Cave Cricket
Belly-up, splay-legged,
bow-backed to the things
in the dark: my mother
will die, my father, my kid.
Licked with dread. What
I can do when you smile
at my limp and crawl,
my see-through legs
rickety and thin.
What else is there
to do. What else.
With no sharp mouth.
No poison. No blades
or fingers. Bullets. Think.
This. Fling myself
from under the steps,
and there are more of us
and more, a rush of sticky
legs and heads so strange,
so big with pain, so afraid
it looks like fearlessness.
Aspen
Fear is golden, a cold
fire on the hill. Its
spread and glitter
in the wind, clones,
women’s tongues
set to shiver—
I’ll do something, I
will—
The wind. You
won’t. You’ll bend.
You’ll fall.
Listen harder
for the leaf
to twist,
to cut the air,
the flat of the knife
all bright edge,
sure: bring fire
next time
See how
we’re more
here
Bad Gardener
He’s a stinker, my grandfather
would say of con men in soaps,
and true, I am: slime mold
has run over my stakes,
and my sweet peas rot.
A thin green opera of self.
An operetta? Let’s be
real. I’m feeding no one.
Fooling, I mean. Grandpa’s
groundcherries and truths
are now weedy feet of earth
darknetting between plants,
plots. Half-facts. A failure,
a farce. Force. An odor bad
with broken fungus,
weird growth twirling
the wrong way, half diva, half
tech. Breathe in. It sucks.
Breathe out to the straggler
shoving for the sun anyway,
turning the air and water and me
to itself, making it up.
