Steph Bruzon

that might work for a woman like me, 
with a hole where my hole should be. 

my matrix loves scrutiny is full of scarcity keeps me 
in need 
in need 
in need

thirty-minute hypnosis to keep asleep 
until I’ve been splayed and shot. 

poor 
overheated 
star
conjures city conjures 
mesh
skin crashing, crashing, 
I’ll soon be where you are 

to crawl
in 
through 
your 
back door—
baked you a pie of my lineage, 
but you 
want
more.

and why am I surprised? 

all of my exhibitions do nothing but tease,
not who I am 
but who I am to 
please
stay 
until you feel it. 

your ammonia diaphoresis
gives me reason for pause. 

please 
learn how to take my shirt off, 
even if all you find underneath is flesh, all the flesh there is to get through, 
and get through, 
even if you never arrive. 

let’s travel, astral,
I’ll drive—

from my silk web,
fetal position, hands in prayer position under my head 
to watch love unravel from my fist
like grief, 
uncurable and unsaid. 

for only dark
do I unpack.

if I killed myself, the band might do better 

my halo is a self-imposed guillotine, as guilty as the dream that brought me here and I could be the Jim of the South! c’mon baby light ME on fire baby spare me your mouth

it couldn’t get any better.

(we couldn’t be more destined to destroy it together) 

and you couldn’t get much higher.

(couldn’t be more apt to dilute me with desire) 

well, it’ll all be forgotten–
even what you want. 

and what I want? 

only the dark
to unpack.

to keep confessing
while she crawls to me 
with last night’s dream caught in her hair
to tell me that everything was blue 
and I was there. 
how she took me in, 
though so little of what I think or say is true, 
fear plated in my delay, I sing the all men stray blues and 
pray 
that
I
do 
not 
slip 
away
pray 
that
you
do 
not
see 
me
now
when
you are already too late.

I travel, astral—
don’t know how to make it back.
the wrong arms are chains;
I’ll have to wring the dirty water from our brains—
love, a thing to be dealt with and 
won’t work for a woman like me
cuts a hole through her poetry so that you might see her
gut full of flickering filaments 
dress me at night—
the intentions you saw as inventions of darkness 
I eat the light feed the light eat the light 
starve 

no light can fill me like you.

the way you sit smitten by your loneliness, stricken by your expensive hunger, while mine is given free—we are 
place holders the poem 
is travel, astral—
no destination for a woman like me—
the poem holds—no place I haven’t left haven’t left haven’t left— 
no place I won’t go. 

and what it is to be free:
the entire world spins for me 
I go by my surname 
I’m everything you claimed I am 
and more

I the I the I the if I 
were you I’d 
close that door.

no place can hold a woman like me—no poem can tuck my nose in, breathe—I still haven’t left I haven’t left haven’t left 
you 
see—
but a woman like me has no place no place 
and because she has no place, 

there is nothing she can’t leave.