Sun In The Sixth House, Considerable

by Misti Rainwater-Lites

The whale in my head grows daily gorging on monkey skeletons and the neighborhood trash heap. The trainer died of anorexia many mountains ago. I send postcards to my mother from the waiting room but she thinks I’m joking. “I can see the potted ferns in the corners,” she writes back in her cutesy Hello Kitty small town scrawl. It’s raining rodeo clowns and mismatched stripper shoes. I asked God for pancakes and chocolate milk but he stopped taking requests in 1993. I feel this cold canyon between myself and my boyfriend of four years and several miles. He’s Sun to my Pluto, carrot to my canoe, vibrant to my monotonous. Still, he taught me how to tap dance to Jonny Trunk’s “Scrapbook” and I taught him how to disco bowl so we value each other at least as much as pizza coupons. The funky flavor of things lately makes me miss the billy goat I kept in a pen in the backyard when I was four. I fed him unrequited fan letters to Andy Gibb and copies of my dead butterfly manifesto. Today I stood in line through three Phish songs to buy a bunch of seedless black grapes. I wondered about where the grapes came from. I worried about my hair. I was surprised when the cashier asked me for my birthday. The laws are always changing on me and the eyes are like cockroaches crawling up my toes while I try to masturbate to vintage pornography that features women who were probably burning in hell long before I was born.

Misti Rainwater-Lites writes a lot of good shit. Her first official full-length poetry collection, Sloppy Mouth, will be available from American Mettle Books in May 2010. The name of Misti's blog is Ubiquitous Dandelion. The strangest place Misti has ever masturbated is in the Mommy Room at the T-Mobile call center in Albuquerque, New Mexico.