Titania

i. childhood

Lisa,

I would like to sleep

             amidst the ballooning animals

of a forest. a sweet, hollow donkey

        should be my pillow.

​

I am alone in the house

             with my sleeping dog,      laying

in my parents’ bed with the          sensual

             smell of orange

                          blossoms and concrete

against the nerves in my hair. a swelling  heavy

scent. a city steeped in darjeeling–

             that’s lisa frank in a field of flowers.

​

I pray with the back end of a comb in my mouth

every night for your return. red beans

             and homemade jelly, baby,

             in a street filled with camels.

                          Lisa, I pray with the back end of a comb

                          in my mouth that

that’s lisa frank in a field of flowers.

​

ii. jenny

my naked, lurid

             backside. jenny likes

      this transient skin, Lisa,

and

​

iii. dreaming of O.

I lost a necklace of baby

             teeth. in the airport–       a couple

with the same limp looked

             so suspicious

to me. their son dogging after them

             in a wheelchair. . .  without my gent-

-le fairy,

                          my hair wakes up warmly

damp

             to brunch. Lisa,  give

                  me Casey. Give me Casey. . .

​

             an illusion. a soft and able-bodied aphid

atop a field of lotus heads, porous

             like the delicate

        legs of a garden hose.

she sprayed their slender pear bodies

             into a sheer and disappearing

        prism. Lisa in the summer,  running

alongside Hunter

              and Forrest.     Lisa.

                                        Lisa.

                                        Lisa.

Lisa shining when the light

     SHIFTS in the lazy child-

       hood shed. Caddie dies

                            a thousand

  times. headless Barbie still,

                                  smiling.

                a Sticker Sheet lurid in the sun.