Blood, Hummus, and Spinach Soup
Errant bottles of lamotrigine
and a highway lined with dilapidated
buildings: hello from Alabama. In
a body post-scripted by the sea,
I fall in love with a kaleidoscope mouth:
blood, hummus, and spinach soup—
I’m partial to the Oxford comma and
4-year-long pauses piling like bacteria
at the back of the dishrack; we should
clean that.
I died here. And the canopy roads
kept my soul like a crystal trinket
or Spanish moss—will you still love me
when I’m no longer pretty? I do hope
Virginia found her pencil, and Emily
danced with Death. In the belly of the
bee sting and reborn by the lake, I imagine
mermaids tending to the big bass, thick
morning fogs under the train tracks and
a feast for field mice fleeing from NIMH.
Translation, Haley says, no man has ever
loved me, and I think of the hurricane
south of Tennessee and bleach and being
offered a banana before being
banished from the furnace. My memory
is mild now, and more of these minutes
are kept in gemstone-studded jars, and that’s
the bounty—perhaps there are peonies in
Hell, and maybe I’ll see them when I pass
through to Paradise carrying
key limes and
cream and
imitation crab.
Connor’s House
I write more poems
about the man from the coal mines
than the artist-composer because
foothills and fairy dust have spent
millennia together, but occasionally
I tell my inner child
he has a weighted blanket
and she dances silly
and sloppy and sidewise
all over the bodies of all the
ants that ate her legs and she
asks about the way he talks,
and there are, afterall, bright
bulbs at the back of his throat,
briny feathers in his teeth and a
guitar in the living room next to the
kitchen. There are, I say, cups in
the cupboard and pans on the stove
and all those smell-good goops and goos.
In the bathroom I explore charcoal
and she sees our skin and hair in
a mirror that needs to be cleaned. She sees
summer faded in wrinkles and winter
flakes and fall’s spring, and she smiles like
lemon drops under lunar landscapes lit like
Lord, how’d we end up here? How did we end
up here – in the mountains, on the
hillsides and under the stars
in a place that is or is not home.
I tell her it is.
