flem is nasty

Even small amounts of lull
can accumulate in the corners of your throat
and infringe upon your lungfuls.

Well

You can you tell it's getting better
because the sweat smells worse
and the body puts some effort into resistance.

unnecessary violence

yesterday I saw a cop hold up traffic to aim at a teenager's knees
flashing lights are loaded
and really you need three cars to crack down on two 15-year-olds?
After their bodies were hustled into the background cages,
their bikes waited on the streetcorner with lonely eyes
the spokes will be broken
or gone within the hour.

Thanks

11/26
She spent the night
coughing into her turtleneck
& slanting cynicism over the tablecloth.
The buildup was almost bearable.

11/25
(in a tryptophan daze)
This feeling weighs 10,000 pounds.
Slowly the art becoming coughs magic into the dust.
I've got love letters smoldering in my pockets,
their alphabet eyes blink once every 72 hours.
& the sleep is snagging me down
warmth on a steady increase.
The conversation sags like an unsupported dance floor.
From opposite ends of the room
loud laughter shuffles together like playing cards
or the shutter of a camera.
The repetition is more comforting that you might think.
What?
You might think the numbers are onto you,
but the clock will forget you
the moment you close your eyes.

the Streets of Seattle

The ice will trick you the moment you look away.
It's the difficulty that makes winter so precious.
The water crackles
as the smokers lean out their windows.

The blizzard is receding:
shiny fingers melting off the sidewalk,
lazy tires hiss sloppily in their chains,
the railroad is exposed
white with geometry.

3 days in
By this time
all the streets are crumpled & gray.

SNOW!

11/23
A Walk in the Snow
Queen of the hashbrowns burning,
my body fantasizes in equal parts mountain woman and glamazon,
makes sharp outlines in the canvas that shook angry from the sky.
My footprints are arrows
punctuating a path.
These dreams will find me wherever I stop to rest.


11/22 (an obscured dialog between Mai Li myself and the fire.)
Holing up for the night
This warmth is not squandered
our bodies braced against the cold
long walls of white mean nothing
swirls of snow catching only themselves.

cold
FUCKING cold
and this is not for my expressing
but the brutality of my fingers and the turning of my incomplete fork.

The words have potholes
and we all know each other well
enough that the spaces left between don't matter
like the difference between breath you can see and the breath you can't
we breathe back and forth in typewriter ticks.

3 skulls are enough to hold it all in
our mouths solder them together with laughter.
It doesn't matter how fast the snow beats down,
the cold is just an idea we've cornered into submission.

falling poems stick

11/21
Fingers, Wings, and Pickled Butterfly Laughter
Weak wintry sunlight slipped through the window
& found the place where our fingers shared matching band-aids.
I can barely stand the stiffness of it healing.
It's stopped bleeding (I hope)
but its empty throbbing has yet to feel.

Jokes half-whole came easy
beside the mouth of the furnace.
Your laugh makes the open sky nervous
(robs it of it's cold)
I want to catch it,
cup a mason jar to your quivering chin,
keep that rocking chuckle like a firefly in a jar.
I bet its sound would continue to flicker days before the wings get tired.

Our fingertips share the same nicked affliction.
The healing is stiff,
but still, we make the most of November's sun
and buying your laughter with words so light
is like trading dust for butterflies.


11/20
Your laughter is like butter,
spreads rich through darkness
we melt into sighing
& smooth over the topography of breathing.



11/19
Things don't always go as planned.
Skin cracks & leaves purple spots on the fingers.
Dust rushes into the mouth;
the air is too tight for words.

The distance between me and my past

the body is no longer made of papers,
our moments have been twisted and properly burned.
I've been lifted from the 1-inch margins,
and this fog has gone up to touch the sunshine.
These storms can't belong to any combination of key strokes
the patterns of genius are gathering spiderwebs
to better weather the electricity,
and I can pick any fucking font I want.
Perception is everything
and all the power in the wor(l)d is useless
without the ability to feel powerful.
And I am crawling out of my puppet fingers
lifting off like fog becoming cloud,
becoming unpredictable weather
I rumble in time with my own lightning
and swallow the counted spaces between light and sound.
Soon
my stormy body will be pressing back against your numbers.

wordgames

the words mix purple on the floor,
big drinks pour down bigger hearts,
sounds getting larger
and ripening the musty air.
our laughter rattles the windows,
the innuendos are exploding,
her breath crackled with the unsaid
And I've been stealing syllables directly from your throat.

Sore

This beat body is a bruised brick factory
weighed down by history and fat smokestacks.
Too many angles snag,
hysteria pools in the stairwell,
as my mouth got away
& I laughed away all my lightness.


Fenceposts
Everything is getting away,
all of the fenceposts have turned to ash
gray floats boundless in the air
& every breath is a lungful of the uncontrolled
what happens when a body can't own up to its actions?
The body breaks and ideas fall birthless from the teeth
a cold brain runs through each miscarriage frame-by-frame
hoping a time-lapse might unlock the unthinkable
that it could find answers
about how to put fire in reverse
and stop the lightning before our bones turn to glass.
And these footholds are actually only shaped like wounds
in the ground my nails scraped together.
I feel like my arms got stole in the middle of a cartwheel
and my skull is being filled with the earth
land that don't mean what it used to;
all of the fenceposts have turned to ash.

So, turns out I need a new laptop

And am super short on the funds to do so.
Even after saving for 3 and 1/2 weeks to try and get my old one fixed.
It has taken me that long to save half of what I'll been needing for a new machine.
So please, if you can buy a copy of my chapbook:
it's 5 bucks and filled with joyful noises.

Also I will write you a poem by commission if you so desire.
$5 for 10 lines on any subject you desire.
an additional subject or 10 lines is an additional $5.

If you can at all help I would deeply appreciate it.
Thanks.

Typos abound froM my ipod

11/11
The introversion is bottomheavy.
Unmasked, the fairy tales drip with mythic scandal and wolfbreath.
The teeth are hollow
poetry injected through hardened poetry
this song is a snakebite.
The scales team up before shuffling off,
a raw balance is peeled from syllabled skin.
It takes such great intuition to find the serpent's throat.
My legs are too overbearing--
forked like a tongue
And I just can't seem to find out where that hissing's comming from.



11/12
Advice to young women, and girls working to become them:
Say "thank you." more often,
And in more ways
Than you say that you're sorry.


11/13
The holes in my tights run
like rain on Winter's windshield.
This poem is a dollar shoved between my breasts.


11/14
"ineedyou"
my body says
in a single sway of simultaneous motions.
The tingles in my skin have rendered me ridiculous
& my hands are pulling out all of the wrong musics.

The ill

After a false start
and two cups of brew,
the blankets called me back.
At 2PM
I am finally ready.

so small

11/9
Your laugh is a lantern
made of fireflies and mason jars.


11/8
The air is crisp like a paper knife
A barely-there moon snags a threadbare brightness
from the night's deep cobalt throat
and tonight clarity is a curved papercut,
an ivory crescent who waits for red.

11/7
Karaoke
Somehow
the words made plopping noises
as they hit the microphone.

I love writing "I was born" poems

"Stay dry out there."
Falls from empty lips toward my rain slicked wrists,
I smile and dodge the warning.
This was the wet sun I was born under,
air as wet as a child's crying breath.
As soon as I became
my body was covered in the amber leaves that sky shook down.
When my mouth first cried out,
the sunflowers were on their deathbeds,
gravity pulling yellow back to earth.
Under a bloated charcoal sky,
the horizon sighed
relieving the trees of their heaviest colors.
I am a disciple of eye drops and chapstick and long soaks in the tub (any tub).
My bones were born with mildew already inside.
I learned to grimace by watching the pumpkins bear their teeth
like candle-lit watchdogs.
If you carved out my face you'd find the flickers they planted there.
On one soaked and slanted evening like this
beneath the same hangdog sky
I came wet into the world.





11/5
(sick)
breath sucked into my belly
I got caught in every motion
my temperatures flew by like a firetruck
angry flashes cornering the night.

what a day.

11/4
$4
My waitress had a constellation on the back of her neck,
spit politics out the side of her mouth,
hid her age with a smile.
She held 4 conversations in the palm of her hand.
Her mouth struck like a match
whose burnt aftertaste bent a question into m mind.

I looked away as she poured my coffee.
Thanked her softly.
You don't just go around asking to tip your waitress in kisses


11/3
Maybe I came on too strong,
like a poet with peppers falling out her mouth.

Spooky Avalanche of Poems

11/2
When breakfast is all you can manage
don't skimp on the spices.


11/1
My notebook has holes for you
&the binary date is echoing your name.
This humming hollow is just the right shape
for the dips and nods of your laugh.
The hours are sideways without you,
waiting to be tipped by your smile.

10/31
Despite the fishnets
Tried too hard.
Fucked up.
Made less money than usual.

10/30
At 3AM I was ready to crash in the back seat,
a bouncing red voice drew me out.
Danced fearless until a 6AM sunrise
By then our voices had faded to the perfect pitch of orange.


10/29
On my birthday
the smallest children discuss Harry Potter at the breakfast table.
The devouring is slow and spiced
smoothing over the anxious footprints.
I can taste that the croutons were yesterday's bread.
my waitress opens the air for the sharing of stories,
our mouths hitch-hiked from Santa Cruz to Alaska
a thumbing tongue coaxes a red smile from the brake lights.
After a thin saunter westward
my body is finally the weight it should be.
The boots don't matter anymore
and my soul is stuffing dance under the table.
The desserts jeer from their perch near the cash register,
their doughy mouths giggle as I break eye contact,
this doesn't worry me
I've got a kinder pie at home
&it's really not breakfast anymore,
she got drunk on too much sunshine:
October was never supposed to be this good.


10/28
On the edge of 24
my body took a walk in my grandmother's boots,
each stride tried to muscle past the loneliness,
I leaned back from the gravity of my comforts
and waited for my New City to swallow.


10/27
This body is not a dog or a pony or a bearded lady,
this body is a tightrope
balance radiating out,
like the glow from a beautiful face,
not just reaching out,
but dancing in every direction.


I should be writing a poem,
but I've opted to stay in my skin,
gonna eat all the pleasures in the room
split & pit each fruitful noise
and let the the bitters crawl back to November.