My mother was like the bees
because she needed a lavish taste
on her tongue,
a daily tipple of amber and gold
to waft her into the sky,
a soluble heat trickling down her throat.
Who could blame her
for starting out each morning
with a swig of something furious
in her belly, for days
when she dressed in flashy lamé
leggings like a starlet,
for wriggling and dancing a little madly,
her crazy reels and her rumbas,
for coming home wobbly
with a flicker of clover’s inflorescence
still clinging to her clothes,
enough to light the darkness
of a pitch-black hive.
Doctor Frankenstein on Love
I gave him everything I love.
The high forehead,
which looks so endearing on babies,
on his face
became a frightening cliff-drop
of skull,
and the vacant eyes,
with their hint of lethal hurt,
were the same cornflower-blue irises
I plucked
from the beggared sockets
of the dead.
I thought we could live again,
like memory,
that we would rise from unrequited
flesh
as only bodies carefully stitched
from remnants can.
But he lurches like an old film
unspooling
and dreams in a language
not his own;
sometimes just the white amnesia
of a flower
makes him weep.