house of open rooms

 (inspired by the work of Kristy Bowen)

On Thursdays the words fall from my lips like adjectives
for water. Dark, dirty. Breaking. The garage door
won't unhinge, its swollen chains where the
grease and slide abandoned us long ago.
How we try to mend all the wingless butterflies,
end up singing their little hearts with the matches
in our ears. Besides, they're too small
for our fingers, go sticking against pink fluorescent tape
and cherry diamond rings. Somehow it’s familiar, it’s like
the way I love, limbs that pop and bleed against all that adhering.

II.

I'll become a victim every two seconds.
Upstairs there's a calamity, a cacophony, yellow roses
like hands trembling in vases. I am fascinated, fanatical.
Fastened to pain like a button. How the tightness makes
me shudder. My depression has a little
white church and little white sheets in the backyard. A little bell
that rings when you're hungry. That rings when
the weather's slightly off.

III.

We are docile and ladylike, prone to high stimulation.
In the kitchen my mother chops too hard
at lettuce. Says there are things I’ll never know and keeps
opening and closing her arms. Something about
peonies and peroxide. Or scentless soap and scissors.
Somewhere a woman hangs a picture and bites her bottom lip.
Slides like a letter into the clean envelope of the coverlet
and places her palms on her belly.
The wallpaper resembling a pattern like the ocean
or my unstable relationships, storms and grey drizzle
pelting tiny swaying ships. My self image glazed and distorted
as beach glass. In my bed a rash of paroxysms and
purple satin pillows. Of longing and Ciara cloying in the sheets.

IV.

In my head too many people are wearing flowered sun hats
and traveling with candles and whispering
psalms and litanies from aged green cupboards. Still
no one wants to invite them in. I was raised
to tell no one, though I admit I caused the little ivory bible
I kept hidden under the mattress to go swerving down
the river. There's a constant fever, a sense of
pulling in. I'm tortured by sleep-deprivation and porcelain angels, silver
light scattering from heart-shaped bulbs. Your sweet little hell I let back
into me. I can sniff your cruelty from miles away, practically feel  
the intaglio of veins in your arms. You always knew there
was something left of me on the roof that flickered in the rain.
A voice crooning from deep in the forest,
Don't fret. There will come a day when the cows stop trampling
and the crying will end. When everything
inside and out of you will forget.