Violet Fades

Violet wears pajama pants
her mother bought,
Pooh Bear and honey pots
bunched into his torpid palms.
Her arm disentangles
to tap the remote,
digital chatter to drown
out the scuffle
of fabric and flesh.
Green-white light washes
out his face, as he leans,
more than friends,
over Violet's sighing mouth.
This isn't what she wanted.
So, as her body—
feral, fickle— yields,
Violet fades away.

Later, Violet builds herself
a memory,
shiny, with the scent of new plastic.
Violet rested just her head
upon his lap,
and his cool, broad hands stroked
just her hair.
And when the movie ended,
he leaned, her friend,
over her smiling mouth,
to brush
just a butterfly kiss
between her eyes.

Christmas Memories

On your knees,
you blew
brown-yellow chowder
onto my parents' front porch
where it froze,
vomit sorbet,
into the snow.

My father, armed
with the same metal
shovel used to scoop
puppy shit,
hacked,
chipped and scraped for hours
at the Picasso puke splatter
until the blade bent.
Still, your frozen fucking upchuck
stuck,
and the dogs lapped at it
like a holiday treat.

I have hacked,
chipped and scraped for hours
at the putrid memory of you
until my eyes burn
and my chest throbs.
Still,
you stick.

Ruin

As my knees
plunged to kiss
grimy carpet,
and my chest heaved
with strangled sobs,
the barren air buried us,
Trouble and I,
and his long, wet
teeth penetrated my
flesh.

They dug me out
with pressure and pills,
chemicals scraping away
at the dense, ashy layer
of nothing,
until I burst,
grains of loneliness lodged
in the corners of my eyes,
into the light.

They found a few traces,
but Trouble had fled.

Still,
there is a twinge
below my ribcage,
a nauseous little roiling
in my gut.
Something grows there
with tentacles,
blind eyes, and long, wet
baby teeth,
which no white pill
will swallow up.

A Yellow Tulip

With weary grace
you lean,
green, like
the dying sigh of spring,
over the bottle's glass lip.
Three long leaves enfold your slender stem:
two, the dainty swell of rabbit's ears,
lightly creased from root to tip,
one, a flat, exhausted tongue of
rubber husk,
tasting the tabletop.
Your hollow yellow blossom
thin, like finespun silk, but
crisp as dewy cabbage
tilts its wide mouth earthward as though
huffing out its candle.