My sex is occupying me,
trading my intentions for actions
glances for leers
conversations for seductions.
my sex is pulling me down,
down
down.
my sex is driving me,
onward and upward
it bends my will
leads me to follow
obsequious and supercilious with
all the other ouses
we can ous.
my sex is speaking for me,
praising and pretending
gasping and moaning.
my sex expresses awe in
staccato breaths,
fear in drooping, and
pride in puffiness.
my sex is me,
and i am not my sex.
–
tjq
We reach blind grasp,
found hands slip under and brush over
the edge,
back against the wall
we clench tight enough to let go
without losing,
but
if you walk away,
past the blue underfoot brail,
if you climb aboard,
then please
let him watch you dangle
a black pink thong just
out of reach
the curve of your coral sand salmon tan
fuck! arch
lures, .
tune out, breathe
hands idle and strumming, quiver
like reformed old men praying
for a pass back
into institutions they clawed to escape,
fought to destroy, give their lives to.
Gladly.
Reminders of why we celebrate
the union
doused in malts, drowned in distillations.
Free.
forget me, be happy.
–
tjq
Hey, your boy’s pulled loose
and he’s running, pushing two empty hips
up over the cavern, but no, it’s only cracked
cement to him, and there’s a moth’s wing pounding
in your throat. This is not vomit dancing
up; it is youth regurgitating. It itches
doesn’t it, this is his unfulfilled appetite
for words; he’s knocking loose
the language in a bottom-scratching dance,
his hand at your hip,
your mixed palms pounding
away these monster cracks
I must fill with eyes cracked
dry with sight, the itch
to crawl inside and pound
the molecules, the boulders loose
into tiny orbits; my hips
the center of their gravity dance.
You, mother, even squirrels dance,
even children crack,
admire, hurl themselves into these cavernous hips,
the wide divide, the itch
returning home; it’s loose,
not lost. Slender mother, put the pounds
back. Feel proud
the extra body dancing
inside, dancing outside; do not lose
the curious smile that cracked
first at the appeased itch;
I know you, too, long for hips.
It is for you this earth splits.
You fear every pound,
but even children are meals. They itch
themselves anywhere and their limbs dance
as if there is no divide
between the new and the lost.
Do not loose the tiny beating
wrist. Clutch it to the hip and dance
until death cracks each bone and tulips itch.
–
bt
Every shallow eye
dissects the origin
of petite ribs,
of big bones.
Breath after breath,
word after word
chins once doubled are absorbed
and played
as sixteen key xylophones,
lifting the surface.
Whispers and nibbles
open your cover
and lead to
raised sweaters,
arms, across chests,
down over lumps.
Blood warms the heart,
like the sight, to Kodiak knees in glacier creek,
of rainbow trout,
downstream and flying,
come home. Tonight
these pleas won’t crack the ice;
we are all seduced yet unwilling.
–
tjq
edit 4/18/07 changed last line from ’seducing the unwilling’
petite ribs will spread
breath after
breath and inside
every part
of goliath pressed
into pleats and pleats
the surface area
alone is enough
to dissect the origin
of woman
brt
That’s the thing about seventies’ wallpaper,
it takes something
old and boring,
and
totally transforms it
into something old
and boring
and all over
your walls.
–
tjq
Sweaters remind me of open fields
but sea green, not grass
and windows blue, not sky
with their waves and arbuckle blocks
a catechism in yarn,
a warning.
You shouldn’t ask me things
you don’t want answers to,
yet you insist
and I can’t deny
You’re still channeling fat
Albert.
–
tjq
For penguins,
they say love
is in the rocks.
This, I can understand,
as if it were true
to us both–
pressure cupped
in your palm
and then in mine:
like worry stones,
set against another,
building walls.
–
rb
Always one is running
chasing, hoping praying,
refusing to wait, always living
beyond. Just,
watch what is chased.
What was skipped?
What did I drag you through?
Does sea barnacle soup at four
lead to crushed hearts at seventeen?
Dreams though, are not so fragile
as knees,
knees always
we are wanting them to be something else, less
clumsy. Pleading,
make them pretty, always;
like the big rig hauler
jack
knifing
at an even 90
wishing eighteen were only four
wheels.
–
tjq
A disease worth having
tastes like sour grapes,
not yet wine,
no longer juice.
Stains all the same.
What I mean is:
I am a steamroller,
You are asphalt hot
Sticking to my steel
Seamless I slide
Ground and sealed
Searing and squealing
You are a shimerring earthquake
Reverse forward stretched
Yoga in August; octagonal
Stop, Slow, Yield, Beware
Steep grade, Cli
ff
Make me home.
–
tjq
My aunt studies genealogy, marking gravestones
found across 3000 miles of open water.
There, she collects numbers to tell her
the silence in a child’s early death,
how a lover dies within days of the other.
On cold stone, these numbers become names
that repeat and merge, expanding out,
like ice cracking with the first rupture of spring;
yet even these slivers are lost, turned to water,
the branch ending in some childless past.
On a smaller scale we study ourselves–
like lines on palms scarred with something
more than now: we learn to laugh alike,
using our hands to trace broad arcs
in the air, gesturing toward each other.
But even more, my mother sees in me her mother,
the structure of bone, the color of my eyes:
and so, to see more clearly this shape
that belongs to no one, I sit with old photos
and see you seventy years ago,
laughing straight into the lens’s eye;
I wonder if the coldness I feel now also wraps you
where you lay, tucked underground, waiting.
-
rb
I wish I was an old lady,
I would know all about pricks,
and their growth.
A multitude of cacti
zombies in the urban desert,
cacti in trucks and on foot,
cacti pedaling hard
push thrust push.
Springing and wilting,
thirsting and drowning.
Of course, then wells would be a wonder,
coaxed (somehow) into dribbling,
then unleashed
and torrents and flashes.
When I am an old lady
I will wear orange sneakers,
converse,
all stars, and talking jive
I will drive for miles (blin
king)
left
eventually, oh
my.
–
tjq
I know I’m late,
but what’s a month
in these twenty odd years.
Bedsides, we made our money slow,
draggin a wagon
with the wheels off some grandma,
or her shopping cart.
You know, just like the ones on minivans our age
the kind you’re reluctant to pass
for fear that as you approach the warble will waiver,
lug nuts in your windscreen, so kind
pebbles thrown in your face,
for stealing my party.
Filing your bucket with sand
crabs. First!?
But
When with three routes,
Capitol News
Daily Courier
and on thursday real estate weeklies,
more hands were needed, yours
still then innocent,
rose. Beach balls call though
and I’m sorry Mindy Tran,
we didn’t look
into the Municipal supply
for sale! act now?
here you go fishes,
num num.
these walls they bind us,
get the fuck! out!
grind
and plot a way
to gallop out of
this trickled down charade,
oh how i know
you will be there with
and without your horse;
but set the time and milk the party,
dance on my table
and wish for rain in 17 states,
at least, they wished.
–
dbr
It was rushing past,
Picasso’s hand
man, turning and gawking
at what passes every day.
The beauty we inhale perpetually, absently,
is swallowed
either
with a bold face and a cranked neck,
or,
with a crossed flit and feigned disinterest;
which always recalls the time
She considered Cezanne’s delectable apples,
carefully,
while
I considered hers,
brazenly.
–
tjq
I wake up watching March huff,
she says:
your gods are angry,
yelling and smashing
their granite hammers
against their flint chests;
I don’t need this,
I have cherubs waiting for me.
April rubs my eyes with slanted spring light,
I contemplate the growling hour
between medicine and 10 am
strawberry onion bagels.
Why are we too vain to accept
unwantedness?
–
tjq
April and ten, rain becomes mud
and early watermelon cracked open,
cigarette crayons pulled from slim lines of color,
marking white eggs to dip,
drowning craft in water…
-
rb
I’m in class
and I am hungry
it’s almost 10AM in March
and morning mist is still frozen
oh my heart is still vain
and voidness can be felt with your hollow wind…
culturalwrath
