Bioluminescent Jellyfish

I loved you forever until I couldn’t,
but I’ll always remember the way you met me
at the dock, in the dark with Dr. Pepper
and Jim Beam, held the raft steady
and floated me into the sound,
plucking bioluminescent jellyfish from the water
and tossing them up like stars
you would have named for me.

And then:
the way you yelled at me
for smelling like your drunk mother.

When I Become More Interesting

When I become more interesting
I’ll wear my hair in tight cornrows and sell
goat’s milk in open-air markets every Sunday.
I will become fluent in binary code
and send smoke signals to acquaintances from the tips
of the clove cigarettes I will have started smoking.
When I become more interesting there won’t be
a bar in Budapest that doesn’t anticipate my order,
and I’ll be banned from Rite Aid evermore.
I’ll play the baritone sax for jazz bands,
but also for marimba bands who didn’t know
what they were missing.
When I become more interesting I will be Baha’i
and have Latin tattoos, and I will of course
cook breakfast for my skydiving instructor.
I will always remain lucid during dreams.
I will perpetually be mistaken for celebrities
and will have changed my name to something
without vowels.
When I become more interesting
they will send recordings of my voice to space,
and I will star in silent movies, and wherever I go
the temperature will adjust to 76 degrees.
I will have at least tried cannibalism and my will
shall state that I should be cremated and put in the paint
of a portrait of myself, or else I’ll be buried at sea.
When I become more interesting the Oxford English Dictionary
will accept my name as a verb meaning "to simultaneously
fluster and fascinate," and since it will be
unpronounceable, any third grader who
can use it in a sentence will qualify as gifted.
When I become more interesting I’ll turn nocturnal,
or else I won’t sleep at all, and I’ll spend nights
climbing ropes and reading Russian novels,
and I still won’t golf or watch medical dramas
but I will have a bungalow in Panama
and chickens that litter the yard.

Paulding County

Everyone who’s always lived here
is friendly to everyone who doesn’t
live in a subdivision. They all remember
when this was just a dirt road, they say,
and it shut down whenever it rained too hard.
Now the roads twist like the lines
on Grandmother’s face, and cars careen
cautiously through like the tributaries
of spit and dip inching down her chin.
Somehow, hordes of same-faced mothers
squeezed their SUV’s on the tar-stuck streets
and picked plots of land to fence in
and keep the farms at bay. You used to have
twenty cows and a vegetable garden.
You’ve since slaughtered eight and a Kroger
opened up on either end of the street.

Your family goes a century back
on these eighty acres, and when you were
the first female born to your family
in five generations, did your parents think
there goes a good thing? How did they
waste their youth? Where did they go
to drink warm beer when the draught of ‘79
dried up the High Shoals waterfall?
To where did they cruise
before it was an easy twenty minute drive
to Waffle House? Did they worry, too,
that Paulding is their oyster, and all the prayer
in the world won’t change the fact they’re sand?

Getting out begets coming back.
All the B students went to Kennesaw,
and the drama kids that fantasized
about Broadway stock shelves at Target
and wish toy boxes were as symmetrical
as the butterfly tattoos on the smalls
of their backs. They can’t fly away either.
But the dropouts still have bonfires every weekend
and can probably still sell you a ten sack
for eight bucks.

Jesus Saw Your Tits

Piss in the ditches and
beads dangling from crooked oaks,

bartenders eager to lick faces
and pour libations down underage throats,

fresh as the bones
in white plaster alabaster tombs.

Was it you that vomited
vermillion on my shoes,

silhouetted sex acts
still Etch-a-Sketched in your eyelids?

It’s 14 hours to St. Louis
by steamboat,

but if they hit you again,
you’ll fold.

(Hit me.)

People are squeezed together on
a streetcar named Regret,

and their greatest handicap
is a hangover

and a group hallucination:
Touchdown Jesus guards Esplanade.

Yes, He stays vigilant
but still hasn’t seen a bathroom.

He surely saw your tits.
Everyone on Bourbon

guzzles hurricanes
and pretends not

to catch the irony,
but they’ve already caught the clap.

I've Created Her

I’ve created her face, given her a chipped tooth
and a faded tattoo on her right wrist
that catches the sun
every time she dots the i’s in her letters to you.
The schizophrenic tangles of her long dark hair
that sometimes she, too, stains red,
pulled loosely back.

Her favorite color, paisley, plastered on the wall,
a jug of pinot grigio grasped between
sunset orange nails that she just painted
and already hates.

We meet in the seconds before sleep,
in the eternal moments of her coma
where she wears white, though black
suits her better, while somewhere in the company of cats
she embraces insomnia, nestled in the minor key
she holds for five long beats on a player piano.

I wonder how it feels to be wrapped in her skin,
prescriptions pumping to her capillaries,
bones still creaky from the crash, after so many years.
Maybe she has a blind spot, too, a promise
of a grey forever we’ll both spend without you.

She needs me like Thorazine,
but my fear is not
that she will snatch you back and leave me
in her plateau of dreams and smoke,
but that she was never real at all,
that even though I know the birthmark on her calf
and the paper snowflakes she snips apart
when she refuses to surrender to the call of sleep,
she has not created me.

Quotes from my Ex-Boyfriend

Communication is impossible
unless you do it telepathically.
I’m done talking.

Fuck the whales.
I’ll put ‘em in water mills,
make hydro-electric whale power.

No, if I eat an entire thing
of unflavored Jell-O,
I can pass any drug test.
I’m positive,
it’s science.

Just for this, I am
going to shoot myself.
Not today, and probably not tomorrow,
but someday.
And when I do,
it’ll be your fault.
I want you to suffer
forever—
because you killed me.

I’ve always prided myself
on being a great conversationalist.

I have it on good authority
you’ve been whoring around.

I’m well read.

There’s even a little library.
I read this book called Pimp.
Well, what was left of it.
Apparently, other inmates like to rip
pages out of books.
Anyway, Shortie was in some deep shit.

Your chin is like my nose.
They call it a “strong profile.”
We’ll have sharp but dashing children.

Rush Limbaugh
is an intelligent man.

You’ll have to drive.
I don’t remember how many I took.

Mrs. Landrum,
you’re a self-righteous shrink
and a bitch.
Power to the people!

You are the scarlet woman.
No wonder magicians love you.

To hell with writing.
You have to be a chemist
so I can sell more acid.
Write about it later if you want.

I am a god.

Quit bitchin.
You’re getting a gun for your birthday.
Speak now if you want it pink.

My great-grandmother
thinks we’re married.
I’d be cool with that.

I am the Aeon!
When I was a child
God spoke to me!
I have a purpose.
I am the messenger,
the angel of the apocalypse!

Your dad should always have
Motley Crue hair.

On Being a Woman

My older brother and I
had chased the trails
of rabbits and Indians

deep into the sticks
and far from home
when we reached a creek

and the urge hit.
My brother and I
were equals then in all

but age, and rather
than walk back, he went
in the brook and suggested

I do the same.
Just take it out, he said,
and go, and aim it

at that rock.
I tried and failed,
of course, and when my thighs

grew warm and damp
and my hands
filled with fluid,

I cried, embarrassed,
and ran home, where
my mother laughed a lot.