The Sisters of St Vincent Du Paul our tomb contains
16 queer and trembling spirits pressing
into each other and the corners of our crypt
our bodies finally free to love endlessly
with no containment or witness.

Our bodies finally free from god.

Surely she will see my candle, can she?
Surely she will feel at least a whisper of my lips on her breast, will she?

I know she feels me here.
I know she feels me here.

Imbolc night
New Moon
I leave a candle out
to lure my crush
A living girl
In hopes that she will meet me here
To make love with a ghost
On the grave of 16 nuns.

A melody of bats breaks out and
now the thud of the thick heel of her docs
catch on my cemetery wall grey paint over
rough concrete as she slides one leg up and over
fishnets catching on the rough like
An exhale across dagger stars
Catching and pulling in
Winged arcs across the
Buttery warmth of her thighs with
still tinier, distant, and unnamed stardust
goosebumps spreading like a meteor shower as you
point your toe like an awkward acrobat and
with a half jump you slide your weight and for
an agonizing moment, you straddle the wall,

Pause, checking your surroundings, belly pressed
flat to the top of the wall, no one follows you in.

Gritty cement wall holds place, cold death between goth
girl’s thighs.

For our 12 month anniversary yet I am
spooked to life by her hot throat her scent of
expired drugstore eyeshadow, center hollowed

(Oh will I pass right through her.)

Two soles beat to the ground in perfect synchrony
goth girl lands her docs within my realm she came to me
I know she did

(Oh did she though)

Amongst a small city of tombs now,
thrill of the dead filling her senses
She sees a small flickering light not far away,
(Oh will she see)
and following, the manic chill of the dark and wetness
In the cemetery air
She comes upon a votive candle
At the grave of 16 nuns, and reads our names aloud
All of us, feels how we sound in her mouth
whispers us alive with her tongue

Kneels down, swings her sack over her shoulder and below our names, arranges a
violet cloth, eucalyptus bundle, dagger, and lights myhrr to a smolder,
for her Imbolc ritual, her new moon rite.

she finally feels what she’s been waiting for,
the stroke of warmth across her throat, and this time she can no longer help yet shiver as a little moan escapes. Her companion, some sweet energy has returned to her for her sacred rite, yet again.

My sweet sisters pour bone dust over my body,
they will me to solidify,
kiss my cheek, slap my ass,

And run trails of mist fingering me as
I step out to her, my love.
Her eyes wide and ghasping
My sisters watch through gaps in the crypt,
touching themselves,  sighing,
rubbing into each others soft angles, mouths joining
from many into one. 

Goth girl steps, cautiously, towards my dusty form,
fading in and out with the wind and melt.

One hand stretched towards my face, in front of
All our queer names, yes we all died before we turned 35.

I move to her and take her wrist in both hands, and take her
fingers into my mouth and suck lightly and she releases for me.

next to her Imbolc altar I kneel my body into
our mother mary, marble statue. And beckon to my love

And she does not hesistate.

She wraps her legs around me and pulls her chest to me,
moaning and crying, rocking her hips into me over and over.
Docs crossed behind my ass, behind the hem of mary’s robe
Tall enough for her to press her cheek into mary’s, into mine.

I am cold death between goth girl’s thighs I am Magdalena I am Sappho I am lillith.

We died of yellow fever before we turned 35 but we knew love
We lived for a god that served the men around us but we knew love.
We hid in plain sight.
In death we fuck in plain sight
goth girl and I fuck in plain sight

Oh what would the archdiosece say as she comes from
pressing herself into my solid death, as she exhales pure
heat and spit onto mary’s veiled crown. 

As she hangs her sweet body into me for many more moments
and my sisters watch on, in their own lovely after glow, some already
starting to kiss slow and deep again, hips gently resuming a
soft rocking, the hum of a street light continues.

The night continues.

They say if you get trapped in an avalanche,
before you are buried, raise a hand high in the air,
cup your other hand over your nose and mouth, then

jump.

But if I heard what I imagine would be
A slow growl of ice releasing

If I saw god’s mouth racing towards me

I would not raise my arm high in the hopes of being saved
I would cross it over my chest and
close my eyes

Perhaps the snow can really hold me

my body can be the warm center in a
cluster of ice
the bite of pain that
supposedly fades with cell death

although they also say nerves in the
brain are actually somewhat preserved

Like a steak wrapped in cling wrap and
stacked upon it’s brothers
in a cooler somewhere

How long do the memories remain in my
body once I lose consciousness and if
I were to be revived at what point would I cease being me

what if they still save me despite my lowered arm

Perhaps the animal in me will actually scream
Perhaps the heat will make a different choice
Against a will, my hand flies up or is taken perhaps
ripped from my chest and torn into the air

What part of me is that
Stubborn will to live
Stubborn animal
Holy animal

to hate myself is to hate god
to kill myself is to kill fate
maybe I can love

I met a girl in checkered shorts and
Doc Martens
who is she
just across a table
a late night kiss
a first date kiss
a city park kiss

Maybe

Maybe

I approach a maybe

This could be something good

–

Being buried by snow = release = comfort = suicide?

If in an avalanche would you jump and raise your arm? Would your body reflexively do it anyway? Part of your body/ unconscious wants you to live.
What would it be like to see the avalanche rushing towards you.

What would it feel like to be buried.

Physically and mentally.
Torn between will to live and suicide/ release.

Like toxic love.

A risk for connection = which part?

Compare to connecting with people.

Images of her. But not as in a “reason to live” way.

Pain circles twice, cat like
and seems to settle
Sleepy-eyed
in the deep of my shoulders & neck

He doesn’t kiss my forehead before bed
this time,
He’s left me enough times to know
He’ll be back

Part of me will miss
the tenderness with which
I got to hold you
The sheer amount of violence
To be tended

& the shaky ghost of trauma
Always courting pain, entertwined
Codependent twins

I met my father at city park the day after thanksgiving & showed him my life. not only could i detect the slightest bit of fear, but my ribs throbbed with the rancid hatred held between my mother & my father that lives within my body.

I want to cut it out of me
how deep
how deep

SJC Fall 2022

The old King wanders the halls of his lonely castle. Sunlight catches dust, daggers in stagnant air. His Ivory roses swell with buds as a gentle snow falls in the grand courtyard.

12 nude witches bask in clouds of opium upon silken cushions, raspberries and roast quail perch here and there on amethyst platters. Sword sheaths spill with pink champagne over oiled lips. A great tiger lounges with a golden chain about his neck, the other end attached to the King’s bloody ankle.

He shuffles by.

Once I was Alive

Once I was alive in a vast expanse
of sunlight and soft wildness.
I was witnessed
by great mountains,
old dead gods who’s
magic thrums in my belly &

the high valley was
crowded with tiny daisies,
roots tangled with mouse bones
and trilobite fossils.

Once I was dead, my
soft brain matter ran
with frozen streams

to the palms of little children
rinsing snails and stuffing them
into the pockets of corduroy overalls.

What I would give to feel the blood rushing through my veins again,
Feel it carve cold ridges across my waist
What else than pain or mania can make me feel alive?

I will find it, I will find it
I will travel a thousand mountain tops.
I sill saw off frozen hands. I will find it.

The tombstone is a heavy heart that allows
A release into soil and pebbles,

Broken glass is a warm hug from
A dream you can finally let go and
You can witness baby mountains, like

Canine teeth, ripping through the

Bottom of the great seas and
Leaping towards the light. A

Beacon of which way to grow.

A guide to encountering that
Last ragged gulp of breath.

Once I was alive,

What would I give to die again
to follow that firefly into the deep woods

To choose mystery, to finally glimpse her close.

To take her hand, to press my clammy cheek
Into an underground river, to fill with worms and grubs,

Home again.

I would pluck out my teeth and leave them in a desert somewhere

In hopes I remain something solid

Somehow

I would dissolve, my matter collapsing into a million beings, in hopes I
fade into some great amnesia

Yet I do not know

& yet I do not know at all.

Once, sunlight made their curls
into glowing blue candy
a sticky gem in my palm

Sour sugar on lips, I still find
love notes hidden here & there.
& tucked between our jars of
Chamomile and Whiskey

How I missed them
When they were high
A Dark Mare carried them
to some distant mountain peak

by noon
walking away becomes wearisome
yet I vowed to one day
exist to someone, somehow

How their whole world was a
Blue Candy
They baked
Possessed in the night
so they wouldn’t drink at the party
Tomorrow

Streetlights reflect in rancid
puddles, containing little fishes &
Sunken pirate ships, waving
Sea grass, in blue candy.

Little oceans took them away from me,
Time & time again

Walking away becomes wearisome,
& yet I vowed to exist some day,
somehow.

Summer 2022

Summer storm in Cat Washington’s backyard always in a magnetic dance, welcome the thunder bow to lightening bathe in turbulent waters
In silence she steps lightly in beat with the tremble of Golden Cosmose, in tune with swollen grapefruit with gloves she trims dead branches, just a few at a time she carries to her shed.
I watch her tend her garden.
She moves lightly but with deep purpose, her face blank. She does not need to smile to feel. The tree, she had to take the bird net off of it earlier in the summer.
“It was suffocating,” she explains.

Cool kids go to the river to make out or to cry.
Swamp Bunny creeps down vines and wire, bricks of concrete
pushes past sweet olive trees, beer cans, and
the final brilliant wildflowers of the fall.

Full moon lowers the tide, swelling
somewhere more delicious. River’s

Bank exposed, lithe and bare and she
beached an electric pole, for bunny
To rest and twitching whiskers
Watch the barges pass.

“You could wave but you don’t” Ms Alligator croaks

Scaled rolls of reptilian skin sink luxuriously
in quicksand as Bunny hops to perch on
rocks at the water’s edge

There should be crabs here but
she comments to Ms Alligator,

“What a paradise of urban wonder,
yet just Pelican seems to feel at home”

“Maybe so can you, bunny, maybe so can you.”

Twitching whiskers, “Ms Alligator, I tried to find a shell but, only
Trash and oil slick, only this dried white bean, yet
Softened in the throat.”

“why you’re welcome, little bunny” she flashes
those soft fangs that her love so admires.

Bunny blushes and a bigger ship a

Foreign navy ship goes by, “I could wave
but I don’t.”

Waves rush them in his wake.
“River’s so excited to see them, I wish I’d

Waved to the sailors for her, wish I’d

Told them she misses them.”

“But she did it all on her own” Says Ms Alligator

Wind wildens bunny’s hair, she returns to feral and
The winter sun bites fresh, the wind burning somehow
Still warm, She is somehow still warm.

“I’ll keep you warm, Ms Alligator, don’t you worry at all.”

Confidence
is a Gothic Lolita bonnet named Emmaline-Sue and
when I pin her to my head as a dark halo and
tie ribbons across my wrists,
I am a fucking god

Arm in arm with my dark ruffled ladies,
Sipping tea under an oak downtown.
My menace partially obscured by her outstretched wings
Framing powder blush, deep lashes, and crosses on chains
Draped
Here and there
How sweetly she blinds me from the
Mundane spooks on the right and left

Fearlesness is her perched on my golden curls
A feral meditation on being forced to face what is directly ahead,

For she presses her lace into my cheek and whispers so sweetly
“you are fucking beautiful you unhinged angel of Satan.” And
I cannot help but strut a little sexier and smoother and
Cock my chin at the perfect angle, to set my lowered
Eyes on fire so when they rise to meet those of
My enemies, they fall weeping to their heels

Bloody and
Begging to kill themselves in
The chance it might
Make me smile.


SJC Spring 2023

To Chase
A Feeling is
Not Real

What
Fleeting Poltergeist
do I wake at night
and fantasize about
As I touch myself

Desperate
For a feeling

Some vague desire
To be real

Delicate geometry
Pressed against
The corners of my windows
Peering in
Crystal is ice
Reflecting parts of me
I’ve said goodbye to

Please come home
My bed is warm
I become
Pink & soft
Simple & holy
Just a little creature again
& forever I can just be good and that can
Be enough

Ice crystals catch upon
My midnight window
Your winter kiss
I shivered all fall
Your frostbit exhale now just
Simple condensation on
The slick meat of rosy cheeks
And finally, palms eternally released,
Held in
A lullaby of Goose down fever
Freed from the search
Of all I am
Supposed to be

SJC Fall 2020, edited Spring 2023