice, girl with no belief
into a rope
while listening
to U2 on
her headphones.
What? Well, not
everyone in a poem
can have good taste.
Nostradamus says, “Bring to
my table the flesh
of this lake’s
finest poet!”
“But, Nostradamus, she left town
yesterday with a sign
taped to her
chest that says
Give blood, get a
chance to win
free iPad2 or Kindle
Touch.”
Alice,
come home.
Your mother
has made you
a bowl of soup.
