seams

To those of us who could not keep it together she said,

“let the seams break, the lattice snap. We were never friends of the gatekeepers, and forever on the wrong side of the gate. Who cares about the fallout? They were fools for trying to cage storms.”

february

It was the month of thawing, everything fluid and slipping under slick glass-ice. It was the melting season, a revolt against opacity. Shadows moved behind eyes, everything rose to the surface. It was a welling season, a swelling month. Everything that once was frosted surrendered its belly, let translucence bleed into transparent. It was an entire nation suspended in white amber, clear and distorting and bulging. It was the season of pregnant waiting, the month of held breaths and suppressed desires roiling. We cannot wait for June, you and I. I'm already swollen with waiting. It's the middle of February, and I'm tired of captivity.

Flint stone

We ate flint stones, he and I, hoping that it would calm the yawning, cavernous hunger we had for each other. Sometimes, when we make love, I imagine the flint sparking in our bellies, filling us up with wet fire--the thick, miasmic smoke of a burning house.

My mother ate stones for a man once, and waited for the burning. I can see her in my mind's eye, stomach fat with flint that had nothing to rub against. I can see her now, swallowing gasoline instead, waiting this time not for burning, but for explosion, for burning down.

This is what we are now, loaded and incendiary. We are the war children, they keep us away from the wax museums, from hairspray daughters and beer-bottle sons. We are a bomb State, we wear grenade pins for earrings. Highly inflammable, handle with care.