Tongue of the World 

pressing hard prayers

through tunnel of my girl mouth

into the bottom

of the earth an operatic warmth unspooled

her tongue and licked my head

golden periapts got loosed from her throat

sounded like bangles jingling

on the wrists of fashionable women

reflected back to me many times

slim and ultra-glam

my captor

Dissolving in Neptune, New Jersey

I’m dissolving in Neptune, New Jersey, place of your birth
and afflicted by drinks and powders scattered and distilled

I’m so busy these days so I rarely if ever have time to blot you out
you’re still here and Neptune’s hot above the horizon

like a tired sun resting in a nest of funnel cakes
and swimmingly Neptune-born I want to notice life’s

finer details but your smell is like mussels and powdered sugar
and moves in rancorous undulations, a real calamity for me

but you’re never in crisis and I’m here in the very middle of the bed
where I’m happiest where it’s bolted down and unwavering

so less of a planet and more of a humanmade monolith
you keep finding me in Neptune, angular and sweet

I keep dabbing but you can’t I’m learning to erase a person or a planet or a place
with a tissue so perhaps just one more night of our communication like a rogue

shopping cart filled with chords and wrenches and many metallic clanking objects
and I cannot look at you as I cannot look directly at the sun without my hand

covering my eyes because man-object-monument-sun-Neptune-born emergency
you were born in Neptune, New Jersey

It’s a real place and I’d like to look at the sun but my spleen hungers
as I writhe on the floor in midsummer when my husband

walks in and asks what I’m doing in an obviously alarmed voice
but how can I speak about the diluvian monument

I’ve been trying to erase with a tissue that keeps rolling
into soft bits of lint on my cheeks

falling into your irreverent sea and so you see the problem right?
you don’t ‘show emotion’ which makes me want to look directly at you

and dissolve like that time in the middle of the road when I jumped up
and grabbed a chunk of your beard between my two front teeth

ripped it out and spat it on the concrete while you did something like laugh
and the sun shone on my back which was the wrong side

so when I out of the murky Neptune-blue emerge years later
asking for your exact birth time I don’t even feel ashamed

as I’m cleanly caffeinated not even a little bit as you can see in crisis
and totally fixed in place nestled between ancient stray beard hairs

at the center of a bed in Neptune, New Jersey looking at the sun

so organs that I didn’t know could have sensations are having
sensations and certain alchemical laws to which you don’t adhere

such as the Law of Equivalent Exchange but you ignore them so well
and with such blasé rigor that everyone including me thinks you might be obeying

them like you’re a regular citizen of the world
I flew to Los Angeles and looked at clean lines lit by midcentury light fixtures

then watched two guys devour goat meat tacos before driving south to Encinitas
where I phoned you from a yoga studio parking lot centered in the macadam

that the sky for centuries sucks on horizonlessness and sinking how Neptune
sinks the world with reverie, funnel cakes and suns opaquely

I remember that I’m lavish particles and that because I wasn’t born
in Neptune and because I’m inside the funnel cake sun, I cannot see you

I get confused and feel in my fingers what you feel in yours
at the same exact time so freakier a swollen ache from tips to knuckles

that shoots up my arm when you hand me a flower made of cardboard and glass
a gift from your birthplace that must’ve washed up on the shore with tampons

and shells and for months I store it in a vase with water thinking it will change
like things change where I’m from and it was at first erotic how you plucked

the flower from a dead shore, I followed you to the other sea
where there’s a plaid couch that gives gently as we fuck a couch into which

I’ve been sinking for a while now, waterlogged, done
and cut the flower’s head clear off paroxysm on the floor so get her to the vase

quick water her with ice thrice weekly and center her on the bed
cardboard and glass bleeding in a different world with similar rules

and about the plaid couch, it’s beautiful in an adolescent way that makes
me remember how much hope I had for men and how we’d revolve

around the galactic tin then you sprayed water on me, dropped me on my head
where I spin and in spinning the public can’t see

long-inured to the twirl right before you threaten to throw
I say no to your face I plead no

you assure me that I won’t exactly die, that I’ll be gentler and given to sway
and perhaps this is the answer to my violent thrashes, funnel-shaped map

of the other place and caked, frankly I want you off my couch
which dissolves below the horizonless sleep of ages here it is

the final splash

Image courtesy of the author, still from Agatha et les lectures illimitées (1981), dir. Marguerite Duras