Indigo’s Voice Anyone

The soul singer, she was shot
and my father cries because
she looks like me and I
look like my mother,
although he leaves that last part
out.

We drink red wine
until we can’t help but talk
about the way she had to crush
the bones of love again and again

until they could not heal

and infection forced him to give up
and let her go
free.

I will choose my lovers better
I will not lose myself
for them to be.

I will not be my lovers’ debtor
nor punish them
for loving me.

Let the stones fall from my wet mouth in
Gentle heaves, for
They have pitted themselves
Too deep, and too long
Rotting out my guts to blackened soil
Some even swelled and split with seed
Took root, and climbed to curl inside my throat
Like the rigging of a living ship.

I purge the poison only, or
I try-
It’s hard to account for everything that’s lost
When morning comes.

After three years of cutting teeth
Unable to evolve,
We sit in the river, trying
To meet each other,
Finally.

On this, the last night
Of our grand game
Of House, which we have always
Played to win.

I mean to encounter you,
To push through the skin of mind
And know the flavor of your thoughts
Before they’re shaped like words, but

I am too busy tightening
My stomach, making myself smaller,
Easier for you to hold on to
Even as the current
Tugs me away.

I move to fill
up space. I am moved
to make full that which
hungers.

By age ten, I loved
to climb down into the caves and press
my body to the cool sandstone that has
forever smelled of fertile silence,
between the breathless black
jaws of some unclaimed tomb
no bigger than my own living
vessel, I would
rest.

The earth himself would hold me
within my body’s borders,
tuck me beneath his tongue to
smother my unyielding urge to gobble
up stagnant spaces like a rabid dog
who can’t bear to waste a drop
of this free life.

When you left
I did not stay
on my side
of the bed. I swelled
out like the tide until I took
up this whole ocean of quilt
I pour

my blind and gaseous longing like wet smoke
into the awkward pits at dinner
parties, disguised in a charade
of mirth, playing the hysteric fool to
unite strangers in their incredulity-
it was meant
to be a gift.

They say life is not perfect
but the craving for life is

Perfect.

It was meant to be
a gift but all too often I swallow
up the many timbred voices that compose
a well-cultivated room,
exhuming and exhausting myself as
a black hole must exhaust herself from kissing

the mirror again and again
until lipstick mars the emptiness
that gazes back at me,
filling me with her
craving.

Published in Atomic Flyswatter Vol. 1, 2020


Withered and acrid
are these stinging-nettle boys.

Their shallow, blackened sneers cuff my ankles in red lace
and my mother, pitiless, shrugs the blood away
having clearly given up on my
wearing shoes.

I ran by night,
from what I did
not know.

By that first pillowing of dawn I found
my legs etched raw,
as if by dying captive men that count the days
on walls of tide choked caves,
and prison cells
and on the ribs of tombs
when one gets mixed up in that unsavory business
of being buried alive.

They scored my skin to play a round
of tic-tac-toe to pass their time
incarcerate, and still
I sing only
of their thorns.

Published in Indicia Literary Journal, Volume 4.1, Winter/Spring 2020



The butterhung wind licks summer skin like sugar dog tongues,
golden as the space your belly laugh once
carved out of this very room.

Now I rent it out at storage rates.

Meanwhile, a man jumps off a bridge.
he is on fire.

These days you look like a grave
that something is trying to crawl out of,
and I am addicted to the darkness
between worlds.

So here I am,
back to pick my teeth with perfect bones
nestled among the corporeal
undercarriages of my mother’s
parrot tulips.

I buried you,
yet here you are.