A Theory of Evolution

The rules of the Old Testament are no longer in play;

The you-break-it, you-buy-it policy no longer applies to my hymen.

If you steal me and destroy me, turn me into something unsellable,

you are no longer required to pay for me in full

and keep me in your home as a reminder of what you did wrong.

No, today we know better,

We have evolved,

We are enlightened,

We are no longer barbarians,

I am no longer an object.

Today, if you damage these goods,

I will not be forced to haunt your bed,

I will not be required to lurk in your kitchen,

presiding over your every meal,

cleaning your bathroom with bleach,

fixing your coffee with extra cream,

and never ever the other way around.

Today, you will not have your hands cut off for touching 
that which does not belong to you,

You will not be expected to pay my family a fee

for ruining their only daughter.

No, today were are enlightened.

Today we know better.

Today I will not rip my dress and beat my chest

to signify that I have been sullied,

if I did that strangers would only stop

to stare or shoot me sidelong sultry glances.

Today I am instructed to shout “FIRE!”

if I want people to come running;

I am encouraged to carry a pistol in my purse

because guns are the great equalizer,

unless of course you find yourself half-conscious

on the floor of a family friend’s hotel room,

but nevermind that.

No, today we are evolved.

We are no longer barbarians.

Today I am no man’s property,

Today I am liberated, free,

I am equal, they tell me.

Now that we know better,

Now that we have evolved.

And so my rapists still have their limbs in tact,

They still have their hands, their fingers, all their toes.

They have never been beaten, whipped, flogged, nor stoned.

They bear no scars, no marks impressed upon their flesh.

They have not had to pay in gold for the damage they inflicted upon me

Because I am human now, no longer an object with a price.

I no longer belong to my father, I am no longer an item of value.

I am just a girl who wanted to have a good time,

who was not suspicious enough of a gentleman’s kindness.

We are enlightened now.

I am just a girl, a warm bag of flesh not belonging to anyone; 
there were no insurance policies taken out on my safety.

Now we know better.

I am just a girl who is no longer welcome in her boyfriend’s bed because of her bad judgment.

I am no man’s property.

I am just a girl who will be paying for her own PAP smear and pregnancy test.

I am liberated, free.

I am just a girl being likened to a whore in a court of law.

I am equal, they tell me.

I am just a girl who was not lucky enough to have her insides swabbed

in time to collect DNA.

Now we have evolved.

I am just a girl whose case was made public and then thrown out 
due to lack of evidence that I wasn’t asking for it.

Because I am a human now, no longer an object.

I am a human with the power to give my consent.

And we are enlightened now, no longer barbarians.

Today we are liberated, we are equal,

Everyone enjoys the same freedoms:

My rapists walk free,

and so do I, or so they tell me.

            

The Lightning Rod Effect

We cannot watch the weather report

without arguing over

the likelihood of lightning

striking in the same place twice

You will tell me that once a girl

is thunderstruck

there is some invisible

seal impressed upon her skull,

making her a walking target

for future storms,

like the clouds can tell

by the way she

moves and speaks and dresses

that she’s an easy target

I will ask you what about

all of the girls who never report

having been hit,

all the girls who keep their

victimization locked up

in the backs of their minds,

all the girls who stop

going out when it rains,

all the girls who curl up

with the lights on

too afraid of lightning to ever

leave their beds again,

all the girls who are struck

once and only once

because that’s all it takes

We cannot go outside

without wondering if tonight

might be the night the sky

decides to swallow us up

and spit us out

so that by morning
we won't be the same

The Spring 2013 edition of From the Depths is out!

I hold in my hands the first magazine to publish my work. (College publications excluded, not that those aren't cool.)

It's available here in digital and print form:
http://www.hauntedwaterspress.com/Home.html

Estate Sale

For sale

two red bicycles barely used

but bought with romantic

excursions and summer

picnics in mind,

hand-me-down sweaters

worn to tatters

broken in with embraces,

the knowledge that she

hates artificial cherry

flavoring but loves

the fruit itself,

six poems written in pencil

on sticky notes and saved

in a desk drawer,

the memory of salt

and apricot the scent of

her unwashed hair,

three photo albums

worth of feeling,

the knowledge that she

cannot sleep without

the security of a locked door,

a distant memory of

that time we drove all night

and I said the air

tasted like metal

but she said it was

more like blood,

boxes upon boxes of dead

dried flowers mostly daisies,

the fact that she liked

daisies best of all,

Everything must go

eden

she is peach

I am plum

I am learning

to grasp the subtle

differences in the anatomy

of apples and oranges

I am learning

how devouring

a pear can feel

like a sex act

when putting

a breast of chicken

between your teeth

can feel like treason

I am learning

how the fig felt

when she was skinned

alive forbidden eaten

by a pair of blushing

garden tourists

she is peach

I am plum

He told me I could call him Ryan

I never thought it would happen to me

he has a pinched pale face he wears glasses

I heard he’s a joke that no one laughs at

he never told me what his last name was

he has a pinched pale face he wears glasses

now rape and I are on a first name basis

he never told me what his last name was

I could pick him out of a lineup but I won’t

now rape and I are on a first name basis

I heard he’s a joke that no one laughs at

I could pick him out of a lineup but I won’t

I never thought it would happen to me

Dead Meat

Out of ideas for improvement, 


She turned to self-destruction, 


She poured her dinner down the drain,


Calling it a plan for reduction

She ran four times around the block,


Swallowed capsules thick and red,


She thought of having lunch


But chewed some candle wax instead



She gazed into the mirror


And painted up her skin


Threw on her shortest mini skirt,


And said, "Let the games begin."

(I wrote this when I was 16. Woohoo teenage angst!)

whipped cream

start by taking off

the leather silver-studded

collar, cut it into bite-sized

chunks and eat it atop vanilla

ice cream, adding whipped

topping to taste, next unlace

the corset, which,

if she’s a good girl,

is currently cutting off

eighty-percent of her air supply,

then pull back,

it is essential to

let her breathe before you

let even a drop of her

touch your tongue,

last peal the boots

slowly from her sweating

thighs, allowing your mouth

to water appropriately

before finally allowing

yourself to feast

Pink Cloud

You do not want to know

the ways in which I am not

your Daisy Buchanan

You do not want to hear

how I permanent pressed

this emotional affair

instead of letting it drift

in swathes of technicolor

silk and cotton to the

hardwood of your floors

as I giggled to myself

You do not want to hear

how I wanted you to

wreck my marriage like

I wrecked your convertible

how my canary-colored vows

would have sounded

as they crumpled

beneath the weight of

your cool white hands

You do not want to hear

how I found you face down

floating in the pool and

put a knife to my throat

hoping to slit myself a set

of gills and let myself sink

beneath your unfeeling body

just to feel the weight

of you one final time

Les bons temps rouler

a torn tutu stuffed

into a trashcan

which has tipped over

and sent garbage sailing

across the sidewalk

my boot gets caught

in the cigarette burn

of the tulle causing

the abandoned skirt

to drag from my heel

trailing behind me

like a drunken tourist

in search of a mate
and my life moves
like a poem in action

The Fifth

You ask me if I can claim responsibility

For the fifth of fermented chocolate milk

Found rotting in the bottom of his closet

You ask me if it was I who took scissors

To every scrap of red fabric I could get my hands on

And sewed scarlet A’s to each outfit he owned

You ask me if I have an alibi for the fifth of October

When his mattress was found frying on the fire escape

Charred black and speckled with animal excrement

You ask me if it’s true the I was the one to blame

For the strands of pink hair stuck to his sheets

Left for his poor wife to pluck from her pillowcase

You ask me if I am the type who likes it rough

The kind who carries a pair of handcuffs in her purse

Should she happen to meet the right kind of guy

You ask me if it is true that I was begging for

The rug-burned back and blue-tinged bruises and broken nose

That he so generously bestowed upon me

You ask me if I’m a flirty sort of drunk and wasn’t I

On my fifth vodka tonic the night I first agreed

To slip into the passenger seat of his Prius

You ask me what I was thinking heading over

To his place in a dress like that at night all alone

If I wasn’t on birth control and wasn’t looking for trouble

Well, Officer, in my defense, all I can do is plead the fifth

Questions for the Girl in the Fur Coat

Is your blood still liquid Valium putting the local vampires to sleep?
Is your heart still made of candy canes and baby shark teeth?
Are you still creating new cuts just to pick off the scabs?
Are you still flooding hotel bathrooms and napping in cabs?
How do your matches and your snowballs and your Vivance go?
How are your handgun and your fake blood and your one-girl stage shows?
Are you still stealing silverware from the restaurants downtown?
Are you still tearing out your hair in expensive ball gowns?
Is your skin still for sale at all the local thrift stores?
Is your tongue still two parts electric eel one part crack whore?
What color is your hair and which mask do you wear tonight?

Recipe for Brazen St. Louis-style Shewolf with Wine Sauce

Ingredients:

*               Three vanilla-scented candles

*               Lack of shame

*               Gray paint

*               2 lbs. morality

*               Claws like kitchen knives

*               Teeth yanked from the mouth of a vampire at rest

*               3 pints virgin blood

*               Full moon

*               Small bottle of lighter fluid

*               Matches

*               Franziafranziafranzia

*               Empty lipstick tubes

*               Mason jar

*               An arsenal of Siouxie Sioux songs

*               Cinnamon (optional)

     Instructions: 

1.  Finely chop morality and place in frying pan heated to medium-high.
2. Stir in gray paint. Reduce heat to low once morality is completely coated and cover. Let simmer for 20 minutes and then place in refrigerator.
3. Heat virgin blood in microwave for five minutes or until bubbling. Set aside.
4. Crush teeth, claws, and lack of shame into fine powder, adding cinnamon to taste.
5.  Combine hot virgin blood with powder while humming any Joan Jett song.
6.  Cover mixture and let sit overnight or until congealed.
7.  Pour chilled gray morality over congealed virgin’s blood mixture while three scented candles burn and Siouxie Sioux songs play.
8.  Store mixture in refrigerator.
9.  On full moon, remove mixture and mash with bare hands until soft.
10.  Force mixture into empty lipstick tubes. Paint your lips with it. Coat your eyelids. Cover your cheek-bones warrior-princess-style.
11. Chug Franzia from a Mason jar until your insides feel warm and your limbs feels loose.
12. Using matches and lighter fluid, set fire to your feet and dance until the flame climbs and grabs your hair and you can’t feel your legs.
13. Wait.

Lynne Lee, Effervescing

You are a sweet shame, the scent of a full bottle of champagne foaming out of control onto the carpet and spilling down your guests' chests on New Year's Eve

You are the sudden pop of the cork that scars the girl in gray dress pants who has never so much as sipped on a glass of wine

You are colder than you're meant to be and saturating my bodice, infecting me with sticky goose bumps, as I sing into a broken bottle

You are the taste of one hundred electric sugar bubbles Harlem shaking on my tongue 'til they lose their shoes and get too blitzed to find them

You are the slight stain on my new party dress, gone unnoticed 'til the next morning, when I redress and quietly exit your bedroom

that night we tried to pay for our prosecco with food stamps

privilege wears a gray tuxedo
with crocodile-skin dress shoes
he showed up in a carriage
pulled by six-dollar-an-hour slaves
keeps his shoes shiny with their sweat
he has never been stared at
like he might steal something
excluding juicy white still-beating hearts
privilege dances the foxtrot
the tango the cha-cha slide
but he never asks us to dance
because we do not own heels
and were never invited to the ball
we were not aware there was one

A prayer for the wild of heart that are kept in cages

Pretty please sister saint pour out

All of your profound and allow me

To lap it up off the dirty wet ground

Like the grateful beast that I am

O great patron saint of poison

Please slip me a mickey beneath

The brass bars of this cold coop

So that I can finally fall to my knees

Over something worth feeling

Culling Song

       I want you

to burn down all your Golden Gate bridges with napalm

       I want you

to force your body to form wings and gills and scales and claws

       I want you

to cut your own umbilical cord with a pair of rusty gardening shears
       I want you

to take a blowtorch to your life and weld it into something worth holding

       I want you

to allow yourself to be blown into glass and then smashed against the sidewalk
       I want you

to learn hands-on how to dismantle a neutron bomb strapped to your own chest

       I want you

                                                                                          to take my hand and then

       I want you

                                                                                            to kiss me like you mean it

Enchantment for gathering no moss

when you stop moving

do your damnedest not to attract dust bunnies,

what you need is an army of grimy jackrabbits

to kick you out of your comfort zone

if you ever stop feeling hungry

what you need to do is convince a sixty-inch parasite

to invade your insides imperial england-style

and teach you what it really means to crave

when you start to doze

you need your life to be viciously shaken awake—

the way you’d shake a lover with a head injury

                                     who is slipping out of consciousness

Dreams in which the dreamer drowns

Your entire life’s work

could quite easily be digested

without the use of antacids

The future

could very well swallow you up

without even chewing you

You

could quite possibly be swimming naked

through destiny’s stomach acid

as we speak

the etiology of senescence

Judy
bit into her
first ladyfinger and
turned gray as the crumbs dissolved on
her tongue

Judy
technicolored
her ash hair unaware
that the dye would stain her skin
with creases

Judy
saturated
her face with lotions meant
to iron out the wrinkles and
went blind

Judy
fixed her eyes with
laser beams not knowing
that laser radiation rusts
muscles

Judy
bit into her
last ladyfinger and
turned cold as the crumbs dissolved on
her tongue

An Ashtray of Apologies Emptied into a Litany

A beta fish floating belly up like a ballet dancer, fins unfurled like silk scarves do you forgive me now

My father shouting because his porridge was too cold and momma’s was too hot do you forgive me now

Not nearly enough applause for the little girl in drag singing Danny’s parts in Grease do you forgive me now

Most people will eat your heart raw rather than go without dinner do you forgive me now

It is impossible to let go of a girl who smells like white paint do you forgive me now

I am a fifth-grader picking out paper Valentines at the drug store for my sweetheart do you forgive me now

Your nonchalance when you told me she likes your hair in braids do you forgive me now

Your mouth when you called yourself a starving artist do you forgive me now

Your body when I eventually confessed that you were crushing me do you forgive me now

I may never know what it feels like to compose the Great American Tweet do you forgive me now

I may never know what the tulips in Holland in springtime look like do you forgive me now

Your face might always be the last thing that I see before I fall asleep do you forgive me now

An existence finally free of girls who perpetually stink of appletini do you forgive me now

My writing desk splattered with blood and sticky black paint do you forgive me now

Ten billion unheard words I wrote all with one swirl of a girl in mind do you forgive me now

Your trust in girls with horn-rimmed glasses and an affinity for Ayn Rand do you forgive me now

The ramshackle confidence of adult children who resemble fifties superheroes do you forgive me now

My own two feet now so calloused that they click like coconuts against hardwood do you forgive me now

That time that I used Sylvia Plath’s suicide note to deride a fellow storyteller do you forgive me now

Finding a typed letter on the kitchen counter requesting my departure do you forgive me now

The ghost of our compulsive romance walking from bedroom to bedroom do you forgive me now

Reading the Lotus Sutra in a language that may or may not be Japanese do you forgive me now

Digging my fingernails into the back of my neck until I feel blood do you forgive me now

Walking until I don’t recognize my body and I can’t recall where I’ve been do you forgive me now

A mermaid who will learn to breathe underwater when you cry your oceans do you forgive me now

The significance of the Hebrew alphabet and Edward Teller and your birthday do you forgive me now

Respect for anyone volunteering to catalogue their insides for a bunch of strangers do you forgive me now

Making money felt more practical than making a living do you forgive me now

Tonight ten thousand people procreate because kids seem like the next step do you forgive me now

No matter how many poems I write my feelings will be delivered stillborn do you forgive me now

Landlubber

Getting onto the ship of a stranger strung out on something and arriving at my destination unscathed
Losing consciousness, being hoisted onto a sweat-soaked sailor's back, sucking ice from his wife's glass
Two albatross: the one with the crumpled wing clinging to the strong one, I watch them brave the waves

When sewing the sails I could not help but want to stitch her a new skin out of silk so that she'd feel less insecure about her scars
I cannot taste saltwater without being reminded of how much I'd like to suck the sin out of her, get a mouthful of what gets her off,
The slapping of the sea more than anything makes me want to chain her to my bedpost until I've convinced her to be my scoundrel

I sent her a slew of messages floating in half-shattered bottles dripping with vodka and vitriol
I swallowed my sorry words with some skull and cross bones pills and a bottle of port
I thought I'd let the wine breathe once it was in my bloodstream—I uncorked my veins and out it came

In the name of love I swam out to see if the wanting really would come in waves and it did
She has love to thank for the day that I washed up on her shore, despite my better judgment,
And it is only out of love for her that I do not submit to her siren song and drift back to her today

Mother Goose on a Bad Day

the dish and the spoon absconded to sunny Cancun
the dish realized that the spoon was a two-bit floozy
the spoon was melted down and made into jewelry

the little dog could not stop laughing at other's misfortune
a dish with a chip on his shoulder wanted to make something of it
the little dog learned to mind his own goddamn business

the cow lost ten pounds and backflipped over the moon
the moon caught the cow and gave her a tender kiss
the cow became a spokeswoman for a frozen yogurt company

the cat played the fiddle until her paws were raw
a talent scout from California saw and made her famous
the cat's career was ruined by an unfortunate catnip addiction

Clairvoyance at 5 o’clock on a Friday

What happened at the lost colony of Roanoke?

The sounds of metallic balloons popping beneath high-heeled shoes, a blue parakeet dying of hypothermia, a grown woman subsisting on candy and wine

When Grandma dies what will things be like?

Riding a mint-colored bicycle with your white hair in a long braid down your back, carefree

How does it feel to lose a limb?

Whiskey, chocolate ice cream, one crying jag for every two weeks you wanted to kiss her

What will be happening the moment I meet my soulmate?

Your ex-girlfriend hidden beneath your bedspread, butterfly knife in hand

What does it take to be a good mother?

Spit, all your shredded letters, all of my favorite bedding, feather pillows, zip ties, string, an allegedly endless supply of love

How do you deal with the pain that accompanies your premonitions?

Slicing off toes to fit into someone else’s shoes, poisoning a girl you should be praying for, absconding with her bundle of joy because she has forgotten you

At what point should we stop drinking?

Maybe it would be easier if we had arms like Michelle Obama, arms better suited for holding