I sever all ten of my fingertips and leave padded prints on your cheekbones, let them drip purple on face. You so generously offer the blade, push it with kisses into my soft. I take it and gurgle, expire and smile. I moan for it deeper my ribs crunching to dust and you willingly give it your hands thick with blood and you stab to the tempo of a song that your mind sings instead of being here for the puncture you press. I thrust toward the dagger and purr humid on earlobes splashing your neck with my sputtering death. Bleed me more sweetly double sided ripping wimper through splitting of silkswollen skin. I am ragged and nothing, shuddering through tides of come. You comb through my organs with razors. And nibbles and phrases whispered and saxophone phrases. I nuzzle your palm and chew from it poison so plump and delicious and spare. I am splayed and willing sticking in viscous spills and hoarse from the slashing of chords and tangled in sheets clotted with ribbons of veins.

And you, while your humming tickles my wounds, are startled how sultry and silent I die.

blindfold fashion

how dazzling the stretch of twine
i’ve braided tight around my eyes
how haute couture the shade of red
i clot around the knots
my nakedness is nothingness
my song a silly squawk
how righteous and ridiculous
my gold embroidered robes
armed with tongue and dagger
but the latter softer probe

Things are sometimes exactly as they seem

Things are sometimes exactly as they seem

Things are sometimes exactly as they seem

i would tear my mouth to cry
but my throat wound spills the scream

and
scene

shedu
::oriental institute, chicago

111507.01
I ride the wings of demigods too heavy with pride to fly

I walk the wall to the gate of Ishtar
and cut my eyes on the sun
I sing the song of swallows

I style the coils of kings and line their eyes with kohl
and etch their lines in stones
that I skip discus on Euphrates
Tell me that you see me

naked in the hanging vines

squeezing my nipples
my feet on hardened clay
my hair is heavy in the evening heat
and the night is a thick wet tongue across my shoulder blades

I watch the wetting lips of emperors
murmur in their sleep

111507.02
When the moon puckers the silken shroud of the east

When it bleeds like a pearl into the dark oil sky

me and my sisters

there are eight

go naked to the delta
and cover our skins in silt
still warm from the long sun

We rip the serpents from the mud
and drag them between our legs

We cake our hair in rotting leaves
and blacken our grinning faces with river pulp

We chat the name Inanna
we are tall and dressed in silt

We pour lamp oil on our breasts
and beckon in the merchant ships

111507.03
thick sinews of sound
bend endless through yawning limbs
the temple welcomes

111507.04
I am no waiting beauty

I arrive with purpose,
a solitary bird,
against a desperate glitter of night.

111507.05
The Department of Antiquities in Iraq
has donated, has generously donated,
oil from leaves of mint
clear, thin eucalyptus
the heavy bulge of olives
their plumpest dates
almonds still in thick green sleeves
and virgin brides
with sullen smiles.

111507.06
At the feast of Babel
the girls with painted eyes
drank palm wine from the south
and laughed with their syrupy throats

They touched each other
with soft brown toes
and chewed their smothered moans

Then came the unshaven men
with scythes and sharpened wood and
copper banged to poison tips and straining
quivers and bows with strings that ache
for bloodsong

and we sang

and sang

and sang

bared red teeth
and sanded eye

till the last of us
bubbled out a sigh

till the bowels cooled
beside a braised rare bird

and granite cracked
with bearded cackles

my stiffened finger twitch

111507.07
now we fetch water
our regal flesh is caned
our daughter’s wombs broken by dogs
the stench of them unrinsable
our queens are choked
by the cocks of carpenters
river bottom kindest grave

memorandum

Love, as the human brain and body experience it, is nothing more than an (arbitrary?) electric and chemical response to particular sets of stimuli.

It is only intangible insofar as science has not yet been able to measure, record, and analyze these responses.

It is only magical insofar as he or she who experiences it is susceptible to myth, superstition, and naive assumptions of causality.

Love is not a mystery; it is a natural narcotic.

Love transcends nothing. It is one of many base animal instincts. Fear. Hunger. The need to reproduce.

A rational being will know this, and subvert the byproducts of more mystical superstitions about love: heartbreak, jealousy, disappointment.

A hysterical being will renounce these facts, refute them vehemently, cling childlike to the layperson’s nebulous concept of a very concrete, scientific thing.

Love, like tears, is a mundane human occurrence,
like sneeze to the presence of dust,
like spit to the presence of food,
like blood to the puncture of flesh.

Kristiana Colón