Oiseau [2/30]
There’s a ghost that haunts the forest, he never sleeps but eats lies through his crustacean eyes. He lives in an orphaned church with a vine steeple and leads a procession of patchwork people. A wolf sleeps in the basement of the church, he howls through the confession booths. A priest is overdosed in the pews. A girl sleeps with her hair over her face. Her stockings are ripped at her toes. She dreams of French singers whose names she cannot pronounce. She calls them all Oiseau. The pianos all moved out to Budapest, she wants to kiss a girl from Iceland. I just want to sleep in the forest, feeding myself to the ghost.
So Fox Party [1/30]
My fingers were made for rattraps, extension chords are just belts that need plugged in and the ninja turtle neighbors won’t offer you blow. But you’ll wake up to the stuttering grandfather clock sidewalk soldier soon; So Fox Party, you’re Megaman X dashing through parking lot lanterns, you’re a wild beast made of broken circus tents, you’re a dizzy gospel singer hurling eggs at racist paintings, you’re a battle tank of fire hiding between the pages of a magazine, a VHS tape in a jean jacket, a synth line so fat that it makes my teeth buzz. So Fox Party, kiss with too much tongue. So Fox Party, be the joke that falls flat. So Fox Party, sleep outdoors in the rain. So fox Party, So Fox Party.
Peacock Fingernails
A grizzly bear swallowed a rain cloud; he grew extra paws with fragmented claws and burrowed beneath my bed. Now there are thunderstorms in my closet, now there are cadavers in my head. Amelia doesn’t like the way I speak about the sea; she wakes from daydreams about Jacques Cousteau with oceans in her jeans. When the closet floods, the bear drowns. My mattress grows into the forest that Amelia paints in the concrete suburbs to lure in and murder the birds. She’s got feathers beneath her fingernails; she lulls me to sleep with her daytime television teeth.
We bury our widowed organs in the backyard; she plays piano till there’s cactus thorns in my heart and my veins settle into their morning nap. We exchange our deflated lungs in rusted birdcages, she whispers against my lips her dreams of wolf packs roaming frozen village cemeteries and men in monster suits buried beneath the trees in her backyard. She tells me about the creature in her parents’ tool shed that begged her to kill her cat until she leaned on its neck and heard it crack. Her eyes shut to thoughts of splintered antlers that produce poison fruit and the night her uncle removed his face and showed her his real hands. To Amelia, my ocean is her swamp. It clots her blood stagnant with algae, and now there are angry alligators snapping in her belly.
