After all, St. Catherine is my namesake
Because I have no food to give
I give the stray cat a quick scratch behind her ears
& now she won’t stop mewing for more on my windowsill.
Her green eyes are as wide as my own
the first time I moved aside my panties for a boy:
crowded in my car’s backseat, I wore a red dress
& smelled like the honey of my mother’s biblical Heaven!
God, my mother lectured, watches our every move: watched the boy
indelicately take my openings into his mouth,
pretending he knew exactly what to do.
I’m pretending I don’t hear that damn cat’s mew mew mew.
Imagine if I’d lost my virginity mewing!
If anything I was bored,
waiting for God to tap on my windshield & praise me
for how selflessly I offered myself to the hungry.
Don’t Be Bitter, Baby!
“Each one of my breasts,” she cried, “is 3lbs
of pure gold
& if you don’t believe me, tough!”
She thinks the secret to possessing
beauty is to be nauseously overwrought about everything
& I hate to admit, occasionally she’s right:
sometimes the only way to solve my hunger is to scream
I have a vast lust for beef! as I drive through
McDonald’s at 3am
& sometimes wearing a boa to the supermarket
is the only cure for my sorrow.
She tells me I glitter
& brags that the guy she took home last night
looked like George Clooney & God’s flower child.
The world isn’t ugly, she tells me, if you let it borrow your stilettos.
She giggles, “Don’t be bitter.
Eat lipstick. Sob onto your mirror.”
& I do—
each tear ballooning the reflection of my grievances
falling red from my hypocritical mouth.
How to Know the Wildflowers
On YouPorn there is a girl getting fucked
in a field filled with wildflowers.
She doesn’t moan like the other porn stars
screwed from behind by plumbers & pool boys.
Quiet in my computer’s blue glow, she delivers
her body, bending willingly to his whims.
If she is the wind, he is a quavering thistle—
his thorns reaching out to cut her breasts
for no good reason. This is not the first time
I am drunk & crying watching free porn.
I touch my breast like that will remove his thorns.
Is it wrong to feel a hurt kind of beautiful?
Buckwheat. Honeysuckle. Swamp-rose-mallow.
Volatile Elegy
I left a very convincing suicide note in the chrysanthemums.
How I love pollen & my sticky fingers!
Is being dead all fun & games?
This comet will sleep upon this park bench.
In my hair, tangled like the possibility of life elsewhere,
God places a flower.
3am & the North Star writhing. A mourning dove. A glassy eye.
The stars are what the dead get hard for.
Sometimes I love god, & sometimes I love geraniums.
Take it, the sorrow my mouth makes.
A flower for the lady who is so beautiful.
A lady for the ground that is so beautiful.
I hold my lust like a pool in my palm
(some honey for the dead) (some nectar for my God).
Tonight the stars will share my bed.
