CONTENTS:
The Woman I Love
Language Is Everything
Every Dress Is A Simile
I Can’t Hurry Time For You
Your Ego
An Opposition
Please
Watermelon
My Baby
Infinity Is A Clock
I Am Evergreen
There Isn’t Much Immortality Left In Me
Kim’s Milk Refrigerator
I Am Your Lungs
Where Is A Place Without Photosynthesis?
Poems Born from Basic Words
A Conversation Between Two Trees
Love Has Made You Disappear A Little
Ometha
THE WOMAN I LOVE
The woman I love has endless
Compassion for me
Yet in the middle of the night
I left her and life for death
There was infinite discord in my soul
Infinite conjunction of pain
And, blissfully I hung my neck
From a modern day cypress
And the young emboldened leaves
Not mulched in their fortuitous youth
Screamed in tumultuous calamity
From their verdant height
Had confused me for a dying leaf
Had waited so patiently for me
Not to exfoliate from a branch in life
When my neck broke into two
In response to the weight of gravity
Against my neck
They thought an inner twig
Inside them had separated
A blade of photosynthesis from
An artery of time
Where I hung the air was endless
And youthful and the wind wore
A cape of made of northern zephyr
While flying high and low
Around my hair and teeth and feet
Making my cheeks flutter
Turning my blouse into a river
Of silk and threads
A day later when I defoliated
With the help of a tall ladder
Soft and firm hands
My lifeless body once again returned
To earth to dream of soil
Made to decompose a life
That had spent most of its
Days in grief and disbelief
I suppose time could take
A long walk with me
By the river of death
I suppose it is never
Too late to hold life’s hand
Briefly while the sun comes
Down from that mountain
Before letting her go
Into a city designed for ruins
I am so capable of loving
Life back
I am so capable
Yet I think why love ?
When I could succumb
Easily to dirt which
Has all the nutrition to
Sustain a new life
A different kind of existence
Not composed entirely
Of fractured hopelessness
And summer rain made
From the thawed out
Heartbeats of winter
LANGUAGE IS EVERYTHING
In a matrimony between two letters
A & A ( Aida Alba)
In ex-conjugal bond between four
A B C D (Ashley Benson Cara Delevingne )
Lesbian powercouples dominate the first few four letters of the alphabet
No need to speculate
Even sapphic alphabets get not tethered to
The alliance of
E D & P d R
Even in a blender of J F A H (Jodie Foster Alexandra Hedison)
And so on and so forth the mergers
J S M V H ( Jenny Shimizu Michelle Violy Harper)
L M SW (Lauren Morelli Samira Wiley)
S A M L V (Seimone Augustus Michelle LaTaya Varner)
TN S A (Tig Notaro Sephanie Allynne )
We all know a lot about the Supreme Court
That sits on the throne between gender & desire
History & language
Each other sapphic syllabary
Signary of tongues, cunts, sexy legs, an umbrella of pubic art
Icons of female deities
We all do not want statue nor portrait feminal misrepresentation
Soft tender delicate
Discourses of shared dykehood universality
In a community of words & letters & dyslexia
Cunt
Again
Cunt
Again
AC AC because only lesbians & language need air conditioner
Because it is too hot
Click that letter as you click your tongue
EVERY DRESS IS A SIMILE
Every breath is a metaphor
Every smile is a symbol
Every finger is a personification
Every gaze is a hyperbole
Every hunt is an alliteration
Every exaggeration is an onomatopoeia
Every despair is an idiom
Every speaker is an imagery
I CAN’T HURRY TIME FOR YOU
Or tie it to a doorknob to stretch it out
Like a rubber band to one tongue
Or to place it on a platter of smoke
I can’t rush time out of the door as I would
With a man who sells knife door to door
I can’t even ask time to tie his shoelaces faster
Or to come to my funeral a day early
I can’t ask time to climb over those hills and valleys
I called your voluptuous body
Wearing tennis shoes I call the internet
While you age slowly across several millennia
I can’t beg time to sit on a pressure cooker
So that his bones would break apart fastest
So that there would be more boiling point
In my desire or my small autumn for you
I can’t gallop time through the four corners
Of my bedsheet just so that I could make the bed
Of my affection for you with the speed of light
I can’t pound time to get the hell out of here
To sprint, hasten, dash, dive, stampede the hour,
The second, the tempo, the pulse, the rhythm,
The meter, the cadence,
The ambience, the music of my exquisite
Breath which lies between your mouth
And my second tongue, timelessness
I now hold time in my bosom and strokes his
Hair and tell him to leave his five o’clock shadow
On the driveway of my watch’s face
While I lean in to kiss an ardor which
Has become my new time machine
YOUR EGO
Took a bus from Sweden to Berlin
I made the finite cities of Madrid and Makhail
Lay down, not on the ground – I tried to flatten their
Spines for your ego, your lover’s ego, and two other
Mattresses of poetry
While the light evacuates
A city designed for Lucifer’s inmates
A ferry ride which take no millennium
I tell your ego to not die
I tell you Hades is shady
And, that your ego doesn’t belong
To no fairyland
There is no silence or resilience
To being a bride
I walk alone with your ego in the middle of the night
There are balloons and cucumbers
None other than
One deflates faster than the other
All potential phallic symbol of the unknown
I know now I am an umbrella
Without you
When it doesn’t rain I open up
When it does rain I refuse to open
Are you still material for a tree?
Fuck this
I want your ego’s butt cheeks
Fuck this
I want your colonoscopy
Okay
Okay
Alkaline mineraloid
Okay
Okay
I tell your ego – let’s be sliced bagel
While spreading eagle
For cream cheese !
And, maybe cured salmon !
On calzone !
AN OPPOSITION
I look without shame for your desire.
I want your skin to dominate me.
I have been waiting specifically for your contact.
I have been specifically a chair.
And, as wood, you sent a telegram.
I forbid you to look ahead.
To misinterpret my cunt for a flashlight.
I forbid wood to make direct contact.
With you while you still sit on a chair.
I forbid this language of obsession.
This obsidian infertility.
An opposition.
Take me to a place where we are no longer friends.
What environment law is this?
When you are a lesbian, material for a tree.
What fibrous branch makes me an alcoholic for wood?
What is inside you that isn’t telekinetic?
What is besides you but me that isn’t real as in arboreal?
I am ardor.
While you are water.
I am a barrel of light
And, you are still being divided by infinity.
PLEASE
Please
I am addicted to your freezer
Please
Let me be addicted to your freezer
Please
I am your coral reef
Please
I am a lake
That is how I quiet
You down
The roof of your
Mouth
Is my only crown
Little by little
I leak a lake
You are reticent
As a coral reef
From the mountain
I am your pussy
From your chain mail
I am still your pussy
WATERMELON
I formulate a drought
Outside your sphere of
Thirst
I formulate an army
An arm length of non
Watercourse
You are flower &
I am lemonade
You are clueless
I am an igloo
Slabbed open
Mindful of the centipede
You are my center
My fata morgana
My vortex
And so is the grapefruit
Which I squeeze
Into a wine glass
Made for your
Body
Which has
Become an
Instrument of time
But not
A device
For desire
What is desire?
But a melon
Easily deceived
By water?
What is discourse
But an intercourse
On its way
Home from
A war
MY BABY
(some lines from Adrienne Herr – from page 5 of Shira Erlichman’s Odes to Lithium)
My baby
is in my bed &
sexy. My
baby,
whose tit is
evergreen, is hiccuping on
my stove.
I am
raining
radish into your
ski boot.
It’s yesterday’s
afternoon. Her
orange feather is
bound by rubber
near a floral
of soybeans.
My baby
is sleeping
in a grave in
yellow Tunisia.
You were blue, she announced,
when I roll around
In a crate of soil.
The earth is twisted
with forgotten roots.
I crawl through fog
baked by mist, cough
a plate of snow,
It’s never too late.
While the earth
heaves a lake
of avifauna,
time pulls my
hair gently
into a time machine.
INFINITY IS A CLOCK
Infinity is a clock with dreams
With no forbearance & no leniency
Each raindrop is a body of words
Clothed in distillation
& synchronicity
You are synthetic &
I am fabric
Worn just yesterday before
A crown of desolation
I am so desolate
So wanting your lettuce romaine
Over olive oil from the middle
Of the sea and east of your apex
Pinnacle of displeasure
You give me so much pleasure
By taking some away, some point
Of diversion & I, who do not
Know better, confuse it
For an inversion of shame
Take me to your house of
Words where your piano
Makes love to me by
Crushing me to the bottom
Of an office drawer
I delete what I could not measure
I pleasure what I could only deny
In the morning you are sweeping
Tears into a dust pan
And, I, who know the law of lamenting
So well, move the ocean indoors
And close the curtains – of course
Of course – they are sylph beings anchored
By devastation & luminescence
Soon to be soaked in my wet dream
I AM EVERGREEN
My isolation isn’t yours alone
My isolation is an inflation
A tree sitting on a hill crying
And, for this immobility
Mother Nature turns her back on
An indifferent sun
I am yours when things aren’t yours
What is mine is sitting cross legged
Across the room
Wearing a sleeveless blouse
A broken chair with its seat
Disheveled
With her wood made out of
Cedar and mahogany
Yesterday the hills are crying
The knolls are rolling
My knees are weekending
Bedsheets maimed by the
Radiance of you
Bowled over as you
Pin me to the radiator
The clock says evergreen vapor
I am evergreen
I am evergreen
When I am with you
THERE ISN’T MUCH IMMORTALITY LEFT IN ME
I sin + then I become a recycle bin
Half a bottle of wine
Half a mint of gin
Coronary disease, accident,
Suicide, cancer, influenza
These are the old vocabulary of death
I was once an empire
Before becoming a vampire
And, now all I do is expire
The language of trinity
Is a broken glass of divinity
Drink sinners + winers
From a glass shattered by
Time + lime
Sneeze + squeeze me to death
This is all I ask of my time
On a lemonade stand
KIM’S MILK REFRIGERATOR
In a capitalistic city
I am a customer of poverty
What are you a customer of?
If you live in Sin City.
We live in a world where Little Wang arrived to class either with a hairful of ice (for winter) or lice (for summer), where Kim Kardashian’s refrigerator is the size of my bedroom, and there is no poverty in America, just starvation everywhere.
I suppose my heart should welcome a small earthquake where a snail wakes me up to sniff continence out of you
I wish you and I could play role reversal
You are the cucumber wrapped in plastic in Kim’s walk in fridge
To curve off my rainbow starvation
And I am the indigent lesbian
Who frequents the all you can eat
Pussy buffet
Life is a bartender
Serving you a glass of milk
When you just want to be just a bottle of beer
Melting severely from ice
I AM YOUR LUNGS
I am your lungs
When you crash into a sea of silhouettes
I am your lungs
When you don’t say
The precise things
At the precise moment
In line
An outline
An outline
Of me being your animal group
Your elastic sack
Your rib cage
Your air drawn away from
My fish
Our carbon monoxide
This city
Does it have you in it?
Are silhouettes have the
Characteristic of parks
Germanic origin,
Indo-European tarot
Cards?
You are situated
On my clavicle
Because my desire
For you is thick
With wildlife
This area inside me
This park
Is devoted to you
Flat
Open
Like a garage
In transmission
As if reaching
For your G
Spot
WHERE IS A PLACE WITHOUT PHOTOSYNTHESIS?
(title courtesy of Adrienne Herr)
There is no preposition here
Only September
And November
Sluggishly
On their way into
The gate of Autumn
The upper management
Of existence
Is cutting a deal
With me
My life near the blade
If only I would stay
Longer
How long?
A decade or two
I think you don’t tackle snow
By becoming snow
I am already on the ground
But life kicks me hard in the stomach
The snow accumulates cumin
Hint of cinnamon and Anais Nin
Take me to the doorsteps of aniseed
Take me to a place where
There is no
Photosynthesis
I am a photograph
Developed in the dark room
Of tomorrow
Today I am a strip of film
Overexposed by light
Underexposed by sin
Yesterday I hung from a rope
Inside a frame in a museum
Of despair
In a roomful of Instagram posts
Pain sprinkles salt on me
Takes me downstairs
Spreads me in the dark
By tearing me apart
POEMS BORN FROM BASIC WORDS
(A timeline of desire leads to a timeline of dead ends)
A
An angry air above another
Afraid to ask for an attack along
An army of autumn
Another answer
Another aunt
Another activity age alone
All alone
An attack
All alone
I appear
All alone
An art all air
An apple as art
B
Brave baby bleeds
Between beer & busy
Between brother & better
Baby bleeds for bottle
Baby bleeds for blue bell
Baby bleeds & bleeds.
Near a bag ball
Black boys brave bright bed
Big birthday
O
Obey ocean
Obey now
Old oil of you over this obey
Of object
Like an opposite other
Like an orange
Like an order
Outside my own oil
An ocean open its opposite object
An ocean open outside her own
Outside an offer
An ocean offers her oil often
An ocean of order, of others, outside my own
Obey me my opposite
My oil
My offer
My old opposite
Only open for me, object
Open only for me, object
Q
Quiet queen
Quiet
Quiet
Be quick in being quiet
Quick question for quick queen
Quite the question
Quite the queen
Quite the quickness
J
Jump juice
Jump
Just jump
For jelly juice
Join us juice
Join us in jelly jump
Juice
Juice
N
Noble noise
Name male a nice neck not too narrow
A north narrow night
O noble noise
Never notices the night in the name of north
Never notices the next noble noise
Never notice the needle near neither nature nor neck
O noble noise
Nature so near north
Of not not nothing
Never narrow my night with your noble noise
Now notice, noble noise, of my neck
M
Most mother may marry mistake with medicine
Most morning I must market music with main machine
With modern moon for modern moment
Mix my mistake with medicine
Mix my mouth with method music
Mix my morning with modern moment
Medicine, meet a member of the moon
Marry her with mountain, mouth, & music
Marry matter with meal and morning
Must I move this middle mountain
Like a machine?
Must I marry the market with money or male?
Must I mother?
I
Increase ice on an island
It’s important to be inside of iron
It’s an island.
An idea for an island to be inside
It’s an increase of iron to be important
To an island
Invent ice for an island is not important
A CONVERSATION BETWEEN TWO TREES
A: “I don’t know how little I love you when I loved you.”
B: “What do you mean by little?”
A: “It is always better if my partner has a better or stronger sex drive than I do.”
B: “What do you mean by little?”
A: “I thought I would love you more. I thought based on the way you moved, the way you hold a handful of almonds, the types of doors you sat next to, I thought I would be so irresistibly in love with you.”
B: “I had no idea I would be so disappointing.”
A: “You see, it wasn’t you that is disappointing. It’s my perception of how much I would be capable of loving you that is thoroughly disappointing.”
B: “Have lower expectations?”
A: “You see, I didn’t have any expectations to begin with.”
B: “That seems like a lie.”
A: “Hear me out. When I first met you, I thought of you just as a young sapling. Then as we interacted there were these small buds sprouting randomly and numerously on your small, undeveloped trunk, and I thought – these will bloom very fast and you would be filled with so many blossoms and I would be so overwhelmed with your fragrance.”
B: “But it turned out that only ¼ of me blossom?”
A: “No, all of you bloomed, including the ones in you that I thought wouldn’t bloom, you bloomed stupendously and prodigiously.”
B: “I don’t understand. Where is the disappointment?”
A: “I wanted you to be boring. I want my future wife to be boring. I love boring dates.”
B: “I am sorry I am so interesting.”
A: “Me too.”
B: “What is a boring date?”
A: “We would just hang out. We wouldn’t need to walk. With our legs glued to the ground. Let the wind whistle itself through our leafy hair, our drooping shoulders, cascading through our branches.”
B: “That seems so interesting to me.”
A: “We wouldn’t need to talk or whisper.”
B: “What else?”
A: “I would hold you in my arms. Let my bark hold your bark in the dark.”
B: “What is arousal for a tree?”
A: “Defoliation?”
B: “That’s an orgasm, Madam.”
A: “So much sadness.”
B: “And, departure in an orgasm.”
A: “Soaking water from the soil up from my roots.”
B: “Is that your final answer for an orgasm, Ms. Millionaire?”
A: “No, it’s the start. After all, we have been around for 370 million years.”
B: “We should know a thing or two about desire.”
A: “And, its culmination.”
B: “And, it’s departure.”
A: “Feel my vascular tissue.”
B: “Is that your heart?”
A: “It’s my plant tissue. It allows the transportation of nutrients from me to you.”
B: “When you feed me…”
A: “Our language of intimacy.”
B: “My love, how I crave your photosynthesis.”
A: “I love when there is hardly any carbon dioxide in the air.”
B: “I love when there is no erosion between us.”
A: “I love the agriculture of our love.”
B: “I heard it would be windy today.”
A: “We would lose some of our desire.”
B: “Through our defoliating leaves.”
A: “Tell me why it’s better if another tree has a stronger sex drive than you do?”
B: “I am lazy.”
A: “You don’t like to fuck.”
B: “It is a lot of work. But if someone encourages me….”
A: “You’re willing.”
B: “But trees don’t fuck.”
A: “That’s what I have been trying to say all along.”
B: “Isn’t group fucking…. pollination?”
A: “No, that’s one sexual preference of flowers.”
B: “If masturbation is self-pollination…and cross-pollination is just sex right?”
A: “What are you trying to get?”
B: “I’m just trying to see why I am so disappointing!”
A: “You talk too much.”
B: “I will shut up now.”
A: “No, it’s the words that come out of your mouths.”
B: “You make noise by just standing still.”
A: “I can’t help if my leaves can’t contain themselves in the wind.”
B: “How can I just shut up? Would you desire me more?”
A: “You’re missing the point.”
B: “Clearly.”
A: “Tell me more about your relatives.”
B: “They all die in the recent Australian fires.”
A: “I’m sorry.”
B: “Fires is a type of pollination.”
A: “Just shut up.”
B: “Okay.”
A: “That’s just a terrible way to have sex.”
B: “I know, right?”
A: “Just shut up.”
LOVE HAS MADE YOU DISAPPEAR A LITTLE
And, when your ego returns I become Lucifer’s wife
So much things are born from knowing about you
Less and less each day. You carve your simile on my mouth
Blow the air away from this swing set
I was just walking with my pitcher named yesterday
When I pour her into you Leaves grow tears and name themselves
Foliaceous lights I think the past is a substantial
Lover and wears me like a winter glove
The kind I leave on park benches & know I am a reminder
That March is a city that thrives on forbearance
April is a metropolitan of rain fall and February is lodged
In the throat of Pisces. Take me to your doorstep
Then suffocate me. The doorbell works really well
Whenever I die and whenever you refuse to dine with me
She asks me: I often confuse the past with the present
Correct me if you see me falling away to time
Correct me if I find my lover succumbing to one thousand
Grams of salt three fistful of sugar and one clover
OMETHA
“You know you have an intimate relationship with death. But know it not to be a curse but a blessing. One that will bring you closer to life.” – Meyer Offerman (HUNTERS: In the Belly of the Whale)
Ometha is sitting slumped against the Methuselah tree. Her age on earth has returned to zero because she has just passed away. The age of the arboreal figure holding her is nearly 5K, older than the Arc de Triomphe, the Aqueduct of Segovia, and the Egyptian Pyramids and everything else and still very much alive. Not a biblical figure, Ometha has told the magnificent bristlecone pine before she dies, “Everything I do, I do in order to recede into the unknown.” She had sat down to die. Years into the future, leaves are busy mulching beneath her feet. Her head pressed against her chest while three thousand years into the future, snow covers the ground. Not too long ago, she tells the woman she loves, “Mend my heart first before you break it.” The senescent tree has been sheltered from public vandalism and scrutiny and yet, Ometha managed to hike up there. The mountains surrounding her may ask why she climbed so high just to commit suicide. Before she dies she sees into the future and tells the Old Methuselah, “Infinity isn’t a door, but a color.” And, later, she tells the future not to kiss her lips with its permanent marker. She doesn’t want infinity to be water resistant. Even when her body has settled into its rigor mortis state, she knows isn’t made of metal, paper, nor stone. She isn’t material to be written on. She is a sleeve that has been in pain for too long. A few days before she found the Methuselah, the pilot who flew her into Los Angeles revealed, “Suicide isn’t popular pilots. But I have fantasized about taking everyone with me for a wild ride in the Appalachian.” Ometha didn’t even blink an eye. She didn’t report the captain to TSA. Although not of a Middle Eastern descendant, she appears like one – olive skin and eyes the color of Aral Sea; she is an older version of Sofia Boutella, the model and actress from Algeria. She loves leaning against the Methuselah’s twisted, warped form. So much history and yet so little of it inside her. Before the sunlight vanishes from her eyes, Ometha notices that her breath became thicker and denser, like gasping and expiring a swimming pool of lead. She had climbed the summit carrying a small hiking backpack. There were two cognac glasses wrapped in two hand towels, a bottle of Hennessy, and three-month supply worth of Ambien, which she had crushed into powder two days ago when she stayed at The Canterbury Suites before driving over six hours to White Mountains on her rented Subaru. She didn’t care if there was mold in the bathroom when she pulverized the pills into fine white particles of dust while sitting on that bug bite induced and semen infused queensize mattress. She was so close to Madame Tussauds Hollywood. She just stared at the wax museum like it was a pillow in which all she had to do was close the hotel curtains and it would seem like she had stuffed the entire museum in a pillowcase. Ometha also felt that museum and self-euthanasia didn’t seem like compatible recreational activities and she tried to keep them separate from each other like two brothers who were capable of fighting all the time, but don’t. She has placed the cognac glasses against the foot of the ancient tree – they wobbled a little. She readjusted several times before they found their groove. It may have seemed like vandalism or irreverence or courtesy or symbolic, but she did break one of the outer edges of the Methuselah in order to mix the sleeping pill with the cognac into an ideal, imbibeable blend. She felt the Methuselah was capable of forgiving her. After all, the cognac shared the same coppery color, though not the same age at the tree. Even if she was able to snatch 1762 Cognac Gautier, the oldest cognac in the world, from the Polish company who brought it at a public auction and drank it herself (though by then, it would have been too late, they (Wealth Solutions) uncorked the old liquor in celebration of a watch, a lame Swiss watch, thought Ometha), the Methuselah could not simply compete with its youth. Like asking an old man to marry a toddler-age wife— sousing a twig of the tree into cognac. Sousing. Sousing. Sousing, thought Ometha. Death hasn’t always loved her, but a few seconds ago, it did. She poured the drink for the tree and one for herself. After all, she didn’t want to be impolite. After all, she did break one of its fingers off to stir. It’s an unfair compensation, but life is unfair. Cognac, sleeping pill, the Methuselah all in one abode – not sleeping together, just hanging out for a couple of hours before sunlight washes its shirt’s collar in black paint. After she exhales her last breath, the translucent, post-sunset breeze appears to arrive to brush her face and hair – like a makeup artist brushing powder and air until her cheeks and chin becomes a pigment of a belated brumal night. In death, all of her pain and vitality are washed away. Nature does know, confidently, how to put makeup on a body that has ceased to exist. Nature, the undertaker and the ideal mortician, dresses Ometha in an ideal death uniform: a hypothermic cloth made of time, sleep, and departure. Later in the evening, Nature, the funeral director, makes arraignment for mule deer, bighorn sheep, marmots and horses to arrive in time for a makeshift funeral, where the air could become a priest and darkness his eulogy.