i am Better Now, and here’s how

i have impractical shoes i cross my
legs is this being a woman, my lips fuller
at eventide

i am a good girl i am a big
girl i have childbearing hips my
hips look good in jeans

you sound like grass you smell like
hills you feel like i don’t know what
i can’t feel

i like the color red i do not like the color
green my favorite dress says chuc mung
nam moi a borrowed shirt says Happy Saint Paddy’s Day

i have been to a wake i have seen a woman
when she was dead i do not like the phrase “dead
person” yes i have seen a psychiatrist

i like whiskey now i know American
names i have been to New Jersey i have seen
the shore i know

aren’t you surprised, the stones in my
mouth, those twenty pounds
gone, aren’t you surprised aren’t
you

Twenty Pounds

What happened to those twenty pounds
that sidled off my bones
like pretty girls
at a party?
Like they were sick of me,
my weak skeleton, the black eye
sockets, wide-open, like a hungry
stomach, growling with bile –
they wanted nothing
to do with me, and what was left,
the drooping spine, vertebrae collapsing
over one another
like
dominoes tumbling
from a drawstring pouch
like
a plastic garbage bag
unloading a corpse
into the greedy gulp of the Hudson, the weights
dissolving
into microscopic particles
small as kelp, poison
for the sea anemone

I will kill you if I get the chance

floating
to the surface, bloated
and frowning
at the sky above, stained orange
and red like a gutted salmon

I am trying to shock you,
to show you
what was

bleeding onto
the deck
your coat
your hands
its irises gaping,
swallowed by the pupils,
two sinking black holes
like a rain gutter, like an open
mouth, sucking down air
and water, taking it
all,
not caring

who will drown, not caring
for the draught to come,

to come.

I Don’t Know What to Tell You

I like to make lists.

Sometimes I invent colors.

I am thinking about being a bad daughter.

**

Some colors I’ve invented:
Colors for orgasms and my birthday, colors
for James Taylor on the jukebox when I’m wearing
a tight dress, colors for my mother’s empty gums,
colors for the persimmons she will abandon
when she and my father sell the house, colors
for things that approach happiness, colors
for pain. Colors because there are no words
my mother understands that can explain
why I don’t call her anymore.

**

I am thinking about being a bad daughter.

**

The last time I spoke to my mother,
she told me: You’re different now.
I don’t like you anymore. She told me:
It makes me too sad to work in my garden
now. All those years, my persimmons.
Now we’re moving. I can’t take them
with me. She told me: You’re older now.
I can’t expect much. She told me:
I’ve been pulling down wallpaper,
but it doesn’t help. She told me.

**

I am thinking about being a bad daughter.

I like to make lists.

**

Some ways my mother fills her time:
peeling rose-printed wallpaper from the wall
like layers of dead skin;
buying things she doesn’t need
at the grocery store; taking trips
to the ice cream parlor; parking her car
under a tree and sitting for hours,
the winter-white sky splashing between the leaves
to cast blotchy shadows
on the wooden prayer beads
wrapped around her still fingers.

**

I am thinking about being a bad daughter.

**

Every night before sleep,
I list my colors to myself,
and try to invent a color for this:
my mother, alone, pushing
a shopping cart past frozen vegetables
crusted over with ice and musty
tanks crammed with lobsters
bobbing slowly against one another,
their claws bound, their eyes bulging.

I’m Sorry I Keep Talking About the Prehistoric Period While Thinking About the Apocalypse

but I need points of reference,
something more than what we’ll leave
behind,
frame after frame of a near-same face
getting sadder,
my words clumped together
like pebbles, and mud,
and it doesn’t matter which words
are which. Every night
I watch your spine coil itself a new
world, the strata
of your vertebrae
no older than the day,
and I’ve seen you
bent over tangled veins
of 16-millimeter film
like the surgical hand of God
cutting cleanly through the years
until the only things left
are what you choose
to remember. I know
what it looks like. I’ve seen you.
I’ve seen you forget. And I know
holding me is an earthquake,
shakes the tectonic plates
loose
from under
your skin,
white-fisted tsunamis
scattering our continents
until we don’t know
whose mountains are whose,
but when we sleep, my sinews empty
into your valleys
like hourglass sand, and
I trap my face in the amber
of your back. I want to stop
the process. I want to fill it,
that space. I want to stay.