Waiting for my man.

Maybe I should go away and disappear.
Dig a wet hole in the shady woods and place myself in it.

Strip down to my skin and lean my bare scapula
against the earthen tub of clay I've made.
Bury my self deep,
to leech all the sorrows tuggin' at me

away.

Swansongs from the wood peckers

and eerie crooning
of Jeff Buckley
whispering through the Sequoia,
or just in my mind.

Warm late morning sunlight

curling at the tips of the grass.
The circumference of the earth at eye level

from a hole

just

below

it.

Peering at the pill bugs, them ignoring me.
Imagining each one leading the second line

I hear trumpeting in my head.

Drag the moist chunks of earth back on top of me.
Weigh myself down. Hold me in place. Pile the ferns in a cluster
of regal green crowns down the length of my subterranean torso.
Prop my head with the last bits of lichen and moss as a shiver
slithers through my belly.

Slit my wrists and feel the slow leavening
of heat pooling at my elbows.
Taste of iron from dirt

and

taste of iron from blood.

Pulsing heart.
Like upside down in the pool.

Inhaled water filling my nose.

The thump-thump comes a knocking.

Barely able to shove the razor blade into the upturned soil,
I imagine what it will look like,

rusted from the rains

next to the pile of bones I have left behind.