Last night I made a storm outside that cracked at the ground and shook the houses like shoulders. Went to bed sweeping at the sky for the breeze to break heat, and rain so I wouldn’t have to water. Weather is not stubborn.
Author: MKAster
2 versions / drafts
lunation
the way to your home
a white pet struck
fur blows the road
cat crossing your yard.
my hand casts a line
sacraments your path
breath gone to seed
nearing your sleep.
a raccoon breaks,
stirring the ground ash
pads my intention—
featherfoil, sanguinary.
all the times I’ve seen you,
and you’ve never seen me.
______________________________________________
lunation
the way to your home
a white pet struck
fur blows the road
cat crossing your yard.
my hand casts a line
sacraments your path
breath gone to seed
nearing your sleep.
all the times I’ve seen you,
and you’ve never seen me.

i was here
part company
then the ground
was shatter and smooth
over something harder.
the same as my chest
filled up tar molasses;
before that, heavy cream,
sand, ornaments.
I pointed up, slow,
second place fireflies–
my body strobing
memory drum and limp nails
on floorboards, the ceiling
hit between tasks,
time measured off.
a heat register’s cloud
and fall from standing–
speaking glued shut.
synapse panicked syllables
a metronome’s tick
repeating at the tremor
(2004. 4 of 28 drafts I’ve never done anything with, being resolved into notes and outlines.)
Linden
leaves stick
the dog paws
soles gone
seasonal slippers
Wasps test
nurses, guards
defended entrances
flex dread
I pull blossoms
weeping sap tea
aphid trails
transformational honey
steep the
brittle end
(8/18. 3 of 28 drafts I’ve never done anything with, being resolved into notes and outlines.)
women at the hellmouth
First season, that hasn’t aged well, and frosted lip gloss. The slayer dropping her bag. The wardrobe was never good. Solids are characters in their power. She says James Spader is hot. This ages well.
Our first combat, our first use of the library, I’m nervous about Jenny. Patterns are hormones, textures anxieties. In being taught how to watch, every escape is natal. Devotion is at the earth’s threshold.
Darla is brilliant, her trajectory beyond the half season. Watch this sire, common-law, sex worker. This will come up again, how-to stratify women, their sex a map legend. How she is the entrance and exit.
This is our first hero shot.
(2 of 28 drafts I’ve never done anything with, being resolved into notes and outlines.)
solar return
the best birthday I get
is as many loved
ones since the Sun is
lucky, and better than
being at the doctor,
So, success. It feels like
tripping thanks &
correct begin. So much
honing off of, shivering
in alignment.
(1 of 28 drafts I’ve never done anything with, being resolved into notes and outlines.)
canticle of the turning
With thanks for the out of bounds angels, poets with visionary limbs, the manifesting ultra pisces, the old woman in the purple jacket’s hand on my canary sweater, and her fine hands holding my head, my knees, this hound, that child.
Blossom
Dorianne Laux -1952
What is a wound but a flower
dying on its descent to the earth,
bag of scent filled with war, forest,
torches, some trouble that befell
now over and done. A wound is a fire
sinking into itself. The tinder serves
only so long, the log holds on
and still it gives up, collapses
into its bed of ashes and sand. I burned
my hand cooking over a low flame,
that flame now alive under my skin,
the smell not unpleasant, the wound
beautiful as a full-blown peony.
Say goodbye to disaster. Shake hands
with the unknown, what becomes
of us once we’ve been torn apart
and returned to our future, naked
and small, sewn back together
scar by scar.
Loss
Rodney Gomez
Lately I have been a gap.
Moth clouds follow me to bed.
I counted them: twenty, fifty, block, choke.
In the room where I used to sleep
a breath hangs low on the bed
and hoarsens the room.
No one knows where the air is
charged and released into the world,
but it thistles.
This is how breathing fills a house
with family: breathing to draw
the buzzing to its source
and breathing to lacquer a plugged maze.
How a house fully beamed and walled
is not a house, but a husk.
How a life in the span of a few breaths
becomes a clockless thing.
draft(s)

