new? yeah, new

okay, so i may have mentioned that i wrote a bit while i was up in the aforementioned cabin type thing building bombs... er... reading and hiking. yeah.

so, here's something that i was working on. and, no, it's not really new new... it's a revision of something else i posted earlier, but that makes is kinda new, right?




Poems in the Key of X: Rogue without a Cause

Marie starts too many conversations
with “—Ophelia knew how to swim.”

She finds herself kissing strangers,
drawn to the scent of an open wound;

reading their lips like tea leaves,
like tarot cards, like a leper’s smile.

She’s a cigarette searching for a lung.
She’s comforting like Prometheus with

a broken lighter. She’s learned the awful
difference between mirrors and windows.

Her favorite place is silence, her favorite
color: evening. Marie knows secrets to make

the cotton blush. Her ribs are recovering
from their dreams of shrinking. Her voice

is coal dust after a cave in. Abandoned shadows
lurk in the grotto of her skull, gas lamps pale

and guttering in their hands, yellow fingers of light
interpreting stone. She gathers flowers

with her eyes and waits for tomorrow to arrive
like a train. Her night light is a burning cross,

but she doesn’t hold a grudge against the rain
anymore. Fire only knows one way to burn.