At one time,
if my nails had been painted
this shade of rose-foam in Kabul
they would have rammed
out the frosted shell
like the tarp off
a bud’s wet belly,
they would have gouged out
each shining beast,
viscera still shiny,
each glittering pore
still insane
with breath

The pain is meant
to shame me back to the realm
of several whitenesses,
they want to chew off
the cicatrix and lodge the
septic cadaver
into a further gorge where frisks
of neon riot in aporia,
where the humility
of the body is turned to iron

The shame is a
figure with an axe
climbing a voluting staircase,
it runs the speeding drams
with agility
from the hard pallet of the
radius to the soft roofs
of the mounds
It famishes
the exquisitely nurtured
yellow
around which
breakers of scarp
hemorrhage
tigerish
glyphs, accomplishing
the gravity of
Japanese inscriptions

A delicate cancer
bares its jaw,
tufts of blood
abound
in clay,
sculpted
fetal knots
a fetal navy,
they harden to seeds,
crab-like, platinum,
growing beneath the
watery ceiling of the palm
into amiable shoots;
an aubade on delphiniums
growing clearer each day

Over many months
the permutations will again
show their round, maddening
faces,
the Persian inlay
will abound
with devout layers
we will stroke on
the fine, sensual, nymphic
chemical
paint up to the ridges where we bleed the richest
I cannot evade the force, brushing
further and further
iridescent texture
on my torso, spirit,
tongue,
I’m a
bridge of veins
in air
I’m an orphic phantasm, hair
combed through with
stalactites
I’m a bouquet
of limbs appliquéd
on pouring rain,
what can the spectral evening muster
in lament?

poetry-magazineA woman is never still

A woman is never still