Menstromania
Loose and bloody in the bathwater, a crossbred
sea star/sponge/jellyfish of mucosal tissue,
a strand of uterus, a small stringed instrument,
a nest, a tuft of down feather fallen from a bird
in the hand of my body (a hedge sparrow)ā
or maybe itās a knot of spider silk. It is time
spelled outāf-o-u-r weeks to be exactāa shredded page
from a calendar eaten by the moon whose teeth
shine as it bites through my lower abdomen, a pain
lit from the inside like a paper lantern. Yes,
this is what my body has become overnight,
a ranting lunatic of clarity and impulse, dysphoria
and cravingsāa bloated hull, red sky at morning,
an eyelid turned inside out, a dauntless sea-craft
crossing waters in an equatorial countercurrent
spurred by monsoon winds, wind spiking
the oceanās surface like a dragon fruit. My body
is the red rind of a tart, hidden pomegranate,
the air is appetite, tonguing the pulpy seeds
(of what?) inside me, inciting a slow evisceration,
catabolization, breakdown in the bloodstream,
the hemodynamics of the world, its nonstop
pulse searching for the aortic semi-lunar valve
in the arterial tree, a big-tooth aspen perhaps,
yes, thatās the one. Donāt call me hysteric, call me
wisteric, bearing racemes of blue-lilac papilionaceous
flowers and wrist-thick trunks, collapsing latticework.
Iām a head case with an acute associative disorder
tending a garden of hypochondria with offshoots
of violet amnesias, long convoluted tendrils climbing
a trellis of intersecting stakes. Iām a recovering psycho-
somatic somnambulating between the body and the mind,
rebuilding the distance with words until relapsing
into this poem, this unmoored monastery of endometrial
cells adrift, this intertidal ragbag tatter of home, no longer
a home but a memoryāfar and near, loose and bloody.
Visitation
Roving through flowering megacities,
fields of sea lavenderācarrying a zygote
nearly invisible inside me, while savouring
the soft pornography of this Disneynature
landscape, waiting for Meryl Streepās voice
to come gliding in, luciferous as always,
draping sublimity, narrating every kill.
I haunt the deer who have come to feed
at the edge of the coastal wood. I fall in with
the flow of animals closing and opening mirrored
doors with a feeling that Iām being followed:
a complicated faith, utopian and disquieting.
Waking
For Ava
1.
Night wanes.
The arrow-pointed attention of the nocturnalsā
their small, violent eyes fixed
on a lengthening red distance. The hunted
shed their vulnerability with each eastward step;
the sun smoothing its hand along their slackening backs,
the same hand that unswathes the house
from its dark swaddle. Sleepā
the rounded edges of a folded cloth, tucked away,
once more, in a pine-scented cupboard,
still cool but warming.
2.
I wake to the ripple of a full womb,
to an early memory of my motherās veined wrists
plunging int...
