Earthquake Season

The mouse bounds along the bottom of the chain link fence: its paws and underside are light tan – its fur darkens along the spine, dark brown with long strands of charcoal gray. The mouse runs with its tail just above the ground – twice as long as its body – long, kinked pale flesh, like a human scar. He runs past the coke bottles and scrap metal, past the plywood and piles of sand and shells. The music of trucks idling and a faint Mexican ballad. A warm damp breeze curls in the orange ditch. The sparrows clinging to the top of the fence chatter and shake themselves in light rain. A grey tabby lies on its back, scratches its shoulders against the dirty sidewalk, its belly fur white, shining like a dull moon. The children inside the fence kneel in a circle on the long, dry grass, whispering and trading small red stars.

Self-Portrait at Five

A dog's mask, the mask of a leopard;
A woman crying in the attic and bathroom.

Chocolate milkshakes spilled in the shape of a gun.

A baby crowing like a sick bird upstairs.
On Halloween, the girl who melted

into a bag of skin when she went out too late.

Snow for my hair, eyes, mouth and ears:
Frostbite and boiling water

for my feet. The girl stuffed

in the oven by the baby sitter
instead of the turkey.

Urine puddling in my Sunday patent

leather shoes, bruising
on my arms and upper legs.

Naked in the forest behind the house –

Running in circles, back and forth,
a snake in each fist.

Sugar Easter Egg

The pale yellow frosting draped around the entrance to the green world had a faint lemon flavor and tasted of dust. The walls were sweet, but rough on the tongue and impossible to bite. The clear cover between the inner and outer world was plastic. The figures inside did not move, and could never be shook loose. Once there was a small pink carriage. Once a family of mice was having tea. There was grass but no sky. The light that did leak in was blocked by her eye, or had to seep through the spotted candy walls. Variegated. At first, they had to be held steady with both hands, but they shrank each year, so she could manage it with one fist by the time she was 8.

(This is such a long poem; I feel guilty for writing such a long poem, forcing i ton you)
July, Then Before

Your dark straight hair like some kind of expensive silk skin I wanted to stick my fist through. That Neil Diamond song we practiced all year in the 8th grade out on the front lawn. The album playing in your bedroom. Singing it to each other in the bathroom stalls. How you cried under the redwoods in the national park, worried the raccoons would bite your toes if you slept. How your sleeping bag swarmed with red spiders in the morning. I wanted to show you how to masturbate: I had read about it in my mother’s medical textbook. I wouldn’t let you share my sleeping bag, I wouldn’t let you borrow my bikini. How you told me not to tell anyone else. I'm not the pig you think I am. I'm not the dog you think I am. I 'm not the person you think you are. Can we try this again?

How you were still crying at the breakfast fire, around the burnt sausage in your mouth. Shaken cans of 7-up exploding on our t-shirts, hot dogs with stripes like prison pajamas. We sang in harmony with the record, sometimes you went a few notes higher for contrast. Peanuts made you go to the hospital, boys pretended to like you during recess and made you cry after school. How Billy, the counselor with the scarred lip, told you his dad did it. How you hated your white fat face. You kept saying that, I hate my fat face, when we'd look in bathroom mirrors. Almost matching floor length blue dresses, with transparent flowered sleeves, for the graduation song. Holding hands during the song, the sun so strong I closed my eyes. As you got hot, you smelled more and more of lemon and old tires. How you were better than me at math, how your painted horses always had an alien gleam. Your hairspray made me sneeze. The song had the word blue over and over. Do you really think you’re an animal? one boy asked before he hit you on the back of the head, made you fall to the lawn. You apologized for running over my yellow lab with your bike; I never said anything about pissing on your toothbrush. We sat cross-legged on the front lawn, chewing grass blades, the fat, white, tender part. I’m sorry your parents pretended to love you. I poured all your change down the latrine. Then I kissed your sleeping hand and, for hours, waved the swarming summer bees away from your face. How I bit your arm once, right after a mosquito, to see what it would taste like. Let me tell you about that summer camp.

Reunion: 1977


In a line of folding chairs,
our backs to the soccer
field, our palms twitch and float

over the paper-plates
in our laps (egg salad, tuna
salad, potato salad) to keep

the black flies away.
They sting our necks, draw
thin scratches of red.

As the cousin next to me tries
to cram a whole hotdog
into his mouth, I watch Aunt

Wanda’s feet pacing the lawn
in front of us, how the flesh
of her ankle overlaps the tight

dark rim of her patent leather heels.
I worry about her fat little
toes. Aunt Wanda is telling us

God once wept tears of blood,
and that his blood is in our veins
now. Before I can stop myself,
I look at the underside of my wrist.

The vein there remains hidden, blank
as the first page of a book. I think
to myself, maybe.

Ramona the Fallen


Crooked, rectangular eyes.
The stench of the horses

we knit ourselves to. Her ears
clotted with gold/diamond circles

she tugged until her scabs opened
their mouths. Hurling down her

shining silver pony, she broke
the fence with her collar-bone --

the poles banging together
with a sound like wooden bells.

Faint stars where she went into
herself with an exacto knife, a stapler:
I break everything to make it fit.

Pathogen I

Skinned rabbit on a pile of tires
next to the filling station.

Bright bugs around our faces,
lit orange by the falling sun.

You reach into the wet gears
of your bike, your knuckles huge,

bruised the color of soft avocados.
What kind of street is this, I ask --

you are caught in the bike chain,
in loosing and refastening its teeth.

Red-faced men in baseball caps
drive their mustard pickup next

to a pump: the bell rings twice.
The blue woman in the florescent

glass booth nods to herself, reading
intently, doesn't look up. You fall

back on your ass, gasping. Above us,
a moth clinging to a bulb opens its brown wings.

Why Didn't You Save Me,
You Continue to Ask


July, the month of smoke, the month
of long dry houses, burning.

How to make a bong with a knife
and a salt shaker, a knife and a shoelace,
a knife and a human hand.

You yelled once-- a long, dog-
like sound. Something yellow in my

peripheral vision. A bruise on your jaw,
a new white around the rims of your eyes.

Nyquil and orange juice, wine and five
Sudafed, we were chopping aspirin
into powder: what could we do
to the inside of our noses?

We used lighters covered with hearts
to melt my Breyer animals
into the shape of a boat:

the calves,
the tiny horsemen,
the stiff collies, bending slow

then quick to the flame

In the Endless Backyard, Part 5

A goat race. Your brother hanging onto
the pocket of your pink shorts. World's
Largest Horse. Endless shrieking, coming

near but never arriving. World's smallest
dog. Smeared glass boxes, cracked, with
bones inside. The hat worn by Jesse James.

Shake the hand of the man made of rubber.
Two liter cup of orange soda and all
the popcorn you can eat. A midget who

won't look at you sitting at a target.
A horse fly shining in your brother's hair.
A truckfull of fathers smoking. A man

swearing as he tears off the head
of a stuffed zebra. Your heel in a puddle
of beer and piss in the elephant tent. A tiny

elephant with a half-closed eye. The tickle
of a trunk, slow on your palm. Bet on number
9, the loudspeaker says, lucky number 9.

My Western


my mother forgot the suitcase
with her boots, lost me
among her uncles' houses,
the farms spread out like
fingers, her calls faded
in the falling telephone wires

and the cows shat and shat
and shat in the cinderblock
milking shed, the rooms of
mechanized vats churning
the smell of baby vomit

our hands and Osh-Kosh
overalls sized exactly
the same, we learned how
to use a bullwhip on the new
calves, your older brother

showed me his Harley: we
crashed together in a mucky,
sweet-smelling ditch, the yelping
one-eyed shepherd always behind us

My therapist tells me we have to work on "my problem
with biting."

1) I wish I could tell you the truth about this; my jaw
has been wired shut more than once.

My boyfriend is bruised and a little embarrassed.

My front tooth is loose and it hurts when I drink
my tea.

The sheets are in the dryer already. No one heard
anything.

I give them names. They recede in the light.
I wish I could say I went away, but I was there
the whole time.

I keep forgetting my body has weight.

2) When I was ten I sat on the bottom of my neighbor's
pool for hours, the pressure on my ears beating
like a huge slow wing. The light flickering
in the marred blue like a hand-held sky.

I kept super-gluing my fingers together, then sucking
them clean.

The neighbor boy had webbed feet -- his bike had a big cage
on the back.

We went through the woods on my big wheel.

I was never rescued. I forget what happens next.

Neighbors

The boy two doors
down likes to bite,
too, but his mother

makes him eat soap
after, and so through
the summer-propped

windows we hear their
struggles in the bathroom,
his shrieks as she grabs

his mouth, the slipping
as he knocks the bright
yellow lozenge from her

hand, and then sobs
for hours, a strangled
sound like a lawnmower

stuck on a plastic toy.
One day there's an ambulance
in their driveway, no one

will tell me why, and a week
later his sister breaks
my 101 Dalmatians record.

Then the whole family
disappears; I never even see
the moving trucks, but things
like that happened on our street.

here's a happy (er) poem and pic from the state fair.

Your Tenth Birthday

clamor, bells, ringing that
sounds like the radio's voice,

awakened from your nap
by your own light, your flesh

glows a little, you leave traces
on the curtains when you sigh;

outside in the warm evening streets,
people leave their cars at stoplights,

move onto our lawn, hold their breath
at our picture window, all of us waiting

Baby Brother

At times, I miss the days before
your birth, the short cotton dresses

made from pillowcases, stained
ric-rac around the neck and hem,

the powdered hot chocolate I strew
across the counter each morning,

my time on the basement floor
with the fat grumpy cat and Sesame

Street, the way my skin constantly
burst into red when I banged it against

the world. A week after your arrival,
I tried to cover your noisy face in hot

sheets from the dryer. I thought you
would disappear once the fabric was
pulled back; a magic trick I saw on TV.

falling/her fists full

cat growling under the chair/broken shoelace/four-square/tripping over the toy tank in the driveway/the wrong word in French/the cleaning woman having her tea on the kitchen table/burnt rice for the fourth time/something skittering in the walls around midnight /breaks her right hand/her brother moaning in his sleep/a head-sized hole in the hallway floor, she can see all the way to China/sunburn along the left side of her face/a butterfly on her cast/the chair falling backwards because he leaned too far/the taste of chalk/poison oak rubbed in her underwear while she was showering/drawings of horses in marker along the wall/abandoned tree house/the swing shattering mid-air/crutches for the fallen boy, forgotten in the tool shed/peeling tennis balls, swollen and soft in the creek/rubbing cold cans of soda around their necks/falling when the horse stopped quick at the fence/getting up laughing, dizzy as a dying bee