Poetry

Masquerade.

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22 LINES

I am not bloodstained robe, nor distorted animal mask. Grandma is lying on the ground, says there is a little girl inside me. I am not coconut peeled to nurture the dead, the moss-blue tumble of water, ghost music. The…

Open Your Eyes Again

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35 LINES

I place the string in your hand, beaded with moments of sensorium and place, caught, time held witness. Your fingers rub them, your face like a prayer, wondering. A series of tiny worlds in whole and part, this world— Up too early,…

As seen through the hole of the hag stone:

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20 LINES

Brighton Pier, burnt down and always burning down. Salt channel, red dress  made for more clement weather, fire farflung from the wreckage caught  round my waist. Pale sunlight, chalk sisters cleaving to the east. The  hegemonic world and a hedgewitch…

girl, flogged by a false-named whip.

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32 LINES

i speak only of beautiful things, i told the eagle on my stomach. it pecked out my liver—a kindness. it stopped the fire from reaching lower. so girl means fire. i took fire from Him, and in turn He locked…

Ganymede

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41 LINES

/ˈɡænɪmiːd/ i. Greek god (in this poem cyborg) —A Trojan boy who was abducted, and ultimately became immortal in order to be Zeus’s (in this poem His country’s) cupbearer. ii. A boy (in this poem cyborg) kept for pederastic purposes. An alienated memory…

obsolesce

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29 LINES

7:21am on the train tracks; brambles have eaten through the sleepers, and  we lay bodies to bridge the gaps. my spine crackles, iron-hot, beneath the scree and steam-song. there are ball joints in my fingers. they clutch at yours, creaking…

blessing for molly grue.

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59 LINES

christianity is wrong about so many beautiful things. example: sex as sacrament, spoiled, turned into wet wounds in christ’s flanks, glitteringgilded edging, an entire clutch of demonsdevoted to desire, hatched from drippingpomegranates. don’t forget virgins and their besotted unicorns,tamed just…

Vulture bees transfigure the man I tried to be

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48 LINES

see: tender, suspended at the tip of arm hairs that never darkened      never hearkened or grew the tangle of my father’s muscle the way he mangled through skin      under thin bindings, not yet bone: a bicycle wheel, unsteady ecliptic starsign,…

Eat It Out

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34 LINES

I unzip you from cave mouthto sex-craved stomach, spillingyour brown flesh coatto the sides. I’m eye to eyewith your teenagethoughts, each stored safeon the shelves of your ribs. I run my fingers along the bonesof bunched-up underwear,an old shower head,…