dear rebel, I’m turning off my tongue.

Someone told me that there is a chance that humans can be overexposed, so I seep out the iron and ink in my organs and allow my body to exist as a solitary stretch of invisible. I am going to let my spit go dry. Rebel, I left sixteen pounds of my bones on a stage in the west village on a friday when the moon was too shy to emerge from its overcoat of clouds. I broke a hip from the impact of silence after I placed seven hundred and twenty seconds of sounds on strangers’ laps. Then, on Saturday, my tooth fell out (OK, just a filling, but it still resembled the rest of me) from biting into the softest butternut squash and I worry that I am coming undone. Have you ever felt a peep hole housed inside a human? I met someone who looked right through me and then dug away at all my private passwords. Should I title this corruption or Sunday rendezvous?

corset.

 

“If you have to choose between something that has form and something that doesn’t, go for the one with form.”   –Haruki Murakami (Chance Traveler)
Her hips are hard like dinosaur bones. I thought about taking chisel to each side to see what fossils forged their way against her custom-made curves, but I was too nervous. And I had this apple weighing down right pocket and the night was cold and scarf was suddenly too feminine to fondle my neck so I shivered my way in. Slowly. Coffee can be consumed at all hours of the day and into night. Much like the moon, it gives off the scent of paused breath. So we swim tongues into cups of caffeinated evening before collapsing them into each other. The first time is like that moment you learn a new word. The syllables aren’t always stressed correctly and you stumble and you whisper it out. Bodies bake into new shapes when pressed against each other. Her skin is a liquid. And mine is a campsite of burns and bothers. So I dig out farmer’s market fruit. And I unravel the lies that tumbled out of mouth between 7 and 9pm and what would happen if we painted each other’s skin with the reluctance vibrating behind teeth. What color is this. What gender am I with you and how stunning that you make room for my blurry politics. Notice that fountain; someone sucked up all it’s water. I still may jump in because you never know what puddles hide beneath all this city beneath all this tremble.

 

forest on my throat

“forest on my throat”   -Dan Dissinger

Do not speak about this. Do not explain this as a tickle or gargle of maps reminiscent of five years ago. This has been diagnosed and shelved. This has been neatly folded and attic’d. Throat cannot be a place where campers go. Throat cannot be a jungle of peeled species. Just call it passageway or tunnel toward trachea. Call it a situation for swallowing but do not do not DO NOT call it greenwood or bushland. This will make others want to navigate your coordinates. This will call too much attention to what drips in there. You call it swimming pool of muscle. Call it tongue, please. Do not glamorize the strength of your mammalia.

Put away your colors. The roots of your state lines. No one needs to know about the lineage of your wrists. Your belly is just a belly; it is not not not blue-lined construction paper with scratch outs and hauntings. Your face is just malnourished of symmetry. There is no need to beg for awards just because your lips exist and your moles follow a pattern parallel to constellations. There is no magic in you. Use your toes for counting. Put away your scar tissue, covered in shadow’d faschia from that time that time.What are you looking for have you found it? No, you may not use your knees as a tax write-off, nor your gag or eardrums. You may fold, but do not call yourself paper or weekly or subscribed or footnoted. You are not a thesis, nor an essay worthy of citing. This is not a metaphor. You are just body. You are just em(bodied]. You are just that.

beethoven and beets

She comes at me with hands like a percussionist, creating a beat against my skin. Presses my hips away from each other to see how far they can spread. Her kisses are meals that bloat me. Afterwards, we lay in bed, our bodies blushing and sweaty like steamed beets. I make hot peppermint tea and we listen to Beethoven as the water’s temperature gets cool enough to swallow.

She cries against my shoulder and her whimpers are sweetly rhythmic like a ukelele. Tells me I must love her. Tells me bodies are meant to wander and crash like waves but eventually settle. Tells me we should move in together.

Beethoven smoothes my scars with his instrumental language. The tea coats my throat, soothing it into sleep. I kiss her goodnight, knowing love is not always strong enough to survive a shared mailbox and bank account.

When I awake in the night, my tongue slips out of my mouth, tasting the salt left on my face from her tears. She talks in her sleep; sometimes she laughs. Never lets go of me.

Beethoven still plays. He must be an insomniac. She is most beautiful at night when our bodies are nude, still minty, secretly dancing.

She whispers: I love you in her sleep…to me…or to Beethoven.