This is something made of nothing. When the month becomes an exit
and the nights taste of half-spoiled plums (maybe string beans if
they weren’t destined to remain unripe). This is how Maggie Smith
defined the end of a marriage, as something made of
nothing. This is nonsensical like how a red ribbon is a spider
without a head or torso.
Spider legs on their own are just dandelion lint. I walk down the empty street
with darkness making a joke of my vision, a fool of my
prided self-awareness, I see a storefront with CLOSED
all over it. It tells me that it’s sorry, really. Really, sorry. All in red.
Nobody likes an unmanned post.
I’ve made boys like me by kissing a girl, undressing
myself into a mirror of two. My mother wanted me on my hands
and knees but
this made scrambled eggs of my head ––
my mother doesn’t know that I gave three-quarters of my girlhood
away on her bed. Letting a boy
touch me like that. Sin-starved thighs. I slept
that night, didn’t nudge her until morning. Those names
in my contact could be dying without me knowing,
so I wrote a poem full of apples
and vitamin C. Such names are choleric
college-aged children, I’m a parent
worried sick a bajillion miles away.
This is fishing in the light-less,
pockmarked ground,
for alphabet pasta ––
I learned to cook pasta al dente
from Gordon Ramsey’s tutorial:
Water, in. Olive oil, in. Gordon, in. Angel’s hair:
I built towers with them
in eighth-grade physics,
testing if Semolina could survive an earthquake simulator
because all I do nowadays is run from falling
objects. I can’t justify my hypothesis
with anything other than my evaluation of
distance. Let me offer this: fish in the dark,
so when you see nothing, you believe
everything already in your hands.
I made an assumption
when the coming of seven-year cicadas
turned out to be the AC generator. I can’t trust
my rotting, heat-stroked brain. It is a wild pony
with a matted mane and toddler-braided tail,
at a summer camp horse show. The one
I got photographed on: framed in a rusting half-moon.
Making something out of soil
is admitting to myself that I have hunted
everywhere for the headless people
who made a girl
of me. Like a poet, I declare
them dust.
The Land Bridge 