the dead things on our back
a girl motions with her hand
fisted to mouth to mouth to mouth
she wants to be fed but does not speak
everyone around her translates
the motion and speculates
about her needs
everyone wants
to tell her how to speak
to cross the street with a sense of fear
to cross the street with a pleasure in fear
everyone wants to climb onto dust
it’s like how she is the way she makes
percussive blisterings
my teeth bleed onto gauze
a puss muck
chewed, of bread
the freight train
runs through
stained in heat
and rain of the places
we think we know the freight
tops edged
sharp sparking off rails
cane tops plucked
we spittle
a canopy of white
mesh sweet
to free up a mixture
of lust and dictionary
the field is too tall
standing sun
how we turned
our hands into knives
all our edges
racing sugarcane
GHOST FIELDS
Poison dwellers
dazzle control.
The housecoat, the grandbaby
massaged absentmindedly.
The balcony youth
violent, strangely aristocrat.
In the exile hood,
a ghostwriter jukebox
stretches its vocabulary
muscles and says farewell
to the wide-eyed blade.
The first born was snow-scoured,
ungathered in shafts and shanks.
It touched the trouble surfaces,
nails backwards.
The rocky tree arms,
gauzed, heartless.
She said “mint off, Isaaq.”
Heedlessness wave
butchering the
garland of reversal.
The household is
a shimmering cloth.
Lace yellowed,
listening to LaDonna
hemostatic against
the larkspur.
I am a recepteuse
dragging plasticine
tongue across the
flatlands, mimeographed
classifieds lifting the eaves.
The narrow microphone
ashamed, this wilderness
peculiar in its
absolute geography.