"Folklore of the Self" explores trauma in reverse-chronological order, delving into the past as constructed narrative.

Folklore of the Self

"should I write them/ out of the privacy of death"

Three Poems: In the Veins; American Ophelia; Semaphore

"...softness, a dream i cannot reach. her/ touch lingers./ it sings through inexperience and
the haze of hospital drugs:/ it traces my outline, makes me/ more than my post-surgery self..."

Two Poems: After My Appendectomy, I Think of Amber Benson's Role in Buffy; Afterimage

"to sing a song of our own, unlike that of birds or honey..."

What Is History If Not an Endlessly Fragmented Archive

"doomed: a word like the toll of a bell, beckoning/ towards death. blue marl clay shrink-swell soil/ in their mouths, under nails, clod-handfuls in fists/ which push whitely toward the air..."

1925

"the warbling spring slopes down to touch your shoulder/
where blouse slips below socket & you remember/
the way sun was a kind of melancholy hope in those days"

Anachronisms (Three Poems)

"I have charmed/ the moon/ the ribbed bottom,/ strewed with dark/ summer nights"

My Beloved Addresses Me with One Last Pastoral

"the crimp of pain/ behind my eyes, migraine/ efflorescing// like the sudden exuberance of blooms/ on the bradford pear, cheaply/ beloved of blowflies"

Fairland Street

" not like her fur, a smooth enticement / but like a peach ripening / in the summer sun "

Piece of Me

"she was never so tender/ as when caring for plants, preferred their solemn/ quiet to a disorderly horde of children."

Creekside House

"Her cats cry as her body becomes ash, their tears/ pooling, putting her out too late: in the tinted picture/ the flames extend from her back, incendiary wings."

Die Gar Traurige

"How full you are of spent loveliness,/ like a fox pelt flattened to the road, white-tipped/ tail wafting with the passing of each car."

Reading Plath in Richmond

"i wish i could say it was just summer
/ but your fury is familiar, was once/ mine, years ago, a girl/ feeling her first heatwave press/ its power through her blood"

Bertha in the Mirror

"...there is nothing unusual about this, except that one line in particular is a visceral squeeze, a tightening of the fingers of truth around my gut"

Once More, But Quieter

"my body, folding in on itself, a fetal fractal / the imagined child / blooming from my nether-
-self"

At 16, I Experience My First Pregnancy Scare

"...turning the air/ golden-green, the stain of spring/ upon the slowly turning world."

The Woods in April

"imperfect prey, my chest squeezes in the tight fist/ of fear whenever someone is displeased—"

The Phylogeny of Fear

"& then they bloom, beautiful & terrible,/ like blood in a basin: the azaleas/ red as a yanked tooth." 

The Greenskeeper

"This spring I should celebrate— / warm sun-burnished hair, cherries/ in full-blown flower, tenderness/ of new leaves— undoes me."


Late May

"...still, you are/ the shape of absence, a hole in the paper/ of our joint lives, curling into yourself."

Pinhole Image

"my body remembers yours: how cruelly/ you delved in me, without question,/ gouging the elm roots of my lungs,"

mmayer5

Books

Selected work