WARNINGS
Your household will be light
enough to breath into
and out of like a paper sack.
Burnt toast until the day
you die. Itching groin. Fecund
moths whose young will thud down
on your lovemaking.
You will call it lovemaking.
Your spoons will curl inside your cheek
of their own volition. They are real spoons.
You will only say heavy words henceforth--
"Saltgrass," or "Maundering," or "But."
Nothing good on TV. Your son screams
when he mows the lawn
or does calculus. A great number of dead
rabbits forthcoming.
You wake up eyeless and mean,
but self-flagellating, so that's fine.
Then she'll turn her hair electric so you can't
brush it for her. This happens in year
six. The dog runs off then, too, and the tomatoes
come up shaped like biopsies.
Across the jacuzzi's smoke there's fire,
the kind that grabs hold
and just runs in every possible direction at once.
DREAM OF MY SISTER
It will be a Thursday morning.
You will pin your hair up
On only one side.
Then you are out of pins
And your eyes are eggwhite
Seasoning your toast.
Dear kid, you have always
Walked into the gator’s mouth
Like an anthem.
You of the stern kneebone,
You of the wrought lungs.
The back door scatters
Into red pixels
And a slab of rain.
You become heavier
Than the dream.
Dear kid. We have engraved
Your brittle name
On your forehead.
We have be-ribboned your skin
with latitude lines. Please
Do not open, please
Do not shake this box
To guess at what it might contain.
THIS IS A GRAINY PHOTOCOPY OF A PENCIL DRAWING OF WHAT IS PROBABLY YOUR FATHER
Like all sailors, a poor swimmer.
In the book naming all five hundred planets he finds a receipt for gasoline,
blueprints for the porch swing, and a curled black hair.
All days are capable of murder. Saturday, a hacksaw.
Yes, he said, you were a continent. But there are seven.
LITTLE MONSTER
1. I am sorry we broke all
your favorite bones
and played Jenga with them all night
until at last we sighed too loud and they imploded
and we had to invent a new game
so our guests would never go home.
2. You will send out
for more rotting meat.
Too long coming.
3. I am sorry I screamed.
I am sorry I ran.
Hide me in your empty hip and shake me.
You never held me down
like she did.
4. All your teeth plop out
like cherries and your skin tumbles
down a steep slope, headfirst
and smeared with mud.
A sweet smell.
Sleep unspooling.
5. Remember yourself foul:
breathreek and dire.
The mice turned to mushrooms, floorquake
under hoof and horn. Flypanic,
dustravage. Whole motes and
inches of terror.
6. Your left ear for a trophy. The one
we turned inside out so it could hear
the quiet days to come.
(Chris Taylor writes and does other fun things in Madison, Wisconsin. She's sometimes kind of a journalist and always definitely a nerd. Her work's been some places, like elimae and Double Shiny and the Madison Review. She blogs at phonehometaylor.blogspot.com, and collaborates at antelopenvelope.weebly.com.)