2 Poems

Little flies like bronze seeds

exhaust entire clumsy lives

in kitchens, never knowing

pale water, dog shit.

Each morning I hang

from the ceiling, cocooned.

I am a species known

for staying where found

unless persuaded

by upended broom.

I circle the baseboards,

seek skin cells and swell

to the inhuman length of mothers –

my mild attitude

my rippling architecture.

Most noonday homes look empty.

I vanish into foundation cracks,

a formless chain of consciousness,

a thousand fists to clench.

I gather the washer and dryer,

snow shovels and lamps

in my coils like a clutch

of lustrous eggs.

I am fecund and venomous.

My children glow with immunity.

We’ve spent too long in my hut.

Winter pulls up to peer in the windows but

I am Baba Yaga, rag-mad,

clutching bowls of salt.

I knit myself a new maidenhead with

all this curdled milk. The house

stinks of it, this house without men.

Here knobby cats drool flea dirt dreams

while the baby wails around

a bitten thumb and wets her pants again.

She howls and I snarl back, feral throats

falling open like the unwashed mouths of curs.

We always end in tears.

Her thin leak of snot is asinine

but paints the door of future comfort.

In slanted afternoon I swig

vinegar and eat handfuls of boys.

Mule-faced, she leaves a golden inch

in the bowl behind my chair.

The dim ceiling perfumes with girl piss,

cat piss and my fevering skin.

The dead can't haunt me.

My brain is already bristling with

the thousand eyeless needles of porcupine fur.

I curl around the baby until the last black dagger

scratches my forehead and

we wait for the thaw.