There is a place

that makes you feel so dirty, you’ll cower in a hot
shower stall, knees to your nose collecting tears,
your body tainted with blush. There is a place
before the sadness, vomit splashing back into
your face like a fist.

Poem for MiMi the Cat

Today MiMi
sat like a sausage
in front of the fan
Her tail curved
ever so daintily
toward me
The storm scares her
and she listens
attentively
to stories
of going to the store
&& buying milk
The woman on TV
needs closure for
her mother's murder
Dainty paws needs only me
a spot of carpet
and a fan.


- Nicole Karlyn, Ashley Anne Henderson

Parental Proverbs

The first time my mother said Beauty
takes pain, I don’t think I gave a shit
about beauty – I made my limbs so
heavy and limp she could barely drag
me out of the sandbox as my yowls
pierced the air like a needle
into a birthday balloon. She
scrubbed the sand off my knees and
elbows in dirt-tinged bathwater, my
voice amplified by the acoustics of a
bathroom – I hate you! I hate you!
I’ll never know why she didn’t lick
her palm and slap me good and hard, why
her tired and sunken eyes stayed focused
on the task at hand – pulling my whirlwind of
hair into pigtails and forcing that lavender
dress over my flushed, frustrated face.
My father looked on, smirking, and said:
Like mother, like daughter. I didn’t know why
she slapped him good and hard, but that
was the last time I ever heard that one.

Elegy to the Cicada

Has anyone mourned your death,
or were we content on crushing your
frail brown skeletons under our boots -
we who would swerve to avoid a tire-flattened
groundhog but hesitate to push your
remains to the side to clear a path?
Even the vegans and the Buddhist monks
winced at your song; pressing
their pious hands to their ears, they must
have prayed for your death as some cheeky child
pulled your filmy wings from your molting
bodies. Maybe we're envious of a life of
fucking and dying, while we're still
trudging hopelessly among the
trees you coat like caramel, the same
ones we passed seventeen years ago.

Fire Island, 1991

Look how my mother's wrist hangs limp as she points,
as if there's something tangible in the waves
that soak the sand and seep towards us. Our
skin is drenched the color of cream-drenched coffee,
softened by five days of Fire Island sun. Watch
the wind clutch our clothes and try to pull us back,
as if there's something dangerous in the water
that already has us buried up to our ankles.
The fabric clings to my curveless young body,
breastless, hipless, and pantsless; here my mom
didn't fret about what boys would think. Under
swirls of white and gaping holes of blue,
as if the world was never proven spherical,
as if Jesus were never so blessed, I look ready -
longing to skim across the surface with my
blister-kissed heels, to challenge the wind and leave
my unwashed hair fluttering behind me, to run
as if muscles couldn't ache and lungs couldn't tire,
to see what would happen if I jumped right off
the edge of this little Atlantic Ocean.

Love Me Like -- (A Found Poem)

Love me like
the seventies -
aggressively
bantering
room by room;
get bossy, and
use
me.

Braceless

The Rockwell gracing these
sterile walls
held a child and
her cheerless, rouged
pout -
a white dress,
a contorted doll, and
a magazine -
as his rubber-clad
fingers forced
the chapped
corners of my lips
wide,
wide open.
His breath was dense,
heavy behind
his mask
and how badly I wanted
him to say
Rinse. This
would be the last time
after the yanking
and scraping and pulling;
the last time
my smile
would be barred behind
metal, with their ever-
alternating décor:
usually blue.
I closed my eyes,
studied the darkness there –
the shapes and colors
and how they faded,
until he said
Rinse. Then –
white teeth, white walls,
and that fleeting sense
of flawlessness,
like Rockwell’s girl
must have felt
with that magazine in her lap.

"The cancer ate her like horse piss eats deep snow" - Norman Dubie

This is why I shouldn't have taken four English classes.

The workload has had its perks, though - like the discovery of my new favorite poet, Kim Addonizio. This bitch is SICK. I have to share a few of my favorites - they're honestly worth reading.

You Don't Know What Love Is

but you know how to raise it in me
like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to
wash off the sludge, the stench of our past.
How to start clean. This love even sits up
and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps.
Any day now she'll try to eat solid food. She'll want
to get into a fast car, one low to the ground, and drive
to some cinderblock shithole in the desert
where she can drink and get sick and then
dance in nothing but her underwear. You know
where she's headed, you know she'll wake up
with an ache she can't locate and no money
and a terrible thirst. So to hell
with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt
and your tongue down my throat
like an oxygen tube. Cover me
in black plastic. Let the mourners through.


Human Nature

When I hear of how he kept one girl alive
after disposing of the friend and mother,
and about the next one he found

and killed and cut apart,
I try to imagine him hooking his fingers
through the plastic rings of a six-pack,

lifting a nozzle from its cradle
to gas up a truck, flicking
the dead end of a cigarette into the weeds,

and I don't want him to be human -
shaking water from a comb,
jiggling the handle of a toilet, fishing

for a quarter to drop into the slot
of a meter. I want him tentacled
and eyeless, like some

creature from a star so far away
it's not charted anywhere, its light
stopping short of earth.

I want him to be a shapeless
lump of matter that is not
our matter, not carbon-based,

maybe I don't even want him
to be alive - silicon, circuitry,
inert mass of material. Then

he'd be no more capable of evil
than a rock or a stick - rock brought down
hard on a skull, stick whittled

to a fine point and tipped with poison -
there still would be someone,
a god to work the levers, to set him

in motion. Better not to think
of a god like that, better to believe
there's nothing; nothing, and the human.


Bad Girl

She's the one sleeping all day, in a room
at the back of your brain. She wakes up
at the sound of a cork twisted free
of a bottle, a stabbed olive

plopped into gin. She's prettier than you
and right now you bore the shit out of her,
sitting there sipping when she wants
to stand on the rim of the glass, naked,

dive straight to the bottom and lie there
looking up, amazed at how the world
wavers and then comes clear. You're not
going to let her. You've locked her in

with her perfume and cheap novels,
her deep need for trouble. She's the one
calling to you through the keyhole,
then sneaking away to squirm out

a window and tear her silk dress.
You can't guess where she's going
or who you'll wake up with
when you finally wake up,

your head throbbing like a heart.
She's the one you're scared of,
the one who dares you to go ahead
and completely disappear. It's not

you the boys are noticing, not you
turning toward them and throwing off light.
You're crouched in a corner, coming undone.
She's in love with you now. She's the one.


Kisses

All the kisses I've ever been given, today I feel them on my mouth.
And my knees feel them, the reckless ones placed there
through the holes in my jeans while I sat on a car hood
or a broken sofa in somebody's basement, stoned, the way I was
in those days, still amazed that boys and even men would want to
lower their beautiful heads like horses drinking from a river and taste me.
The back of my neck feels them, my hair swept aside to expose the nape,
and my breasts tingle the way they did when my milk came after the birth,
when I was swollen, and sleepless, and my daughter fed and fed until I pried
her from me and laid her in her crib. Even the chaste kisses that brushed
my cheeks, the fatherly ones on my forehead, I feel them rising up from underneath
the skin of the past, a delicate, roseate rash; and the ravishing ones, God,
I think of them and the filaments in my brain start buzzing crazily and flare out.
Every kiss is here somewhere, all over me like a fine, shiny grit, like I'm a pale
fish that's been dipped in a thick swirl of raw egg and dragged through flour,
slid down into a deep skillet, into burning. Today I know I've lost no one.
My loves are here: wrists, eyelids, damp toes, all scars, and my mouth
pouring praises, still asking, saying kiss me; when I'm dead kiss this poem,
if needs you to know it goes on, give it your lovely mouth, your living tongue.

On cutting ties

Stripped, I am both ecstatic and disheartened to see only flesh and ink.

It will pass away like a slow parade

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Disregard all of the above.