Kate’s karma
Thought to have fainted
“swooned,” she wrote in high school Brit
when I saw my name on the pass sheet
minuscule white placard
amid gray bricks
Same scandal veils
present war with forgetting
“This is not a hotel, ma”
Arms heavy buckets
hardly a trope for daughterly love
nor cheap gloss on suffering
“Come on, get some sleep now”
ii.
You’d suck blood
so long as I hung
on your coattails
dirty sum we repay
in small excrements
prickly pears of consent
time to rewrite
the whole maternal bed
and its flimflam cargo
remember that ancient cleft
place where “you go your way
I go mine”
barren immemorial debt from before “before”
What shape do I give it now
hair brush rattle chair be there
on the morrow
kyrie eleison
iii.
phantom silhouette
playing hard to get
(fate) fixing the odds
red over black for now
Laure my love
Help me out here.
It could have been the year of the painted bird or maybe before when Dirty vomits at the Savoy.
I’m getting all mixed up.
There’s a war, barracks desert-like.
We don’t hear the screams not even rain that pounds still less the dark blood running down their legs.
Maybe I’m thinking of the sisters in Les Années de Plomb.
Bomb fetish.
A close-up in a cell, synchrony, recurrent yeast infection.
She misspells whiskey.
The postponement of forgiveness.
Slack prejudice.
Fuzzy sweaters.
Should the worst storm—heap of eyeglasses silver bangles— turn up the volume we pore over the omen.
You’re toast.
I’m shagging you on all fours. Put that corset.
Y a du monde au balcon no more common than my thumb on your pulse.
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