Welcome home, a strawberry plant
grows out back
for you, but it
has twisted to fingernails
to scratch away the bugs.
It has a heart, ready for transplant.
I promised to die,
I admit, I’m in the habit,
but it just sat in one spot,
sucking on water cells
reminding me what it
would feel like to overheat.
Now you are here, hiding in
the desert, my fruit not fertile
enough for you
to eat.
So, you say it’s the center of time,
one hand holds it,
the other says good-bye.
My eyes settle blue on boulders,
on the desert.
She doesn’t know I am here.
She doesn’t know how I watch her,
or how I crawl with
tortoise in patient crawl or
how I soar with her carnivorous
vulture.
She is like woman,
like God
and sperm
and sea
all at once.
Her magic is dry and alive.
What is
to hate is to love.
She acts like death
but her surface is in force.
Her dry stomach spreads thin.
Her hot mounds curve Earth.
Her treasured liquid leaks from
her spike covered fruit.
She is dangerous.
She does not fear exhausted corpse’.
She swallows inside out,
spits it out and keeps it
for company
and when buzzards come
and when flies come
and when suns change course
she will suck dry
hard bones
deep within her sand
burying them
in her desert forever.
It’s 4 in the morning,
it’s every morning quiet
and cold.
Where did the clock go?
Where did the familiar ticks and tocks of time go?
I am pounding from underneath layers of leather skin.
I am buried in a nerveless body
that does not know me.
All that hair is matted up in front of those
eyes.
I cannot see out of her eyes and
she won’t dare look inside for me,
and at 4 am no soul on Earth is laying
next to this body,
no hands are caressing her cold spine
or listening for the deep screams inside to
follow her exhaling breath.
She is a secret to them
as I am to her,
but they want her. They want to touch the
back of her head and wake her
from the dream,
they want to kiss her lips and be warmed
by a return of love and desire,
and some of them know about me,
yet, here it is, 4 in the morning,
it’s every morning quiet
and cold
and I am alone with a body,
trapped inside a body that does not Know
I exist, pounding on her tough skin,
screaming at strangers to wake her
from her dream
and resurface me,
but all they can touch is
her top most layer;
her skin,
her hair,
her lips,
the warmth of her lungs working hard,
the heat of her blood circulating
but no soul on Earth will ever reach far enough
to pull me out from
underneath.
*This is a bit risque…so…if you aren’t an adult, don’t read it…LOL
I feel myself screaming down low,
my curves curving more, in search of,
in need; my cave waiting,
tugging on the emptiness,
in desperation.
I know this man who is solid,
his limbs aligned, straight and hard,
as a man would be. He has been calling me
with capacity, firm grasped,
swollen purple.
He has come for me before,
it was winter, he turned me into a mermaid
and brought me to a heated spring.
I never hesitated.
That was just once.
There were several times, over several seasons
that he came for me
again, and again.
I know this man who is solid and firm
and I scream for him, my body searches for him,
I belong to him.
It took only his few words in sight,
tied together on specks of dust,
sent to me on the back of July’s
thick breeze.
I stood as openly as my chest would allow,
reading his words from the hot pavement,
soaking in a fresh idea, feeling
his tone
settle deep in my ribs.
It is not an uncomfortable place for him,
for me,
unlike the others. He is a choice.
I gather his aromatic movement
like a lilac wedding bouquet and plant
his image between my special vessels
and skilled capillaries.
At first, years ago, when I kept my eyes
and cheeks naked, it
was not a choice. His parasitic words glued
themselves to my eager young ears, prepared to host.
Now though, his silvery voice is
passion fruit,
a red sweet juice that saturates me,
and it took only his few words sprawled
in the hot July pavement,
“I think of you every day.”
My soul has hands that feed my mouth
delight boxes marked “poison”.
I have second hands that are language.
I gave up youth for silent lips that
spread too thick. Two plump
pulsating cream puffs injected
with secrecy.
The boxes piled up to a thousand acreage;
a still wall with a calm face,
sipping tea with the Queen of servitude.
I have become a slave to iron curtains
and black rods.
Once upon a decade ago, I slept with
meaty warriors with bull-dog ears.
They carried sturdy death machines that
slaughtered innocence.
I heard them slice my siblings
to hamburger, while my stable body hid
in a homosexual bed.
I bled out of my ears for one tight night,
then woke up to the funerals.
I faced a casket with strawberry frosting
trim, small china pieces laid across
the mahogany lid.
I tipped with warriors, drinking their poison,
swallowing fear in full, single gulps.
They offered me a butchering tool
and I pulled it in, deep through
tissue and cartilage, into the warm cherry
pie that was wrapped inside my body.
I melted with metal. I succumbed to
murderous beasts that carry
angry weapons,
and without useful hands,
or mouth,
I became a box.
I have never felt you, but I saw your beady blue
transparency in the hand of a stranger.
She drained you and the mucous,
she strained you just to have you,
and I do not know you but I feel you.
And I wonder if you are the same,
or if you are even you,
and in this mood I am careful, and thick.
I dreamed about curious habits and
watermelon seeds; slick, black beginnings
buried deep in moist protein.
I woke up, choking on raw meat, trying
to swallow your well-being.
And I have not held you, but every day
I feed you,
and water you
and let you grow,
because, although I do not know you,
I want you.
I have peculiar bark on my long tree legs,
it grows in layers.
When I was eight, I was a fresh baked apple pie.
My mother never told me why, but I know
it was because of the tears.
My tree legs drank them every day,
while mother explored my cold sweats.
She picked them off my forehead with
smiling fingertips. Eager for discovery!
She poked through my warm crust, straight to my soft apples,
spoiling my fruit,
rotting them with her murky breath.
I was an apple pie
until the world never died.
I realized, at that precise moment,
that I was a foul smell;
putrid. I had dried up and crumbled.
There was nothing left for me but
these long, strong tree legs….
and bark.
Undercover
whispers about size
and
the rice.
What will we do with the rice?
Crowded family ties.
Lines of sweaty
palms
caked with
white rice flakes.
My stems, baked
in
sun beams, waiting
for a gleam of
approval.
Shape came easy.
Like he did.
Before and
after the rice.
I was born to a gray world.
Void of sunlight.
Barricaded by ice.
Hunters have come for me. I watched them
gobble up
sisters, a brother,
and the woman who birthed me.
I stayed, under rocks, under dirt,
for sixteen years. I washed myself
in sin,
couldn’t come clean.
Stained with nights that smothered me
in the devils
chest hairs.
My hair grew to the length of
a woman. Sweeping me
out from
the dirt, standing me on
one foot,
then two.
Then, my breasts grew,
not much larger,
but wiser!
For some time, I lived out
dull
nightmares.
Screaming in sleep.
Silent during the dull day.
Grinding coffee beans
with quiet grips of rage.
I sliced each strand of woman from
my head,
became a man. I cut tears out of my arms
till I forgot how to
cry,
smashed my head heavy till
I forgot
everything else…
except that the world is gray.
My hair has grown back out
to the size of a woman
and my breasts haven’t grown
anything but heavy,
in a heavy body,
in a heavy gray body.
maggiemaeijustsaythis 