Creature

Take the chocolate cricket
to the back teeth, suck on a snail,
                      cleave out its silver
every little thing choirs. Cook catfish,
its little heart's corrosive,

yet light as a seahorse. In forky-whiskers,
a view of age, sinewy-blue,
hunched, unmuscled, making space
                          to dissipate, bereft
of oysters, missing operas.

Coffee

Each petite theatre opens
hesitant. Coffee's the house of cusp,
dancing goats, dervishes, acrid-red
wakings. Sleep-thickets unlace
the body grounds itself,
              to clear night's hinges
boil water for eggs, toast a strip of nori,
a square of salmon's warmed. Burn-smells
of Teriyaki stir mnemonic liquids. Cups refill,
the second world opens. Fists of business,
logic assigns itself multiple topics,
                     forest is a low force
hunched and retreating. The cup is damp
unfingered, dormant.

 

Nerve Tea

Formosa's fruit, oolong, is a scorched gardenia.
High-pitched little black dragons flick

with tar and smoke. Charred bits are twisted
for moments of ugly motherhood.

And nerve sports (electric heat). Hunger shreds
edges of the house I've constructed,

a bolt for blankets of fishcakes (vinegar needles,
clumps of ocean, rot sauce), the eager self emerges

to mend corners of weathered crow's nest,
a house of forks with fingers in sky.

 

Frankenstein, Under The Elm

I carry my thug legs
to the theatre of birds and enter
the skin of spiders. Climb boats
of leaves, eat bottle-blue flies,
I try to root in a rabbit's chest,
or drop on summer's floor (ground opens,
lends me a chair in dirt's kitchen).
But I'm so far beyond creatures.
Each stolen, callow eye waters,
bones nestle in alleys
of flesh, my long arms gather
air's soft sugar.

 

Eat, Repeat.

The table of the forest stays

set: snails, mushrooms, a summer hen,

apples. Always apples, bracelets

of being. All things desire, and so the lost

walk circles, the desperate forage

the garbage. I walk for feasts; flesh, fish,

grain and green, repeat. Egg, seed,

repeat. The sea deposits salt to land,

smoke curls from fire, summer falls,

a fisherman cracks open an oyster, tips

winter into our lips. We roast a joint of beef,

spring pulses. Tantalus will never touch

the book of nurture, and Caliban still pleads

for a seat. Dinner is divided; we drink

a cup with Dracula, rinse our mouths

open up palms for bread.