cornered...

conjugal encounters,
behind closed doors.
muffled sound, voice
layered across voice,
words blurred,
starchy at
the edges.

small seconds,
skips in time.
hopscotch,
chalk on asphalt.
rough knees & hands, hard undersides.
nails slicing.
on accident, a
slip of turning tongue.

peanut-butter-chunk, apple-cinnamon-surprise:

her cookies were sumptuously sweet. to die for. men loved them, found they edged out the hard place that she clung to, storing just below the surface of her thin, translucent skin.

beckoning...

beyond the spread of winter
slept the breathy sweat of spring:

tulips pushed through mud,
stemming upward,
flanked by the beginnings of
gladiolas, daffodils,
& other delicate things,
all with the weight,
the texture,
of paper.

(cherry blossoms fell, like confetti).

/it wasn't may. it wasn't even march.

but the sun was warm, and the yard was quiet.

so she stripped off her clothes, tossing them into the dirt.

laid down naked on the warm concrete &

let the heat seep into her skin/

apples, oranges...

an interim. a holding place. space between words, without commas.

someone took the rug and shook it. stuffed it back beneath her feet. without saying anything, so that it went unnoticed. almost.

"i can't even sleep," she says. he mumbles back, something about the root of her disorder. it's incoherent. sounds like: "unhk."

in darkness, the pupil widens. to let in the absence of light.

which means she's sitting around with ghost eyes, staring at the ceiling, looking posessed.

big shame: she was becoming an insomniac. tossing & turning, through the hours. something was haunting her. she couldn't say what, and she couldn't explain. it was something, though. something, always something.