She comes in the night, wrapped in silver and white and her cool kiss burns my mouth. She is sharp as ice, tongue frozen as the stone path in the garden where the dead utter broken English beneath the layers of snow.

What's past is past, but every moment with you, no matter how slight was liquid ink - a stain on my memory: a cigarette run in the bony winter just before class, a chance meeting that brought rushed, breathy words - that quick exchange that started it all. Then telepathic messages lost in mutual passion for words, a phone call late at night to say I'd meant to kiss you. In between, a flicker elsewhere.  

 I’m looking through the glass at Saks Fifth Avenue, watching middle aged glamour-vixens search for the perfect open-toed, stiletto-heeled torture device and there’s a hole over the big toe of my canvases that I’ve decided adds character.   The whole floor smells like expensive perfume –                             &...

 Cecilia, glitter airbrushed feather, lying skinny and slit-necked you’re the multicolored, adjustable contrast to a natural universe.   Imported from scenic, elastic Montana and so synthetic, your body three-quarter poly-angora.   Threading flowers and butterflies into Chinese characters, you were exposed as the pyramid messenger.   My Garbo in poindexter glasses, peering through the gathered keyhole into the cosmic center, the starlight blink.   Once...

    If the generations between us were peeled back, they would reveal you, younger then, with freckled hands running through foam and water, fragrant heads in silver and chrome basins; all around, women in bubbled, NASA-esque helmets, heat blowing over their curlers, their perms, and the other beauty school students darting about in speckled smocks and plastic gloves, turning flaxen to flame for the divorcees reckoning with their X’s.   Fresh from your mother’s pat...

I’ve been dreaming, O’mother Of smoke-colored girls, Their bare, half-yellow feet Stinging and strutting Over hot coals, while Volcanoes spill ruby red In the distant darkness.   I’ve dreamed of a child, O’sister Dressed in white lace, eyes Closed like a heavy-lidded doll Hands pressed to her chest In a gesture reminiscent Of a bird caught mid-flight, and All her weeping visitors Raining over her bed.   In dreams, O’friend, I wish I could tell you Of th...

 What is that horrible pull of gravity, of skin  away from grace? Why does it weigh so much: wrinkles equal to granite, fat equal to mountains? Who are we besides our faces, which are no more than bone structure and the skin smoothed over the foundation? All this,  to become dust; how can it matter so much? 

is not something they called me on the playground in my pink knee-highs, not what would have occured to them - my tormenters, who couldn't explain how I was different, just that I was. Even in Junior High, I blushed in the locker rooms and shut myself into a stall, worried my secret would spill out somewhere in that cold, metal room. But they made fun  of other things, did not know  the thoughts that kept me awake nights. In high school, when boys pushed me against lockers and bruis...

At 7, I was the girl in ratty sneakers and a Strawberry Shortcake dress listening to records and staring out  my bedroom window to where, below, I could see my sister and her friends: her 14th birthday and lights hung from trees, citronella burned and everyone sang along with Duran Duran on the radio. I, alone in my room, dreamed of having  a best friend, but settled for my doll whose eyes closed instead.   At 14, I pored over books and magazines, dreamed of a day when I'd...

Each culture has one: in Greek,  it's Thanatos; in Arabic, Azrael.  They smile bony grins from old tomes or tarot, often  donning black - robes or spots, and carrying corpses or standing among piles of them, gory  or skeletal.