I Can Write Poems, and Nothing Else

The sky has run red with my blood

and I am sitting on the porch steps

picking watermelon seeds out of my bra

black little ants crawling across my heated skin;

summer is heavy as a pregnant woman -

she stands in the sun, hands on her hips

and closes her brown eyelids against the light.

I am sitting on the porch steps

peeling turquoise paint from the concrete

and flicking it like flakes of skin

into the blue hydrangea bushes.

Spring comes like a blink, a little wink of a green eye

and I am forming my mouth into words

that have no sound.

Those words are pale lavender and yellow

as a bruise, as my name on your tongue,

and I want you to say it into my mouth when I breathe.

I am making words with my hands and my mouth

great swells of words that hang under the sun

like laundry, white cotton underwear pinned at the hips

t-shirts with the ghosts of arms flapping in the wind -

phantom limb.

I will take those blue- and purple-edged words

and mash them into a paste to feed to baby birds.

My hands are red with the insides of chicken eggs

cracked open on the teeth of a starving dog;

I am waiting in the sun and my poems are drying out

like a body fresh out of a lake, lounging in the grass

in the summer like a pink, flushed corpse.

What am I doing if not holding these words in my two hands?

I used to think if I swallowed a watermelon seed

a watermelon would grow in my stomach

and now I don’t want to have children;

my only consolation is I can write poems like giving birth -

visceral and bloody and slimy and screaming

sunburned face tilted up to curse at God

freckles across my nose like He leaned down and spit on me.

I am sitting on the porch steps with a red face

writing poems with my wrist cramped as a crab claw

split me open at the back and let my meat show.

I am only writing, I am only scribbling meat words and blood words

and screech words, animal yowling in the dark under the porch.

Hold my head between your two hands

and I’ll scream into your mouth while you

breathe my name into mine.