Mid-Atlantic

She wakes up in the afterlife in a fog. Unaware that she had an enemy, she was unprepared when the villain approached to deliver a fatal head injury. Part of her soul is stuck in her tomb, but as is common, it has a fake door where intercourse can occur, while another part of her soul begins a new adventure in form and in name. Always a reticent young woman, in premature death her speech-producing anatomy becomes irrepressible as she tries to render her circumstance comprehensible.

I’ m in the barricade hearing the clock thickening you.
Autumn encircles a confusion that’ s nothing new.
Flash back to warring eyes almost letting me drown.

Out of which, a picture of me walking in a foreign head.
I can’ t hear what you said. Then you say: Cold room,
the second that life unwinds. A tinctured vase returns

Did you know I’ m in this hospital bed?
I’ m not. I’ m in the same light you stand in,
much the same way I’ m in the waist of your Carolina
watching from the screen across the bed
whose pulse is worn down with an IV to the head.

We are all snow birds atop
the cherry blossoms of August.
Springtime in Washington D. C.
passed too fast, nearly in the flash of Rose
brushing her teeth over the bedpan.

Only open homes & woods & pansies’ blue ledges
can lead the zero with his only arms
to embrace himself in open fields for all to gape upon.
He unbuttons steel-gray sheets, a knotted top coat,
bares himself, his hole, a vision
as framed by the marker that is
where
his body blew and left enclosure intact,
skeletal innards
enough to make moviegoers ask,
“Has anyone finished themselves yet?”
I haven’ t. I swim the lagoon, take note:
the babies are barely dirty,
their armpits smooth with silky soot

I have known great gold Sorrows:
Majestic Griefs shall serve me watchfully
Through the slow-pacing morrows:
I have knelt hopeless where sea-echoing
Dim endless voices cried of suffering
Vibrant and far in broken litany:
Where white magnolia and tuberose hauntingly
Pulsed their regretful sweets along the air- —

Up late watching slug porn, you confess
you had a boyfriend who could spin you

like that, slug grace and slug ballet — we don’ t
touch the topic of slime — and those eyes

dangling from tentacle tips must be a
kind of love or lust, sighting farther and

nearer all at once. (But are those eyes?)
Slug sublimity suggests love’ s a drag,

touch that lingers and leaves a wet trail of
memory and... What did we do before

YouTube? Boob tube. Boobs we have none; slugs,
of course, don’ t care, can’ t tell girl from boy,

In the road, a dog. Days dead,
that dog. Liliana was walking beside me awhile
(I am sure) and I was almost not crying but then found

what I was looking for.
She heaved it for me — all of it, the stench, the weight —
in her thin arms until it was too much.

Tired, she dragged the thing by its wasted paws
all the way home. Her dress was stained. This is how

I learned about love. She did not mind at all
the silent, steady distance I placed between us.

Some people might describe this room as spare:
a bedside table and an ashtray and an antique

chair; a mattress and a coffee mug;
an unwashed cotton blanket and a rug

my mother used to own. I used to have
a phone. I used to have another

room, a bigger broom, a wetter sponge.
I used to water my bouquet

of paper clips and empty pens, of things
I thought I’ d want to say if given chance;

but now, to live, to sit somehow, to watch
a particle of thought dote on the dust

We’ re headed for empty-headedness,
the featureless amnesias of Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada,
states rich only in vowel sounds and alliteration.
We’ re taking the train so we can see into the heart
of the heart of America framed in the windows’ cool
oblongs of light. We want cottages, farmhouses
with peaked roofs leashed by wood smoke to the clouds;

This was the winter mother told time by my heart
ticking like a frayed fan belt in my chest.
This was the fifties & we were living on nothing
& what of her, the black girl, my own black nurse,
what of her who arrived on Greyhound in the heart
of so dramatic a storm it froze the sleeves at her wrists
& each nostril was rimed with white like salt on a glass,
what of her who came up the dark stair on the limp of her
own bad ticker, weary, arrogant, thin, her suitcase noosed