Shake the Earth
Ours was a sky real estate so dark, we could track
the Milky Way cartwheeling over our house
could hold the plasmic whiskers of its twilit clouds
accountable for our paradoxes: only scar of a lightning
strike, the charcoal stripe along the palmetto
that cast its blond fronds about the porch of the carriage house
where my sisters and I hosted high-school parties,
toasting the reluctance of my parents’ consent
waning with the waxing of a strawberry June moon
peculiar how gravity seemed to lure our intoxicants
to sick in the same spot there below the television
so recurrently, the residual acids of vomit corroding
a citric crater in the shag carpet and glamorous
to be 16, Gen Z, and, like, relate
to Diana Vreeland when Bob Colacello complained
Studio54 was becoming more and more
like pagan Rome and she said Isn’t that what we’re after?
glitter gurgling up a clam breath hole, murder by a carton
of salt, pluff mud gripping my shins, oyster teeth
chewing me guilty, a baby’s handprint occurring on the french doors,
my mother perplexed clutching a bottle of windex
to believe the constellations conspired especially for my story,
meant not even the pond out front could hide
beneath wood ducktail feathers or pond scum or
milkweed tufts entranced by the breeze bending their adonic
faces to a reflection where the galaxy lactated a way
rippled by my feet splashing and the boy I hadn’t loved
not since January catching and pushingcatchingandpushing,
his Nikes planted in the oak-tree root system
equilibrium of the crooked swing of my torqued soar
one look into his face pulled the loose thread loose
the binding unraveling our bildungsroman to pages taking flight
go ahead and imagine a flurry of white-breasted nuthatches
and let’s call it a diversion, like that harrier hawk who chose
this night to latch its talons into the scruff of our house cat
Mouse and carry her off to heaven like some fucked-up sacrifice
in the name of a goddess trapped in the dim of a dying star light.