my new rabbit’s a real peach (reblogged from “his” Tumblr because I am an insane person)

I sink in
between sharp rips
of leather on steel
and stare down the powdered tarmac
until all glows
solid white. 

Surrounding Midwesterners
fidget in sun-hungry skin
and fold bubbled coats
into pillows
on the musty carpet,
an invisible pane all that separates them
from the steel beasts stuck
flightless in their stalls.

I stare them down to a blur, too,
and focus instead
on an old woman peeling magazine
faces apart
with hands that might have milked
the clouds for their gray.

Florida wraps its heat around my throat like the scratchiest, sweatiest scarf until I forget there’s anything else, and it works like this every year, mistakes and monotony soaking in the weight of the weather to get heavier and heavier.  My spells don’t work as well here; consequences assemble to swelter under Southern sunshine.  When autumn nears and one morning wrings the air dry again, instinct flings my door open early for the first rush of tolerable oxygen in months.  I breathe in bursts of home for a week straight while others trade tank tops for sweatshirts and shiver at each sharp, sweet breeze.  Nicotine, reluctant, fills young lungs molded far from here, but the rush is inferior.  Smog and wind come cooler, remind me that steel peaks will emerge from inside a cloud again, roaring engines streaking me across their skyline to settle me somewhere central for as long as it takes.  I’ll ramble down ribbons of concrete for days, follow gut-rumbling whiffs of tomatoes roasting in beds of cheese, bubbling in their fresh dough, to find myself at a gray beach a thousand miles from the nearest ocean.  The old thrill of wisdom will fill every limb like the opposite of smoke, like the smart spark of some better choice: burn my bad year down, be well enough to sip plain city wind and feel cool.  Still at this distance, I become aware of the chemical and the natural and how they like to hide in cups and dance my stare dizzy until I can’t tell which is in which, and I drink up that one self I was supposed to kill.  She fills me.  Soon home won’t let her in.

monologue is a dialogue
between Head and Tail,
those twins joined at the back
and flattened to face anything
but one another.

They take turns
speaking for me
according to pattern
and a dash of circumstance,
muffled protests
from the one face-first
in cold dirt
and overcooked confidence
from the other.
Sometimes
something sets them spinning,
chasing delusions of
union

in a trick blur
that lets them both catch
daylight and scream
its shine
together.

In the void of night,
the cat scans our house
like a boa,
slinking through hallways
in hunt of hot blood.
She always finds the dip of my back
most ideal,
curls her soft black spine
around mine and purrs us both
asleep. I am a wrinkled sheet
of office paper this morning,
pinned still by a small, warm weight.
I’ll let her hold me here
until her hunger
surrenders me to the stirring
day.

[2-14-11]

I write poetry on scrap paper at work
between scan and scan and
clean and bag
and scan.
Instead of eyeing the languid laps
of the shortest of three hands,
I use my own
to will each receipt
into a sloppy ticket out.
But it’s clock out,
not write out,
and the grocery genre belongs
to a bearded beat anyway.
I’m stuck resisting
trite but tempting
metaphors for the damage bin in back,
for the produce codes my fingers know,
for the product I now am:
peel painted yellow
and curled around the bottom
of a brown bag,
waiting for the paper
to carry me out.

[2-28-11]

Your hunger resurges
like a storm cloud sick
of holding its breath.

Feelings stream forward
in wet stripes
after so much time behind
stacked distance,
the kind of gap that hardens
into some soft thing
too choppy to fly through. 

My skin wrings itself out
to dispose of the old,
old ache.

[8-27-11 12:45 am] 

Full of bliss and belonging
(no more longing);
swallowing lost time whole
and folding into the familiar
shape of us.

I catch my face
in your pupil
and want to trade places
with the image.

[9-9-11 5:09 am]

war withers a mother’s breast
and her daughter’s stomach
stays empty
while I slip pills into mine
to stave off appetite

[9-21-11 11:01 pm] 

Isaac Brock,
you can’t tell me what to do.
I reserve the right
to drown the sounds
of those situations
we both frequent,
to give half a heed
to words that name
the chaos in my brain.

What authority do you presume,
and why am I the subject
who suffers,
feels those notes in her bones
and stays stagnant
between years-old yearn
and a love that never
even held my hand? 

[8-27-11 11:45 pm]

Rainbow Trees by Laura F. Santamaría

“I won’t say who they are, though.”  
found in my front yard on two separate occasions.