From STARVING IS THE ENERGY

it gets harder to be seamless 

women the employer must know

to make a happy workplace 

of nonprofit women starving 

is the energy that makes us break

to hold a compress to the redness

between the ideal and the material

reality all of us with common

ailments of the office 

*

crepuscular and solitary 

nearsighted and on a mission

in late February I followed the

highway of dead male skunks

roused to find a mate

the feel of their sulfuric bouquet 

like stomping cabbage 

that will be your food

for the week is what

I learned from past wombs 

and why I need to be talked

out of going to work sick

with what I knew to be

our new Achilles heel 

the upper respiratory

now and at the hour of 

our chemical defense 

*

when things are bad it tells

you that things are bad 

we wouldn’t need poetry 

to tell us the obvious if it weren’t

for colonial amnesia 

my pain receptors fizzled 

like Pop Rocks in blood

you could run your program

for poets like a poet or a Pennybags

relying on our gift for friendship 

and our chronic dearth

mercy did not exist in the primordial life 

it was misunderstood for fear 

and such misunderstandings 

made for death Jack London 

I put my knowledge here

in pain from shoveling the hole 

I overexerted to put it in the hole

and the pain left temporarily 

later that night eating okay pizza

at a dive bar bathed in the cream

of queer youth  

*

impulse purchase of a cow

that is filled with lavender

that you can microwave and hug

last night I dreamed my dog

was sleeping with me wherever

my joints formed a bend

I dreamed I was not flat 

on my back

the wild ride of peeling off

layers to get to radiant baby

or quasi modo geniti infantes

on Low Sunday the cups 

showed I wasn’t circulatory

and the symptom sniffer said

I had mold growing in the cellar 

the healer’s art resolving

the enigma of the fever chart T.S Eliot

told the beginnings of a hump 

post haste practice the grotesque

and gothic as I paced the upper floor

at daybreak and felt it was not me 

but humps and pacings of the past

intruding upon me 

the intrusion was me the radiant baby aging body

the radiant baby aging body is not starving 

or dead they are not the obstacle but the energy 

to activate shards into an afterlife Rachel Levitsky

as a radiant aging baby poet 

flattering kings in public put the desk body 

on a donkey and lead them out of the village 

put a censer in their hand and they will

swing it hoof by hoof to the holy pension grail 

mirage far far away from the hospital 

far far away from the capital 

toward the parthenon of parthenogenesis

collecting their genetic material

in air sacs in their bones 

thus the young crone was born 

*

awoke in nightmare

of friends speaking to me

in the voice of administration

on behalf of the apparatus

to the tune of all safe and sound 

in higher lullaby 

the values are real 

and they hoped I would align

it was all perfectly friendly

but the cow body energy was on me 

as I did not cut it free before bed

so much time with my hand on

their rounds that I could never

square with them as protein 

being crone in the barn 

stuffing emotional go-bags

with winter cow dust

to fuel our secret lives 

where all life has to be secret  

I walked out of the barn more impossible

unable to compel anyone to care

smelling raw milky and of the finest hay 

turned into the healthiest shit 

my outer soles full of it