CHANGELING
because i took too long and came out wrong. a dry birth. then blistered itchy angry. hold me heal me never leave me. “didn’t i come to bring you a sense of wonder?” doctors said marble cake and mutant. Trina Schart Hyman said i looked like a fairy baby and mama said she was right. after all, she should know, go and see. but i didn’t, couldn’t know, not yet. i only knew: lesions, discomfort, this world wasn’t made for me.
WATER SPRITE
CROUCHED in moss and caked in mud and soaking sprouting to the sun
BRING the hose over puddle the clover fountain spray and rainbow days
LAUGH the salt sea through yr nose wriggling tickling pond minnows
moisture pleasure gangly dancer
ropes of water twist and wind
sit in trees on rainy days
watch the stream run down the drain
a whole world in the moss
sometimes flying!
MONSTER
oh i only grew smaller. everyone else got taller. lonely little mutant. never knew what went on at parties, never made friends easy, and then i stopped speaking. i missed all the teachings, both classroom and playground, how my breasts would grow round, too soon and too much, examining tufts of new hair down there and compare to the diagram to see where i stand -- is this when i’m called woman?
and then i stopped speaking. undiagnosed anxiety, depression, and ADD, unrelastic expectations, abstience-only sex education, pimpled lonely and confused, i came to the conclusions that i was built wrong, that i would never be loved, but most definitely never make a baby. i won’t continue the cycle of genes that make me want to die, pitted skin and missing teeth, monster mutant coward creep.
HYDRA
we roared to life in the mid-early aughts, all fire and spit, chomping at the bit. our ideas, countless and unrestrained. you'd think it would be difficult for us to bite off more than we could chew, between three mouths. maybe we just didn't have the stomach for it.
we slid into a story: built the world so we could tell it, lived in it so we could share it. meanwhile, made out, tripped out, fell down, banged about, raged, and connived, in various configurations of one and two and three. always a party. well, until
i can't go on like this. it's too much it's too much. i can't breathe through the poison. i can't see the swan.
"OH YES YOU WILL AND YOU HAD BETTER SHIP SHAPE SOON" came the voices of my like minds, one in each ear. i had fallen, shriveled, i'd been cut off. they wouldn't hear that i was done. like rising from the dead, like Euripedes said, when i came back up, now i was two heads. once three, now four, surely we could tell the story, if we put our minds to it, even bigger than before. grow the world, live the tale, multiply each time we fail.
(when you fell, we pretended not to miss you. what's just one head, anyway? we are legion, leviathan, unstoppable by now. it was as if you were merely sleeping. maybe that was true, but the balance was askew, and the remaining first two couldn't manage without their third. the same poison slithers through our shared blood. you couldn't stay down long. up you sprang, a lucky thing, with two new points of view.)
a polycephalitic wonder, from three to one to hundreds, we forged ourself when we attempted creation. all we wanted was to bring out a story's essence, to see our hero's life through. to make it real, we lived it -- and its completion meant our end. the hero found our weakness: she had been our only purpose, but we made her independent. when she was done, she didn't need us. the hero had the better story. the story finished us.
TRICKSY PISKIE // GOBLIN??
whisk up the biscuit mix spoon it out in shoes
fridge door open
oops wrong room
paw through tumped out trash crash into every owl
smoke butts, only
butts taste awful
late night possum pizza party where were you?
dawn wants squatters
bed loves noon
don’t talk about next week, it’s only saturday
some thing wicked?
come this way
climb up the mountainside, never reach the top
they blew it up
to reach the rock
pissed in jensen in the stall wide open
bird bone rotten
oak leaf awesome
french broad river
ice white soup
cows’ calls penetrate walls, sing up to the moon
pick through pasture
trip on shrooms
cows low solo sows’ woes good luck sleeping through it
show up christian
go home druid
WITCH
and i don’t mean some instagram crystals manifest #blessed self-serving bullSHIT. leave me out of it. i wonder if anyone’s ever been scared of you. “why should they be? i’m one of the good ones!” pshhhhh you are the ancestor of colonizers. you are the product of genocide. and when you talk to your spirits, you ask for MORE?? do you ever consider what you could offer? not the wine and herbs on your table, not the exchange you make for your own blessing. what are you willing to sacrifice?
when i crawled out of the bog, and i saw the world i’d come back to, i cried. the ache of emptiness overpowered me. i wailed as i pulled sticks out of my tangled hair, grieving for the barren land. palms and forehead pressed to the earth, i moaned, drank dirt, made mud of tears. here, sing a song to soothe, find ways to patch the wounds. comfrey and yarrow to mend, fire and smoke to clear. implore the elements to guide me, make me strong, so that i might return their strength threefold.
i see far and wide, it’s too much, all wrong.
take the day off and put the night on. the moon’s familiar face warms, reminds me that we will keep moving, we have to. we are not always getting better, bigger; we grow in all directions. i love the moon, and the moon loves me back: knowing this sends me spinning through trees, a drop of ink spilling into the night, hungry, ready, ((holding space and growing power))
GHOST
SHOWED UP
WHERE THEY SHOULDN’T
WHEN YOU COULDN’T
GIVE HEART OF STRONG TRUTH
GET HEALED ON SILLY THINGS
GO HOME OR STOP TRYING
