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.

Am I in Trouble?

She bends,
knobby knees splayed,
to pull Tinker Bell boots
from a locker
twice her size.
The school halls spread,
cavernous, and
pigtails with pink ties graze
soft young cheeks
that tilt up toward a teacher's voice.
“What are you doing
in here
by yourself?”
the old man asks,
and her hummingbird heart
flutters, Am I
in trouble?
“They said I
need my boots to
go out
on the playground.”
He shuffles up behind her,
beer gut pushing
into her back,
and his fat pale hands creep
over her shoulders,
down her flat chest and stop
to cradle her unripe privates.
His hot breath
moistens her ear
as he bends
to whisper
threatening gibberish.
She stands, blank-faced,
as he walks away,
and her hummingbird heart
trips

Shuck and Swallow

Men with tie-dyed sweat stains shove
barnacled shells across a grill
crusted black
with God-knows-what.
“The Virtue of Shellfishness,”
a banner reads.
Tyler and I navigate
streets sprinkled
with long-haired hobos
and glistening tourists
to the hiss of saltwater steam
and the incense of seaweed and weed.
We seek
the perfect oyster.

Butter-and-bacon,
blackberry sake,
Po Boys, skewers,
all of them fresh;
an oyster mosaic
streams through the square.
Tyler buys two big slimy
treats,
slathered with garlic and
garnished with gills.
The brown shell scrapes my upturned palm
but cradles its tenant in pearl.

I thumb the gob of flesh
into my throat,
butter and brine dribbling.
Seawater fills my mouth and I
gag, not daring to touch this
gritty nugget with my tongue.
Tyler laughs
and buys another.

Waiting... Waiting...

I am waiting for a certain someone
To pomegranate slice me open
And discover a hundred thousand luminescent
Seeds of passion,
Nesting in fibers of faith.