The Store Stump

Monday

my dear store stump-ians,

the time has come for some housecleaning, and I will be closing this chapter of blog history and moving over tumblr.

Please come visit me at my new address: storestump.tumblr.com

There are lots of new poems up and I hope to be posting a lot more writing from now on.
Thank you for the faithful following of this old blog - I have loved it dearly.

I hope to see you all at my new home,
yours,
z

Wednesday

i've caught the butterfly wings of this day in my gut
skies washed with sun and smiles caught by their hair in between these teeth
everywhere chests are opened, voices unleashed
on my hips I carry these flutterings and swayings
the weight of a hundred windy tendrils of spring

your eyes are grayed and chasms open where you tread
I'd almost like to climb up away where your teeth, lips and crinkled eyes are huddled
in a cave under the floorboards of a house
somewhere inside

we climbed here once before and called this place Japan
"look how the rooftops shift and lean" you said
we had daisies in our hair then and only violins
in our young hands – catch me up now, your arms

they strain with a new awakening, we've held lakes in our fingers
leaked out them all, our guts
our fears, watering our feet; we've leaked out our hearts
and torn eachother into ribs and bones

now on sweet slopes we tunnel, soles warm with dirt
hold new light in our palms and break into this hilltopthe beeswax on your lips burning mine, bright hummingstrung between our collarbones.

Ryan with scissors

the view from here is of a cut-up sky and semi trucks that ply the roads beneath, in the inner workings, the heart, the jungle, of this city. Here there are only comings and going and makings, warehouses upon warehouses with craft hidden behind crusted glass. On this second floor after three flight of dank carpet and cold walls, there is a white door from which strains notes, shy and foreign notes, like the forbidden door in each grimm's tale I was read at three. Here white walls, white celing, white white floor, one white chair, one mirror, and the tallest girl I know with trimmings on her fingers. Ryan with scissors is the kind of magician you love on sight and feel shy to ever burst upon again, with her white hair casting itself towards the floor in rivered lengths and her girafe legs so long they twin themselves incessantly unsure of themselves. Her father's career in 1960s with the As, her sister's habit of picking up street poets, they are mythologies under white iron fixtures and white lights. She only cuts in shapes that take my jawbone from its caves. A sudden torque of a wrist, flash of her knives, and the tickle of fallen hair on my arm.

Tuesday

I’ve awoken from a late night with fearful tenderings, dead ache bones fishing to take hard medicine outside the cricket moon still crowing. We talked on the phone he asked am I Narcissus? I said if we’re going to talk Greeks, can I be Icarus? Only partly for the wings, but mostly for the red heart Matisse gave him in the falling. The dawn is bold and lionous, my bathroom tiled floor white and cold on bare feet and slumped limbs, a world of shakings, tremblings, to be in a body with gutted bones. The chickadee is calling outside the way it did when I was six and I hunted it in the back of our blue Nissan truck with binoculars. I hunted that sound, the chickadee dee dee, like Cherokee, because of the liquorish feel it left on my tongue. My limbs are stones in the early morning air the cold softness of the honed weight against the floor, Egyptian fossils, encased, alien. I’ll keep crouching here to belong to the bird’s legends, to adorn the tongue with home. To make mating calls. To watch that phone turn into beanstalks and bear its long green fruit. To give my faulty ticker with its animal beats to the red belly of the sun.