sentencemaven

[sentencemaven]

Hot Tub 2

The trees like witches in a (im)perfect circle. 

then the ring of water.

The tub on the deck with no cover. 

Forehead, lashes, nose, lips, chilled chin, and nipples 

Exposed. 

Ice falling through the trees like random, precise, 

Precious kisses electric. 

Fingers find the edge, 

Sharp not serrated. 

Because it's dangerous to be alone 

With only trees as guardians 

And only water.

[sentencemaven]

She Walks

She walks in swim trunks, like the day

Of summer sighs and thunder cries,

And all that’s best of yin and yang stay

Tangled in her hearty heart and mind.

Never tamed to the tender light

That hinders visions and dreams alike.

She walks in swim trunks, blazing bright

And burns and turns and owes the night.

She walks in swim trunks, not like the night.

Like the hottest sand, the stinging nettle,

The full, falling fruit and the highest kite,

Like the wildest wind on a cloudful night.

[sentencemaven]

More

I want to make food that taste like you and taste food on you and savor your sweat and make thoughts of you. 

I want to seek shadows with you of you in you, hide and seek near you

and write poems that define you and ravage art that knows you and paint you pink with fringes of flaming black on your lips and tips. 

And wake to your flesh and dream against your fuzz 

and lose you loose you, mistake you and take you and mis you. 

Split under you; shatter, splatter, and strike you.

Bend not break, mend not make.

And twirl you in deep and twist you in tight, spread your darkness, smear you in light

and speak with your eyes and touch with your tongue and blend our horizons and steal your lungs and mix our juice and squeeze our love and love our us and fall in love. 

All the fucks and force and scraps and rents and rapes and recompense, flirts and fists and cuss and lust everything all at once us. 

I want us 

to 

make 

sacredsome 

something (one) 

sacred.

[sentencemaven]

1031 Literary

When he didn’t push the bucatini off her fork, she ate in sloppy mouthfuls.

The hum of collective humanity hard to deny.

Voices vibrating  

A word added, a phrase, a whisper, chuckle, sigh

Until all is lost.

Breathless breathing throb

Dinning in all their places

Lifting, dropping

To whatever music the bartender plays: 

an awkward accompaniment. 

Enveloped

Among but detached

Listening but not heard

Distractions now so easy to attend:

The woman (maybe not so) alone, skin reflecting glow

Of the phone she slowly scrolls.

Another sits with sisters who steal her brussel sprouts

But share her secrets.

Another is so close to her bloodwarm mirror who smiles, gazes, reflects intonations and nuances

Matching, white to pale.

Another doesn't hide.

Her neck exposed often when she throws her head back

To laugh at the moon

She knows is there 

Beyond the well-placed prints, leather seats, designer lights,  tin ceiling, roof, city, world. 

Then she leans in against his slumped shoulder, her fight for pasta satiated and asks:

Did you see her, too?

[sentencemaven]

No Mosquitos

She waited by the fire late into the night

Confident there were 

No mosquitos

Perhaps too pristine to get out the spray.

She waited as the fire raged and the world fell asleep:

The other campers

The raiding raccoons

Her children

Even the lightning bugs went to bed.

She waited in the wake of the death of day

And in the smoke of the dying fire 

But there were no stars

Just a drizzle of fickle rain 

And Orion, the coward, hiding in the nighttime sky.

She waited in her dreams

Rain, rhythm 

Dirt and thirsty roots.

No stars.

Then she woke to a constellation 

of mosquito bites red, raw on her bare skin.

[sentencemaven]

The List

–Be dead so I can resurrect.

–Answer questions in code so I learn to speak without words.

–Value coffee over conversation so I crave only chemicals.

–Be silent often so I hear myself.

–Deny so I believe.

–Offer kindly to ship my things left so I know where I belong.

–Glare at me in a crowd so I feel special and alone.

–Kiss me with teeth so I tremble.

–Tuck my hair behind my ear gently now so I know your tremble.

–Say my name once a month so I think you remember.

–Forget that my ass is tender so I bleed for days and feel your pain.

–Do art and starve so it's hard not to feed you.

–Push bucatini off my fork so I long to eat your finger.

–Hate yourself so I can love you until you do.

–Be the one I just can't quit so for once I feel weak.

[sentencemaven]

Field Notes: Constellations

Orion hides in the night

As Ursa hunts his ass

Nostrils flared

yellow diamonds 

    for eyes      

With Arcturus 

  ancient and red lolling

 at the end of her sharp stars tasting the sky for flesh.

The twins shake.

Cassiepia grins as her lines vanish

While Ursa's astral claw, a twinkling Kartika, reaches from East to West.

Leo lounges, wanes oblivious.   

Draco dissolves

And falls 

into

      her belly 

crowded with the saptarishis and the seven sons and stepping stones and Alioth, Mizar, Alkaid and all their carries, and the entirety of a salmon weir but with room for Orion.

Who cannot hide.

Every celestiality touched and changed and possessed.

Myths lost in the chaos of swallowed stars, strands, spirals

Contained in her being

Forgotten and free.

[sentencemaven]

Field Notes: Mid-July

The sun is so sharp today, 

Expectant with an edge 

of shame.

The first tomato blushes

Offers pink to the golden god

And waits for blessings.

The corn taller than tangles,

Flashes tassels in brillance,

Worthy and needy.

The okra praising Sol

Full swaying palms of green, pulsing veins

bursting her blossoms with blunt fruit.

But the dirt, 

defeated, defiant

contracts, condenses,

curses.

The vine creeps along the ground

Clinging to any sign of life

Hiding its fruit swollen with stolen water.

[sentencemaven]

Field Notes: Rushing

Moment: midnight

a quarter earlier 

Later

May.

The sky mistful,

The moon a myth,

In a blank

     blanket  of space.

A stunning sway

Tender but deep

Swirl the trees like babies.

     the bugs sleep.

     the snow peas push onward.

     the lazy moth falls.

The barred owl doesn't

call, hunt, 

Exist.

Movement ends; 

Memory begins

to

change.

Midnight: twenty after May.

[sentencemaven]

Blink

The bassist and his bucket and rhythm.

The parents with their son in a wheelchair, the father committed, the mother crumpled, their grown child, forever young, burping giggles at the light up necklace in between his teeth. 

The couple with matching coats and matching pace, too fast for most but in stride with each other.

The child who can't stop laughing because she's on her mother's shoulders and the perspective and delight is just bursts from her tiny form too much to contain in her tiny form.

The man who stares but does he see?

The deep voice vibrating over the rush of impatience, music, whispers, shouts, pauses, held and collapsed, that points the way to the entrance that no one sees.

The many who ask for quarters.

The woman walking slowly, breathing the night, holding her breath, exploding stars.

[sentencemaven]

Bellyglow

So, I get driven crazy describing things. Like one night, I was out with close friends at a bar alive with people, and the most beautiful thing I noticed was this person sparkling in her skin, a force confined in flesh, perched on a stool at a table in the center of the room. Her legs propped up and bent and spread, adorned in leopard spots, but her belly bare and polished like precious stone. She cradled her phone between her legs, and when she forgot to turn off the screen, the glow spotlighted her bellybutton. Anyone who looked at it would fall in love. And I tried to put that in words all nightmorning.

[sentencemaven]

One Bite: Braised Pork

First, the virgin dirt the pig wallowed in

All its secret tannins, history of spice.

Then the flame that kissed the flesh

Blessing its transformation.

Next the meat, salt of movement,

Resistance then yield.

(We all yield in the end.)

Now, texture more than taste

Release of fat, the body’s gold currency.

All that remains is memory

Or loss,

A mouth rich, 

Or a belly ([not] ungrateful) full.

[sentencemaven]

Against White

Against the white sky,

Snowflakes are black, 

Ash from a volcano,

Explosion of star. 

When flesh is hot and confused, 

their kisses feel like fire.