Jules

**

Because it is raining Jules
is a messy rain         past midnight
no one is up           Jules put on shoes
and walks into the halting rain,
she goes to the curb the street
unfolds         rolls and rolls

**

Over the forest Jules
sails if she wants
she can drop and become
impaled. Opened and unlocked
Jules breaks a few tops
to clean her teeth
and toes         Jules up there
stays and sleeps

**

Jules believes in tap water
Jules believes in Dorothy
Jules lingers
She empties bags of rice
by holding them upside down
over boiling water
Jules saves
Jules empties her clay jars
Jules rubs her eyelids
Jules ordinarily bathes
She scratches & scratches
Jules knew nothing often results from something

**

Jules breaks the newspaper in half
and leaves it on a bench.
Dogs circle the park
until she leaves.
Pines drop in bunches
onto the bench every so often
until she leaves

**

Jules dresses well on Tuesdays.
Other people do the same.
These people Jules thinks are only
dressed while she plays dress up.
Myth, Jules knows, provides an engine
beyond childhood that must be ignored
to function. Jules rarely cleans these clothes.

**

Jules rides in cars and sometimes drives
with wine in a large thermos.
Deer on the long empty road past
the hospital, so she drives more
to see if she can see more deer.
One for one Jules decides is
enough to keep driving.
One breathing in the fields to one dead and
dragged to the grass from the street.
Jules staggers from the car sometimes
getting home.

**

Jules feels wanting and drills a slope
deep into her brain to let herself out.
What does she find?
No little workers manually chipping away
to unearth gold. No little freckles that
become glitter in heaven. No rings.

**

Jules woke one morning back in the city
next to Party Steve. What is the city?
a friend asked. Boys like cake but
girls are better. Steve bounced around until Jules
asked for coffee breakfast asked
to leave. That was September. Jules curses.

**

Jules spends money that doesn’t exist.
This is life, Jules thinks, wondering whose
waits on the end of sirens that pass her apt.
at night. There are people she could call,
but what would she say? Better to wait for a run in.
Better to wait for some grand grand news.

**

Jules scorns small talk feeling continental.
Nothing, she thinks, is worth talking about
in such short time. It is like putting down a book.
Like forming a recipe around a condiment. Jules
spends her day in imagined conversation
with Lou Reed, in which Jules feels he deeply
believes in her.

**

Jules gives tours without a license.
There stands a fence where Jules
lifted her skirt and bit through
her tongue jumping down. Sometimes
Jules starts telling of her first time,
but she only remembers it was
under a hammock.

**

Summer’s ending and Jules sleeps
all day in your bed with the windows open.
Jules entered your life through a
wall and lay reading on the sofa
until you came home. Jules never left
but you did. Says she waited
for that day you wouldn’t come back.

**

Jules rides her bike around
the perimeter of the town.
Some days she stops to rub her hands
along the mountains. Jules wears her favorite
floral dress to the movies, but when
she returns from the bathroom,
the screening is over, or someone takes her seat.
or she hears her name
except it is someone else’s
though it is still Jules’.

**

Today feels like summer
look at Jules sugar falling through
her hands, bunched together like a cup.
If she shows her neck it means
she is at least interested
in a walk to the river but don’t say
it feels like the sweetness of the tides;
Jules is willing to go there
and take you under.

Terrarium

When I’m winning

my colors twist up

like a candy cane.

When pressed I throw

my riches into the woods.

I don’t even know what

real life is. People talk

of a final discovery, of a

large bell lifted from a song-

bird. Drop a nickel in an

ashtray, listen if it sings.

O mountain how did you become

so serious? Do you forget like

I do the middle name of a cloud

you sometimes loved? Does lightning

hurt or do you close your eyes

to hide? Is your pain golden

like the wheat, filling you up

with bad ideas? Magic morning

come back to bed. Let’s take

another hour before we start

the parade to carry our wonder

towards the township of outlaws.

Deeply masked, their word is ours.

Swollen hands in an iron dream.

A world that is always admired

by someone, and for everyone else

nevertheless sometimes glows.

Sparklers in Outer Space

for a.r.m.

The defenestration of the rainbow hill shortarm / longwave

society was the last thing we needed, truly.

So when Uranus went retrograde, gratefully, we hid

On the first day a cleanse began. The second day

held wonderful whites, detached magisterial pronouns.

On the the third day, the last thing this universe

needs, you tell me,   is another love poem written

with wet eyes staring out the window of a spaceship.

I was already lost in morbid cosmic visions,

of reverse destinies, of patricide in a mirror maze,

of sparklers in zero gravity, of sequins stitched on a butterfly

and later in my sleep, i say aloud: take my word on this,

this beautiful shipwreck can never become real.

but you wake me up and tell me I’m wrong.