the best, worst, and mediocrest of leon atropa...
the raven on pallas’s bust is but a girl like me i see her in the mirror when i write to half-past three: a woman made of dust and bone with eyes all clouded over who’s wrapped in an abaya as she stares over my shoulder her lips and hands and curves are mine, the ones the maggots eat she’s only one more body twitching on the rafah street she calls to me in thunder bay: azizati, come home i am…
this is the third thursday in a row that you haven't wanted to make love, because you guide my hand to rough edges and stare at the stars through the ceiling and tell me that you will die. you, born of bronze and carbon, blue magic woman, you'll outlive us all; i am only flesh and blood and rotten blood at that, and if it weren't for my rotten blood we wouldn't have met. i write it on my face that…
all i remember from shakespeare is that romeo died to keep juliet who died to keep romeo; you look at those tragedies with eerily warm eyes and a garnet-bright place in your heart for words and visions, and i look at you the same. of course we have no money, we work in a library and i ran off to follow a man with his gun in the room to watch me as i write to you. but yes, i am a dog, trailing you…
somewhere in the world, the sea has met the shore and your face grows ever solid; we meet twice each week an hour each day and your words never change your face or my habits to change my habits would mean to never see you again and in the palm of your hand is a shell you’d like to guide you and in the palm of my hand is rosemary i’d like to find you and between us is some pearl, some summer star…
where i crawl a thousand miles by some cloudy gravel road bugs and snakes on my hands and knees and the yellow grass half on fire too flat, too endless to hide me— and because old yeller got the muzzle to the head all over a bite, you fire ten rounds that vanish into the great prairie nothing but the shots that cracked like thunder stay on the wind and the only place you hit me out of ten shots is…
face behind asphodel and hands under iolite, it says to the sea of crushed velvet in black that no matter is created or destroyed; it cycles forever, then, and it is always something and i will be back. i will not be a ghost i write of or a heavenly tax-payer and it will be dark but i will be tobacco and seawater and then belladonna and then a rabbit, and lastly when i've been everything in the…
no sailor, no chaser of light stays on land in silver night waits for something river-blue heart of sea glass, doesn’t move folds herself into a row sable-snowfall domino breaks no smile and wears no gold highly favored where it’s cold underneath a lighthouse beam dies to see the things unseen world is wide where fear is found leaves her anchor, runs aground no sailor, no chaser of light gives her…