[x]

AlterAllow me just this:
your hand
my hand
separate.

1.
I fell into a deep forest. My femur
put forth roots. I did not say: oh Lord,
take me from here
like Rebekah, this is another
barrenness.

My mouth remained resolutely
closed. The moss
grew over me,
in me.

Oh Lord, I am scared.

2.
Mother is reading, brows
at half mast. In the kitchen,
Father organizes sardines
on crackers. Home means
this soft quietude.

Five thousand six hundred
miles away, I am watching a donkey.
It stumbles on three legs; the fourth
is loosely curled, like a child's fist.

There are wild dogs in the fields beyond,
waiting. I am a dog, waiting.

3.

Where Cats Go.I'm the girl who inhaled the world.

Lucid dreaming backwards, kicking rocks

Skipping rocks, stacking boulders

Building the earth's womb,

I planted dreams.

The pyramids; triangle hips, sleep apnea; her postmortem floods and quakes

Nine months later,

I placed pennies over her eyes, Inhaled. Exhaled-

And heaved out mounds of soil, wet vines,

Some dark, cavernous underground.

My ribs choked and packed Creation. My temper split Pangaea

And by Sunday I had left Earth to live with the Cats.

Unnecessary RoundsIn the fall I'd make unnecessary rounds
over that scuffed, speckled tile
in case you were namelessly there-
an anonymous book browser,
a stranger buying milk.

I saw all these walks of life, at noon
or at eight o'clock or nine.
The protruding stomach pregnant
with hamburger-death, stretching
at the filthy shirt with a belly button eye
(Cyclops, do you still blame Nobody?)
and the young man's thin white leg with the
long tendon swimming a delicate breast stroke
under smooth cream-skin, under the fluorescents
hairless and illuminated.

Even lonely people need groceries,
need some fuel for their night ramblings
and nail biting,

OrchardYour fingers are guillotines,
purely purposeful machines.

You pluck the apple,
and carve it clean,
find the core,
suck out the seeds.

Take a life
and taste the power,
it's arsenic
and sugar sweet.

You thank God and the devil
with a crooked smile
that the day is young,
and so are they,
and just ripe enough
for you to eat.

mechanical clocks don't...Love set me going like a skeleton watch:
your voice wound me up, a look pushed
the hammer struck the gear;
pretty soon we were syncopated
ticking out a rhythm.

I wind my time when I remember.
I keep its gears bared,

measuring me in taut increments:
rationing my allowances,
budgeting my attention,
counting down the wait
'til next time you and I coincide;
then I'll forget to wind, it and my faces will
pause.

Around you I forget my time, detest the reminder
we are lent hours. But I check
nearby displays in a panic--whether I make the bread line
or not, it won't stop rationing out
my piece of your company.

I pretend I can ferre

VertigoHe sleeps the sleep of a man
who doesn't yet know that Love
sits sewing her shadow to the dawn,

nursing a subtle,
aching silence in his lungs
with her name, her shape.

He can't fathom how someone
can sit so deep inside him,
shelling the shadows of himself
as though there are moons at their core,

how he no longer believes
in falling lightly in love
but in committing himself
to inevitable call of concrete

or how she lingers like ink on his fingers,
like a story he's still figuring out how to write.

An Anatomy Lesson       If I collected the lies I've been told I could make myself a skeleton. 206 hollow bones made of hollow words. The bigger lies are structural support, holding up the rest of me. 33 dishonest "I love yous" could be 33 intersecting vertebrae, composing my curving spine.

       I could gather shards of my 10 favorite broken promises to be my long, sharp finger nails. The 10 runner ups fit on the tips of my toes.

        Spiderweb truths, theirs and mine, will weave my new skin. An average of 20 feet of sticky substance, easily to

And Lay as Though She SmiledI died of cholera in the third grade. My best friend Alice Hathaway presided over my funeral.

Lying in the school soccer field, holding a bouquet of dandelions, my cheeks rubbed with pollen, yellow and sickly, I asked Alice to give my eulogy.

"What?"

Neither of us had ever gone to a funeral, but somehow I knew more.

"My eulogy. Say nice things about me. Since I'm dead."

She hesitated. "Elaine was really nice. I wish she hadn't died. And I hope she goes to Heaven."

I waited.

"Are you done?"

"Uhuh. Amen."

"Okay, now's when you bury me."

Alice ripped grass from the field and poured it over me. I smiled as it fell into my mouth.

"Ashes

Barren.✣

March ripped itself out of February, prematurely born
from a month of quiet white blankets.
That morning
(though you said it was too early to plant anything),
I dug splayed fingers into the frozen ground.

I tore the soil away
in icy clumps, naked fingers driving seeds home to somewhere deeper,
somewhere deep enough that anything could flourish.

Your gloved hands cupped my shoulders as you murmured
"Nothing will grow, you know that."

But I was so tired of the muted death
that thrummed its way from your words
into my womb,
empty like the oak cradle w

Skip to the Last VerseI went to Catholic school all my life
And thought in agnostic terms by 5th grade.

I'm now what you'd call an existential nihilist
But I believe in inalienable human rights.

Tuesday early morning I took my dogs for a walk.
The pimp stopped his car to let his whores out to pet them.
He told me how pretty my girls were
I told him his were too

When I got home I got myself a drink,
The last hard liquor in the house.
I can't decide to be proud of the 'functioning'
Or ashamed of the 'alcoholic'

Next, out to get the newspaper
and heckle the meth dealers next door.

It's fine because I was stealing the paper
Off the neighbor's porch.

ugly consumptionmonday my little girl asked, "what would happen if someone ate
the sun and
how many calories does it have?"

and i wish i could see myself objectively, wish
my skin wasn't worn from
fitful starvation.

have you ever seen your
hands as i do, strange bloated things

in search of bones?

and i wish i could remember when beauty
was a mouth red as pomegranate seeds eyes
like sickle moons. back when it was

more than numbers. ninety-five, eighty-eight.

get down to eighty-five and you will be
beautiful. be

thin and sexless as wet march.

tuesday pa told me: "acceptance ain't something you
can buy at a convenience store."

and i am all ma

Ark BuildingGod told me,
Baby Girl, build me an ark
and hold yourself up inside
like a prisoner or a prophet;
there will be two of everything
but you.

I said, Lord,
I just don't know,
haven't you a son to help me?
These hands of mine
aren't those of a carpenter
and I could use some body to hold me at night,
besides.

Child, he said,
there's a plague, a plague a-coming,
have faith, plant your seeds,
harvest your trees,
throw your arms into the tempest
flail away.

I'm a sail, I am the sea,
the air, your blood, your bones,
have faith, you've weathered worse
alone.

I say but Father,
why two of everything
but me?

RevisionI hear each altared word;
dipped in borrowed
thought, encumbered
as the candle's wick,
my vigil lights, unlit.

for exit 165.in the outstretched wingspan of
tuesday night you'll find them:
the foothills slumbering jagged under
sixteen inches of loose sand and
the city hushed and glowing, lines
of porchlights strung together in suburban rows like
beads on a chain

your house was cavernous hollow like a lung
the colors were dim and
jaundiced, a quiet rush of tepid water
bent the silence while thirty years of
smoking hung ownerless
in the air like the cling of a dead moths to a wall

you tell me of a dream that's vague like
clouds in the sky like
clouds in the sink with
your body limp and damp like
hot tea bags and
your face like spilled milk
a

The Dead GodThe room was large, quiet, and empty, and it smelled like death. It should have smelled like weathered stone, or dust, or moss that grows forgotten in dark places so long it forgets its name, but Rat knew death. He had tasted it the moment they walked inside this ancient church, and he longed to adjust and stop smelling it.

He wished he could walk closer to the three adults behind him, but he would get in trouble. He wasn't a scrawny child today; his job was to walk carefully and take the brunt of any traps he triggered so the adults would be all right. They were needed, after all: Theodora and the silent man had the magic, and Flim was a mi

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grafted.My hands shake and never carry
the grace I feign with words and eloquent speech.

Those hands are a reminder that
I am living right now
despite myself.

I need to know why I carry this price
between my shoulder-blades, why I perceive
such a threat in this face of mine, in
eyes I stole from the man who always leaves.

I wonder if when I was younger--
if some bit of rage was lodged,
like a foreign object,
inside of me.

Not festered, but resting.
Not rotted, but waiting.

safeI move my feet a little to the left,
leaving the ground clear for you.
You are building walls along the grass,
telling me that it is to keep the wolves away.

Our daughter is at my chest and she is beautiful,
skin soft, the underside of a lamb's ear.

We watch you lean calm and fierce against your wall,
muscles gilded with skin as soft-looking as our daughter's.
You exhale your confidence and ask me why I don't breathe,

We are safe now, you tell me.

I can feel the bones of our daughter's fingers,
and this makes me hand her to you, silently turn back to the house
and stifle the howl bubbling in my throat like so much blood.

memoI don't remember what I had wanted to ask you that morning,
especially not after waking, your dark hair fluttering in my eyes like it was mine.

My hands on top of yours, five fingers puppeteering five fingers across
the turning, softer frames of my thighs. You are distracted, I see it in a
pull in the corner of the lips that I worshiped with my own, undulating
beads of praise that bubbled up in gasps and arched backs.

Throughout it all, I attempt to encompass you,
to sway you back, hungry. But when you finally wake and turn to me,
your collarbone grins, pressing against your skin
like steel along silk, the hollows mocking where I

Eulogy.When you excuse yourself from the viewing room,
I watch your back, then follow you.
I picture tracing my fingernails along the inside of your arm
to calm you like it always has.

But I am de-clawed,
nervous fingernails bitten down to the blood, and these nubs
clattering against your skin only bring forth from you
a phantom
of a laugh.

Still, I might take that laugh
and save it
like I saved your mother's necklace.
You moved to throw it away,
--and I snatched it, reminding you that
this was all you had now,
anything you loved about her, this was it.
The hollow between your shoulder-blades spread
as you put your face

Because God didn't give youShe says it's egotistical that
he loves it when she says his name
during sex, and only

tells him this when each of them have
retreated
to separate corners of the bed.

She says it anyway, and he
appreciates the effort,
because all he wants is to get some of the credit, for

all those undulating cries out to God, oh yes, God, yes--

--when he's the one doing all the work.

Every prayer get under his skin

and embeds itself there, prodding at his ribs
like a child
or a shattered bone.

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How to Feel Alive.

by ~epiphenomenon, Nov 15, 2010, 10:37:38 PM
Literature / Poetry / Human Nature / Free Verse

Speak as if you are cradling sugar in the curve of your tongue.

Wear lipsticks with colors named
Venom.
Persian Fire.
Matador Maroon.

Wonder how many times they can give different names
to the same fucking color.

Smile with your teeth. Make it
obscene,
like brandishing a knife.

Understand that the fingers that caress necks can
break them, and yours are no different if you
really think about it.

Run your finger along your hipbone,
and find no dust after years of living, untouched.

Wonder how this is possible, wonder how years of this is possible.

How to Feel Alive.by ~epiphenomenon

Literature / Poetry / Human Nature / Free Verse

Edit (2/14): I am absolutely floored by the DD, thank you so much to everyone who has found my profile by way of the DD, thank you for whoever suggested it, thank you to nycterent for featuring me. I am so happy.

Full Title:
How to Feel Alive, Without Really Living.

Daily Deviation

Given 2011-02-14

How to Feel Alive, Without Really Living by ~epiphenomenon stands out with its brevity and concentrated intensity. ( Featured by `nycterent )

love 3 3

joy 3 3

wow 3 3

~~mad 0 0~~

~~sad 0 0~~

~~fear 0 0~~

~~neutral 0 0~~

*katarthis Dec 18, 2011 Hobbyist Writer

I'm left thinking "wow"; this is a good one, another worthy of the DD praise. I didn't get into the correct vibe until after the color names - Wonder how many times... punched it home hard and fast; I love those lines. All in all, a very well written piece, well worth the time spent to read.

k