Two Poems from Decompression

Originally published in Decompression, Issue 6.

“Portrait of a Girl in a Man’s Rainboots” also featured in Or Else they are Trees

Written Onto

You are the color of dust piled
beneath church frescoes when shadows
are more solid than the things they carry.

In the abandoned house,
the flame of a candle closes its tear ducts.

The freezer drips a blood-like substance,
but it is not blood, it is the juice
of pomegranates.

You do not notice and each time you
go to pull out the ice cream,
another stain crosses your breast.

Each month a new line,
new dust, but you no longer
recognize Demeter's script.

It says only "woman"
but even that comfort
has been denied to you.

Portrait of a Girl in a Man’s Rainboots

Nothing has seeped into your skin
even as you were gathering, note by note,
the ocean in your palms.

Back in the slow country,
I took your big, empty boots for a walk
and they felt like boats
being washed ashore in a storm.
It was no longer raining and
I thrashed through the underbrush,

raising my knees into the clouds—
each twig-snap like the sound
of a nail hammered into a cross—
until it grew dark and I reached the point
where twigs end and the sky begins.