The Dead Of Night.

I'm Goody. This is where my poetry lives.

[intempesta-nox]

DON'T RUIN IT BY SAYING IT. Speak plain, heartsong. Tell me I'm a crime scene, equal parts flickering halogen and yellow ticker tape. Flashbulb, arterial spray, an unholy mess of gore and viscera. The union of awkward angle and rigor mortis. If you have to say anything at all, say 'forensic countermeasure' like you mean it — like the street lights are on and you're calling me home. While you're at it, say 'Lividity.' Say 'Time of death, all four stages of autolysis in slow motion, and an unsigned autopsy report.' Say, "Sugar, you're the backseat of a hearse on prom night." I'm not a doctor but they tell me the fastest way to the heart is between the ribs, so after that it's anything you want, angel. Anything. Kill me slowly. Murder me in cold blood with all the sweet-breathed intimacy of a garrote after drinks and dessert. Desecrate my final resting, use my tombstone as a pillow and the darkly scented air as a blanket — hell, cut out my tongue, but promise to hold yours. Ruin me for all I care, hold my still beating heart in your palm and crush it to sweetbread and dust, just don't give it a name. Don't call it love. I don't believe in death sentences.

"VI," from Hallucination by Goodbody Grieving

[intempesta-nox]

IT'S DAWN AND SOMEONE IS CALLING YOUR NAME. Not the sun, already risen and turning away in shame, not the birds singing in the bath, not the sweepers yawning across the city, but
this man chained next to you. 
This man with 
his 
forgettable milk carton face, 
his 
broken hinges, 
his 
hair like wet grass -
this man who watched you drowning in your dreams and breathes you into wakefulness. 
This man who loves you. He 
has stories carved into 
his 
wrists, written in the ink of dragonflies 
he 
caught and domesticated
and killed. 
Spelled out plain, simple,
the way it should be. 
Your mother said to drink 
him 
in until you’re sick with 
his 
smell, to drain 
him 
of everything worthwhile before 
he 
can escape – 
they always do, she says, but this man is not your father. Say it with me. This man is not your father:
Although you are inherently 
his, 
he 
does not treat you like property. 
He 
will not lease you to pay the rent, 
he 
will not call you by another name of 
his 
choosing,
he 
will not sell you to the highest bidder.
He 
will till the land and grow you a new Eden instead. You should know this by now. You’ve had a long time to study, child, and you’re well versed in 
him: 
the legend of the glass-bottom heart, a firsthand account of wrongs undone, 
his 
mother’s recipe for magnolia wine, and you know 
a l l 
his demons by name. You dream of pulling out your teeth 
one 
by 
one. Bloodied and slurring, you call upon the gods of street corner and gutter muck: One tells you about the false prophets hiding in the life between street lights, waiting with their hands full of ceasefire, 
knowing that you are filled with gasoline and every new lover is a lit match. Of course, the other comes:
smelling of snuffed candles and white ravens, whistling a song in Kentucky minor, keeping time with the rattle of chains holding her to the earth, exhaling steam into the crook of your elbow. she 
begins by revealing herself, removing the mask of steel and sinew until we are staring right down into the bone. 
“A lucrative business venture, making your home inside the husks of deadish things like a widow, a mother’s love, a man who just realized he will work the soil until he’s buried deep down in it - and 
he,
child?
he 
is a hole 
you will keep digging for yourself.
when 
he 
is six feet under you and your shovel will sink down to meet the pine box and pry the lid from it, wake 
him 
from 
his 
pricked finger and the next hundred years of embalmed sleep just to listen to 
him 
speak to the worms.”

“The Dead Lovers Society,” from ATROCITY KITSCH by Goodbody Grieving

[intempesta-nox]

SAY IT WITH FLOWERS. Chloris sets up a modest booth of white pine in the southernmost corner of the parking lot. Spring has come like the declaration of war, gory and gorgeous, and she has freshly picked flowers for sale. Arterial sprays of roses, hydrangea, dahlia, and yarrow. Funereal sprays of mint and rue and rosemary. The colors gushing. A pastel bloodbath. A cacophony of jewel tones. Nature's violent return to form.  A bouquet for Hera, poor Hera, who has yet to learn of her husband's latest indiscretion. Roses, yellow ones, for infidelity. Bittersweet, too, because the truth usually is. Pink larkspur, fickleness, because the lightning god who killed his own parents is never anything else. Cumin ground into the soil, a silent prayer for no more nymphs or naiads or lesser deities tracking their dirt onto her clean hearth. Chloris considers her customer and tugs in joyful marjoram as an afterthought.  After that, it's business as usual. A bushel of orange lilies for Styx to line her river with, glaring and hateful. A statement piece. A single narcissus to lay on Echo's empty grave. For Artemis, edelweiss and snapdragons. Gladiolas wound into crowns for Enyo and Eris, nasturtium woven into victory wreaths and laid at Athena's bare feet. All of them fresh from battle and steeped in blood. Coriander for Medusa, who's been avoiding mirrors again. Lethe, forget-me-nots. She never remembers to pick them up.

"HISTORIANS ARE GOSSIPS WHO TEASE THE DEAD: THE FLORIST," from Atrocity Kitsch by G. Grieving

[intempesta-nox]

DON'T LOOK DOWN. Ocypete is there, on the roof of the building again, contemplating the practical mechanics of flight versus the realities of falling, of shattered vertebra. She imagines the sound her flesh will make when it meets the asphalt, now that it's pockmarked and less burdened with feathers to dampen the impact. She's almost done molting now - at least, that's what the doctors say. Soon she'll be just another flightless bird devoid of color, average as the ostrich, plucked dull as a chicken due for slaughter. Her sisters mean to coax her down as they did last time and the time before that, but she's going to jump this time, she really is. Celaeno calls birdsong up to her as duty requires, but mostly she's a hollow-boned creature with a mind of scrap metal, engine oil. Her mouth is moving, sure, dancing all the right steps, but really she's thinking about her drafting table back in their nest. The designs on it. Sheet after sheet of flipbook schematics hypothesizing wind-up birds with spare parts and steam for wings. All she needs is a flightless bird. Alive, ideally, but she isn't picky. You can do a hell of a lot with a bag of bones, enough elbow grease, and a strong head for cybernetics.

"HISTORIANS ARE GOSSIPS WHO TEASE THE DEAD: THE HARPIES" from Atrocity Kitsch by G. Grieving

[intempesta-nox]

WAR MAKES STRANGE BEDFELLOWS. I know you. You and the old wounds around your eyes like sleep bruises, dug deep as trench warfare. They are an intimate compliment to me, wrist deep in the nuclear waste of my own thick blood. You and I and the endless night. Universe locks every door, bars every window, pumps monoxide into the ether and awaits finality, give in, the half-heard thump of dirt hitting the casket lids.   II. Listen: They have told us we are empty shells, but we are hermit crabs carrying all our earthly possessions on our back. There is a difference. Guilt is a singularity with depth and weight, its own shadow on the moon, its own gravitational pull - life is a war against our own gravity and yes, Athena, you will feel it. You know this already. Because you and I, we are properly acquainted with the Kali days of six armed destruction, the world unmade, the rebuild effort on smoldering rubble. Days of bottle and chain, keep swinging, everyone you've ever met a hostage at knife point aiding in your escape. The Lethe days where the details are blurred and intangible and perhaps incorrect, overdrawn, but for the swarm of bees in your belly.   III.  If you ask me to I will tell the bees, death drowsied and stingerless, that they remember the shape of the hive correctly. That their queen is trapped in honey and quicksand and maybe sinking, but sovereign all the same. You are sovereign all the same. Even on the nights you prove that wolves and girls are born of the same moon, to the same sharp teeth. It's okay to gnash them every so often. Bear them to the world. Tenderize flesh. Shift your bones into a new shape and howl your new name like to wake the dead. When you wake in the morning just the picture of the original girl with those sleep bruises around your eyes like old wounds, your pack will stand ready with cucumber round, concealer, freezer chilled spoon, a note excusing you for the day.  IV. They tell me I twitch in my sleep. Mouth words that never make it as far as sound waves. Sometimes, the only proof that the dreams were real once is the claw marks on the roof of my mouth. It isn't much different from waking. The blood sticks to everything either way. But you, you are tourniquet and butterfly bandage, bathtub gin to sterilize the wound. The controlled demolition of my heartbeat is no match for your flood water. The days of Sisyphus and his stone are here, me climbing and backsliding on this hill for the rest of time, but you are here with snow chains for hands and a sturdy spine, shouldering the weight beside me. The days of Prometheus, the gentle thief, the vultures, septicemia and slow bleed, and here you are still in manacles forged in the same heat. We are a matching set. This is what it is to be weaponized, to put the gun in the bedside table when the sun has set. This is what it is to live with the safety on.   V. You and I, the bruise and the open wound. The healing processed. This is not the end.

"The Healing Process(ed)," from Atrocity Kitsch by G. Grieving

[intempesta-nox]

I AM ADDICTED TO YOUR SMALL KINDNESSES. The witch king in his candied house, breadcrumbs on his tongue, he calls me Gretel. The invitation, flanked on either side by a touch of dimple: Come, he says. Come out of the rain. Leave the wind and storm on my doorstep. Come dry your hair, come lay your glittering skin beside the fire and stay until the last puff of steam has risen from your crooked spine. Come heat your blood beneath my hands, babygirl. You have to understand, I tell him, mine is a language of blood. Translation to potable water is slow, dexterity a requisite and yes, the batch usually ends up poisoned. He rolls his two sturdy shoulders, steps into the light, calls me Aurora. Rest your bones awhile, he says, tucking the spindle away on the highest shelf. Rest, I'll be here when you wake. When I do it is a hundred years later and to empty air, the gentle impression of body in cushion, water running in the kitchen. Water rings on the coffee table. He is long gone, buried with his promise in a ring of lilacs beyond the bramble bush, but the inside of my left thigh remembers the warmth of his hand. The fingerprints he left behind as a trail of breadcrumbs to mark his way home. I will let no birds devour them.

"FLOWER ARRANGEMENTS FOR SELF EXPRESSION IN THE VICTORIAN ERA: Lilac," from Atrocity Kitsch by G. Grieving

[intempesta-nox]

HE LOVES ME. He loves me, he loves me not, he lo- He loves the way my organs look snow angeled on the asphalt. He loves my road kill. He loves my blood spattered on the grille, his foot on the gas pedal, the tire treads on my pride. The hole in my sternum, the still-beating heart, the neat cross stitching of his name on the left ventricle pulsing slower and slower, all that gush in his stainless steel palms. He loves the way I stain, lives to bleach the bathtub after every failed attempt on my life. Loves my head under the water, that scream trapped in an air bubble. The intimacy of popping it. He loves my young divorceé breakfast highball, the clink of ice in glass, the sunlight catching the stolen hunk of moon rock he asked me to hold onto after the heist, safe and sound on a single unsteady hand. Loves my sickness so much more than my health, loves my where did the time go, my in it for the children, my didn't wanna die alone, my everybody has their problems, my please, my please, my don't go, my please, my I do. He loves my 'til death. He loves the way my mouth curls into a smile the same as an unfolded switching blade, says   "Brother, you first."

"FLOWER ARRANGEMENTS FOR SELF EXPRESSION IN THE VICTORIAN ERA: Nasturtium, Anemone, Rhododendron, and Tuberose," from Atrocity Kitsch by G. Grieving

[intempesta-nox]

CATHARTES Preying on the leftovers of the dead has done nothing for your reputation, so you may as well eat your fill.

"FIELD NOTES ON FEMALE PREDATORS: ON SCAVENGERS AND WORKING SMART, NOT HARD," from Atrocity Kitsch by G. Grieving

[intempesta-nox]

PHOTURIS We regret to remind you that you glow too brightly. Now, nobody is blaming you, but when you shine, death follows. These are the facts. It doesn't matter that you're mimicking countless other glitterbugs before you, the trade tricks handed down from time immemorial. Photinus stole fire. It wasn't his to give. It wasn't yours to weaponize. Be like that cousin of yours, Noctiluca, the one with no mouth. Stop batting your wings at the males of your species and eating them whole.  It's upsetting, really, the orgy of magnesium and enzymes raging in your belly, how they named the process after Lucifer's fall. Remember it was his arrogance, his undeniable incandescence, that undid him. Remember and dim down, beauty. You're attracting attention. You're creating a glare.

"FIELD NOTES ON FEMALE PREDATORS: ON CATCHING LIGHTNING IN A JAR," from Atrocity Kitsch by G. Grieving

[intempesta-nox]

LEPIDOPTERA Sweet, sweet subjugate. You beautiful object. They will study you under glass for centuries, admire the push pins in your major organs as they question the nature of your smile with cold, scientific detachment. You beautiful object. 

"FIELD NOTES ON FEMALE PREDATORS: ON TROPHY WIVES AND CHILD SLAVES," from Atrocity Kitsch by G. Grieving

[intempesta-nox]

MANTODEA Stagmomantinae, the world remembers you for the crime of obeying basic instinct. Genre trope femme fatale with the razor limbs, the unfinished exorcism of your head on a swivel, your stereo vision. They never remember your hands, your triangular head, perpetually bent to prayer. What matters is this - your lovers have all been willing to die to spend a night with you. 

"FIELD NOTES ON FEMALE PREDATORS: ON PRAYING VERSUS PREYING," from Atrocity Kitsch by G. Grieving

[intempesta-nox]

LATRODECTUS Dear Hesperus.  I know you, too. I know you upside down, legs splayed, climbing the walls and watching. Dear Mactans. I know your hundred eyes set too close together, the way they laughed at you in school, how they burn intent through layers of shadow and wall crack and underbed. Dear Mactans - your mother said no one would ever love a girl who wasn't handy with a spool of thread, so you prayed to Arachne for strong legs and a desire to spin, and look at you, weaver. Your belly turned to the world, your greatest works done on your back, how the males flock in whole congregations to get caught up in the worship of your web. No one ever told you how easy it was once you became what the tea leaves predicted. How good the give-in. Dear Variolus, the hourglass is always full.

"FIELD NOTES ON FEMALE PREDATORS: WIDOWS OF ONE KIND OR ANOTHER," from Atrocity Kitsch by G. Grieving

[intempesta-nox]

PANTHERA I know you, Tigris. I know you sitting in your den of lip gloss and broken bottles, your silk robe hastily tied, hair tousled to a bedheaded fever pitch of perfection - waiting. I know you when your meal arrives, eager to die for a cause or railing against sacrifice or in a place altogether past feeling by the time they’re laid to rest on your dirt floor. I know you play with your food. Teeth lick and glisten. No matter how unblemished it comes, there is always flesh left in want of tenderizing, bones left in want of breaking and you, predator, came ready-made with all the tools essential to butchery.

“FIELD NOTES ON FEMALE PREDATORS: THE APEX,” from Atrocity Kitsch by G. Grieving

[intempesta-nox]

Enamored of each other and each too shy to admit it, they did the next best thing: Started a band that very day. She (she being Vigil) played the piano whose sound he now knew like his own heartbeat, a toy piano he recognized in passing, and a violin more scar tissue than f-hole or body. As for himself, Lantom played the accordion that brought her to him, a stand-up bass that kept her there, a set of drums they found in an alley - left in favor of a better and younger lover, no doubt. They called themselves The Bay Harbor Butchers and started out, as all artists in Ceasefire must, busking on the streets of the Art District.   Their particular brand of noise-making would be likened to several incongruous and abstract ideals rather than sorted into the confines of genre: A BANSHEE'S ADVANCE WARNING - THE DEATH OF A DISTANT O'GRADY; A HALE OF GUNFIRE; 9 MISSED CALLS AND A LAST, FRANTIC MESSAGE; A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL; MOONLIGHT AND SALT WATER; A 7-CAR PILEUP; and FOLIE Á DEUX the most common among them.

an excerpt from SAY A PRAYER FOR CALIFORNIA: ALL BABES ARE WOLVES, by G. Grieving

[intempesta-nox]

TAKE ME TO THE PLACE WHERE NOBODY DIES. A ferryman, a toll, fields of asphodel, etcetera. Valhalla ringing, laughter in the deep. A brushing of wings, harpy screech, light, a tunnel. Etcetera, etcetera. This is not a horror story. The blood in your mouth, heart string tea, rose and bruise and marrow spilling red on red on red. Cracks in your sternum collect saltwater, rusted bucket aqueduct, the wells brackish and emptied. Bone dry. This is not a love song. Everywhere, ash. The dead walking. Acid rain. The view from the back porch. Rocking chairs on hardwood, screen door storm song. Wheat growing overhead. This is not a heartland. You'll notice a decided lack of golden harps, the abundance of molted feathers and family members you really hoped wouldn't make it here, the endless creak of stairs where the renovations are ongoing. Gold footprints going up and up and gone. No fruit on the trees, nobody singing. White light like an interrogation. This is not eternity. 

"Mezzanine," from Atrocity Kitsch by G. Grieving

[intempesta-nox]

A LIST OF THINGS HALF FINISHED A photograph with names of the long dead written illegibly on the back, age-browned ink and spider script, crinkled at the edges  with celluloid skin peeling back on the whole damn thing. Roadkill the second before the car hits, headlight eyes, pre-crunch stutter lungs, the almost smash, waiting to become the worst part of someone else's day. The fever dream that wakes you scared and drenched in 70% of yourself, having fallen off your REM cycle and left you with the ghost of skinned knees. The house at the end of the block, skeleton framework laid out against an ocean of sky, foundation crumble, schematics weather-damaged and abandoned.

"A List of Things Half Finished," from Atrocity Kitsch by G. Grieving

[intempesta-nox]

Your headlight eyes and stop traffic lips and fishtail hip sway, these are things they would take from you. Spoils of war. Yes, it is a war. For your gushing heart, your help hands, your birth body and your gold dust touch. For the spark of witch mother magic that you were born to. It is yours by right. Charge fully into battle, Amazon flesh and bleached curve of bone, primal scream in your throat and rising in pitch until it is the only sound. It is the only sound. Bring your bat swing-barbed wire-breakneck bliss. Bare your teeth. Sharpen your claws, you riot of blood and skin. Iron out the details of your spine and stand like the monolith you were born to be.

"Self Extreme," from Atrocity Kitsch by G. Grieving