Until I Ate the Baby’s Breath

I am Sick in my fingers and out of my mouth!
I can’t open it to foul strangers
I whisper like wolf, teeth bared.
My heart sits in my throat,
I roar and it metastasizes.
I hemorrhage
my prefrontal cortex, the abuse victim of
women on the sun!
Without shoes!
In skirts of straw and satin.
Oh, God, do they burn.
My eyes used to be blue, you know.
Until I ate the baby’s breath
Oh…. the innocence
Until I swallowed.
My eyes are green now, you know.
I am practically a snake!
And about just as good at climbing,

They fear my poison but the proper word
is venom and I do not bite
I enhance,
submerge, swallow
and singe, siren.

How Big of Us (or Cloud Conscience)

The sky is full of you and me,
and I think it’s rather big of us
to be too busy raining to matter
who we’re watering and who we’re drowning
I think it’s mighty of us to stand still
and place our droplets upon the sandy
and the snowy places without asking the feet
which weather they can weather,

I don’t feel so good about starving
out some flowers and letting the other ones
uproot in the storm,
stems and leaves carried down the drain as it were.
Others remain intact,
but still we stand.
Forgetting to consider anything
How we ever got to be clouds, I don’t know.

Fox Moon

I fell in love with a fox
while trying to find
an animal to call my body.
I was shaped like nothing but myself
and lost in it too,
geometry failed to tell me
exactly what angle
my back is supposed to be arched at
when someone told me they loved me

I fell in love with a fox once but
foxes like that get tongue-tied
and so, I spoke in a detangling voice,
I told her my favorite phase of the moon is
a waxing gibbous
and that is the phase of a fox
almost entirely there
all bright and noticed
whole enough to light your eyes in it
but still
quietly incomplete

Originally published in 2016 in a self-published collaborative anthology, Because of a Word.