Brute: Poems

What is this impulse in me to worship & crucify anyone who leaves me—

If ghost, if whore, if virgin—same origin story: because X was a face too lovely, Y was a corpse in the lake.

How many implements of shame should I hold against myself?

We're almost a whole shadow now from far away.

I know what to do with the dark.

Done with the whole dark & the insect dirge under blue lit lamps. Done trying to remember June, first stars & August when I was Penelope when I was Eurydice when July was missing & I was my own dull shade.

It's easy to be angry about how much hope there is in reaching The whole house gone & so many little monuments to the wrong thing

He said I didn't want to tell you to wait for me (But wait for me)

as if my own voice could return me to myself.

Oh hawk, what's your damage— are you here to pick the bones of the years I laid waste to like I never loved a thing? So be it.

Is it giving up if you give what you have & the universe still fucks you

It's not anyone's fault that this world is full of omens. By all accounts, history is a practice of ignoring things & hoping for the best. You can drive yourself crazy with looking. You can expect bad luck to mark you unfooled, fooled. Light to mark you with light.

Without you, all the proverbs are halved in my mouth. Where there's smoke there's. Where there's smoke.

My mind is a wishbone drying. I hold it taut & pull to break.

I have just this one heart okay I was burned I was gaslit nearly to ash on the first try From the start I was told I was a powerful speaker I was told when & how I should speak It's true I made a feast of my own misery I invited everyone the whole gang

Don't tell me the sun is an exit the sky is a clamp.

I said I never want to survive that story again

On Broad Street, ravens lurk on the Divine Lorraine Hotel as if to say Always a corpse flower, never a bride.

Stone after stone, I’m defacing the river of being in love with you.

I grow true to seed. Unfamiliar with traditions of marksmanship. Whose grouse it is. Whose grouse I am after I fall.

No one was with you — how that weights on me. That there can be no untwisting of the tree back into its seed. Innocent of all changes.

Is it true that you can’t love a man against his will & get away without a scratch.

I am sewn into a dress.

If I loved someone like that. A figure of questionable authority figuring out which relics to preserve under cling wrap. For the way he smelled like cedar. Mispronounced the names of plants.

Listen to me, I'm not hiding it— I'm swimming out to meet the boats coming armed up the river & I wish he were watching through a lead-black fog. I had his book of exits learned by heart. I thought I knew it.

but I can stand here reciting all the words I have over the hole & that's what's left—

Compromised by longing & looking for language to note the differences in the map: the pointed spruces tipped against the moon this time & the water halflit, star-slid—but it makes no difference in the telling.

Hello you are a vessel of vessels.

Underneath every pattern is a logic it's your privilege to ignore & yours is dreamsense yours is erasure

unfull but full of loathing