How Do You Deal With The Unending Feeling Of Things That Must Be Done? Towels Folded And Put In The Cabinet,

I feel pressure to act not as a person, but as woman. To fill every void left by our absence, too little leaders of us, too little comedians of us, too little scientists of us; am I meant to choose what loss to make up for with just my one life?

How to Kill a Crooked Ward

Though nothing can haunt a crooked ward, her neck often cracks and turns rapidly as if she fears something coming. As if eyes leech onto her rigid and bark-like back, and their hunger for her image alarms her, or the echoes left of her fallen mind. Nothing can hurt a corrupted spirit, but perhaps the past. She fears not a hunter, but a walking memory, pulling her back to her former self. How wicked a deed to dredge a dead woman's mind back to her rotting body, to convince her only to die.

Where there was once blood in my veins, cold laughter flows.

Bells ring at the tips of my bones,

A strange sound cries out my throat.

Alabaster dice roll in their jaws,

and I sit in my skin too tight bathed in spotlight,

Waiting to see grimace or grin.

To drown in failure or soak in glorious win,

Step forward step forward, renounce body and soul,

Become a jester like me, and luck is all you’ll own.

What poems do you keep close to your chest like a weak deck of cards? Terrified anyone should know your mind in all its weaknesses and honest throws of emotion. Let me read them, let me know you. I promise not to ruin you. I promise to be kind.

In defense of the comic, whose characters are foolish but whose mind is not. I see her brilliance in the whites of the audience’s smiles, in the wit and the quickness of her responses. I know many serious men with the mask of intelligence hiding a simple and plain nature. I find the opposite quite riveting.

-Confessions of a Ticket Sales Clerk

Remembering him is like getting to know a shard of glass. I push my finger tip down gingerly into his jagged profile and draw tears; he is not whole anymore. He will never be whole again. I could sip tea at my window sill and watch the clouds roll on, but I prefer to live on the edges of his memory. I prefer to dwell in my scrapbooks and peak into his diaries, peeling back the brokenness of disappearance into the smoothness of understanding. Floating in the ether I am pricked again by the knowledge that no matter how deeply I learn of his soul, I cannot unplunge him from the river styx. And I am content to keep hurting, I am content to keep pressing my soft body into the recesses of his absence, if it will only bring me closer to his place in nothing. I am content in that.

You weren’t there on the mountain

when its last glacier melted,

You weren’t there in the river

when it’s water ran empty,

You weren’t there by the ocean

when it’s body rested over much of the land.

You didn’t watch the dying happen, but nonetheless, it happened. And one sunny day, when the skyscrapers stand hollow, and the cars don’t run, and the world’s heart has beat its last,

You won’t be there.

Algae bloomed on the face of the lake at summer’s height, like zits in bundles of thick and slimy green. The siren that dwelt deep in the lake’s toes could not bear the warm swampiness, it drove her mad. Not only that, but her sailor girl, her shining beacon of hope for food had wounded her in her escape. She felt rotten, her gash festered in hot white patches. No food, no beauty, no cold deep blue lake water to retreat to. All that was left for her was a walk. To find the sailor girl and give her what was coming to her.

Intelligence grand and ever expanding,

his head pounds with new ideas, while the heart in his chest beats slower,

his empathy is sluggish and cold.

The same old cruelty that ran in the veins of the cavemen is steady in him, his wisdom in vain. He has become acutely worse, torturing with metal tools instead of wooden ones, brainwashing with television instead of word of mouth, colonizing with guns instead of swords. What use is knowledge in the hands of a dominator? It becomes just another weapon, words to razors sentences to spears. Do not waste intellect on brutes, they will wound you deeper because they will know where it hurts.

Why can’t you let me have anything? Why can’t you let me have anything? I ask the mirror.

The girl in it is too busy weeping to answer.