Danielle Pafunda

I dwell in the road to the sea everyone travels and dwell in your house preparing to haunt you if I’m not doing much later and dwell on your face and if you don’t aggrieve me I or my daughters might could come back

When you go to the door to the sea god's house also / my house a place I dwelled / guarded
by a seabird who doesn’t stop for pain heats fire rocks and trash dugout drops hots into
your gut a cooked meal that bakes you and tells each blind a holy hide a nightbird
cocks the moon until it's soft shoots / it into you a syringe mouthed glistening jelly moon
potion shot into your coal your / heart like a bubble a songbird stacking sand for notes taking
notes flushed countenance says bird this guy's wreck and mealsome says garbage like a chime that
brings / brings bearings rings all the birds to the yard I won't / go down / when you come
my face guarded door where I keep time I keep time lashed bad daughter and trade her for my
daughter / standing in the ditch by the road to the sea everyone travels I don’t want her to obey
you and I don’t / want her / to obey me I want her like a bad daughter all legs climbing out of
the squabble oven over the crust of a crater bored into earth do not bore my daughter

she will flay you she spools a strip of time the poisoned peel she doesn’t eat it wiser than
I at her age by her age / I / had a husband / had to spit a red mouthful at his guests’ feet my
chores included serving them my unguarded smile and ungirding my hospitality without
enjoying the congress or its session I hid / wore war my knees but not for him lace habit / in
this shaft of time I’m laced in / perma revolution to my daughters to my bad habits in every day
this belief that pain /my greedy hold on time’s meal core slowcore sadcore revolve of flesh that
can’t keep juice turns rugged and greasy / venison double fisting antler and throat

leather game falls back in the sand / if you don’t want to go to the underworld go
underwater and no hot god will fool you going deep out in salt laters where the ribbed
gown sea tides salt stiff white bridal habit / you call out nun call acolyte you call / them
daughters and they turn off their phones I can’t remember how men got my number after
I gave it up on a makeshift altar / altered it / on my knees dull classic but you encounter the
ropes say the grace of each knot / forbid beautiful images line up for record and by the time
their turn’s to come beauty’s convulsions give over to something we don’t recognize

fertile sound of wave that carries wreck on rock irritating your ear where birds wheel
too close by checking you for doneness / done in this / give up

I don't want this for you I wanted to give you sight through a new lens / mine
drilled cut deep absorbing / you bathing unusual visage from the rocks I observe
your flesh / before all birds splintered vessels and rusted shafts / were my face
opening against / your dryfire skin and the refraction of salt infinite crystal patina
auric from any angle we were / in it and I / had my arm out coated in raw jewels
pulsing with favor humming your favorite not too worried who has frankincense
or benzoin out here on the weary hippie road / reserve sage verbena hardy mint
lavenders none longing sticky in your crook / shush

if you don’t want to go to the underworld go out to the desert don’t look / look
like that / look back at me your eyes smoked four nights a crystal sewn deep
in the mountain’s hot thigh I get a beak for a needle and tear out the stitches
what the fuck happened to you I thought you were born I thought we were / on
earth I thought this must be the place but it had a false pedestal through which
time / the holler behind my face guarded by you know guarded

so fucking many winged wheels of fortune bearing each the premonition
of its relic body and maybe / mine / own death and handler thereafter / you
don’t get to die and lie down you get to be ravaged again by the hospital

salt and dirt deep loosed to the murder wind was just feeling up some other / person
put your skin against mine and teach me the true fact of hugging let me know / no show
me how it’s okay to have run the length of the road to the sea and then the length of
your body my arms / restrained against the ground perform for me the embrace so I
don’t break it break against this shaft down this astonishing shaft the swallow time does
it to us each time my daughter calls home a movie she says / sorry, mama / you don’t
get an invitation to the house of the dead exes weeping salt house on the inlet its mouth
a'foam with rocks without falling down a shaft or two / you don’t have to get it yet
you’ll know us forever / we’re ore

You go back to get your holy things when your skin has greater part sun than air and stop touching your bitter friends it's true once married I had to go to the underworld for a really long time after which I came to live above the biotoxic soilcrust but not with you or anyone

Two-shaped ivy-covered two times three times kindred feast / eat something like a partition
and watch yourself come back to life whose door is guarded by sea-bird and froth
your skin kick to shore I wasn’t a sea creature nor drowned was lover I came to the sea and demanded entry to the borderless because / it shifts it isn’t territory I asked to leave my
nation state I asked to be bride-dissolved I asked to be sick and then / well, on shore I couldn’t
explain that my heart was a hospital in a hospital gown in a hospital I couldn’t explain that pain
was sex and you had both when you had me I couldn’t explain what I had done / with that
done with the way I had to encounter my name shaped on the public tongue

my actual name was I left my holy things at the gibbous ridge and climbed over keeping
everyone alive with my ability to turn flesh to milk I was not /considered holy then it
was obvious I was just doing my job I got your hot spirit embodied and cooled you
with materialism it wasn’t /me I came in on a raft or I dove off the prairie or I alone I swam
all those miles to the sea there wasn’t a single sea I passed through every gate gatehouse and
checkpoint each time my heart lonely whale in a terrified bone cavern wet starved-out strung
up there was so much air and so / little oxygen I breathed you in through a golden straw I
spun your hair to gold to reed to straw how pliant

don't talk to gods don't put your ear to the source / code / shell change biome to spell
don't read aloud the formula of a virus if you don’t want to be a virus don't say its vows
and sing / all night / your friends were on the velvet crest of a spring-damp hill and their
names were just sitting there fresh / animals stole them / all night new cells out on release
from your gown and rails from so many syringes you lost count I mean I I lost count
the needle had been in me such a really long time and then I went under I didn’t have an agriculture to ask where I’d been I did not have to answer / my phone to anyone or to say
my name correctly any longer than that I was down there / longer / harpies came out of my
ribcage and sometimes a species would drip down on me people killed it machines and bad
ideas sometimes a gust of hot wind but my lines were dead I shut magic’s face so it
wouldn’t call my name I shut it like a box you can fuck with but you can’t

Danielle Pafunda's books include The Dead Girls Speak in Unison (Bloof Books), Natural History Rape Museum (Bloof Books), and the forthcoming Beshrew That Heart That Makes My Heart To Groan (Dusie Press Books). She sits on the board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and lives & teaches in the desert.