what hollow thing eats at you?

Is your mind/body meandering

nothing more than youthful gaming?

Or does death knock at your ribcage,

its filthy fingers picking at your mortar?

Stand down from these heights

before the quicksand covers you over

and I can no longer cup your fleeting pulse.

like bits of crystallized sugar

lozenges of sharp words flung

when one is young

slip down the mouth and come full rest

at perfect bulls-eyes just inside the chest

preparing a way for further knives


flipped across rooms

to exactly where the worst of wounds reside

down a toddler’s cotton-candy pink mouth

how unkind syllables do spin in early

and slash red as a sore throat

to where

even the repairing stitches must be sewn up jagged

from those harsh verbs, the pointed tips

leaving behind unmended gash lines black as railroad tracks

right across a stretch of skin

located just below the defenselessness of childhood collarbones


then—that familiar rip much like the renting of sheets

seams opening first to a drip next a puddle

which will forever gather as sticky sweet and unwelcome

as a caress of your own mother’s blood

Dinner for two at a restaurant I

suggested. Now those jeans

and its brothers are ornaments on the lawn.

I was resolved to engrave

“I hate you” on my face

but then betrayed by the leaking

that stained my coral cheeks.

A rosy plush blanket twisted around

my toes as I surveyed the emptiness,

yet crowd, the room held. Numb

fingers lifted the “I love my daddy”

binky, a present from the shower.

Moving from the room, the glass

shards of girlhood sliced the soles of my feet.

I brushed a misplaced rattle, its stars sparkled

through my vision, and heard bubbly small

talk being made across the hall.

Rinsing away the news

I dismissed your pictures in my mind.

Now with diapers to change and

plastic bottles to fill, I live for someone else.

My feet duplicated the pattern of a day,

and I cursed the verb I felt.