this week is just scraps, shoved in untidy bundles.

standing in the shadows as i look in the mirror without my glasses, i
resemble nothing so much as a poirot doll - all sunken eyes in a pale
pale face.

there is nothing on my walls. they are bare, like skin. a child's
face painted garish with woman's makeup.

at threea.m. the moon shone like a spotlight through my window. and i can't do this anymore.




Dead Letter is the poem my eye lands (lands like a hook in the mouth
of a fish if I were a fisher) as I flip through the words of the woman who taught me the importance of ending
a line like a stumble, like a trip so you fall as you read so that reading is falling
and the bump of a swallow inhaling. I have lost the audacity
to use the word poet, the mirror just laughs. It seemed meant to be grander,
incendiary and pounding hard on the ribs to enter the heart;
cracking bones to find the meat beneath. Instead I spill over, colouring
the lines and outside, disheveled as fog twisting the morning hills, overly fond of a comma.