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Anne Marie Rooney

She comes to me like money. I pin up / my hair.


Exhaust in the love pipes

But good sun on me. My face.
Why do I not want to be abraded.
Abrasion has its antecedent: probable.
All blue and torn the growl is now
sticky, lousy-sticky, with salt.
Juice. Spoiled ovaries.
Who is fat, and feel the sun.
Feel the coffee in the neck: crack, crack.
I make a circle from her broken breath.
Each flower faking its fall.
She comes to me.
She comes to me like money. I pin up
my hair. Buy file folders. Miles of files
now sweat neatly. Still
the ground crawls. Sweet creep, I won’t
celebrate it.

Ingratiated Apostrophe

Offer you mother my peak. Parambulation. Parchment with parched
Wrists. Spent dry or decapitated. Center of scent which unplies me,
Multiplies. Entry and canter, dissenter and stop. Some amble-outing
Angle to mother my mangle. Angel in the ether. Offer you
Mother heart, chin, no neither. You take the breather from my barter,
Then smile down through it. Sneezing come farther. Quicken then starch
Dumb mother my father. Centuries pass. So what. The church of us
Apses open. In mirrored wings our sisterly fingers supple on. Offer
To mother an answer, come faster. Offered rubbing and oily after
That outback offering too. Mother offered you move from me, for me,
Form me new and move forth. Farther than meager my mother fathered
Tiger. Tiger skin, tiger bones, everything else tiger in the tremble plus
Terror of other men. Men offer their mother. Then I what, will mingle
The water in-thrusting. Such thrust, though what thrusts past stationary.
Station of my crossness: take one. Taken but scratching can the bone become
Risen. Can it raise the stake or raze what’s staken. High sakes crack me
Open, offer another color without soft mother mouth. Housebound
And biding. Crossed generation on which my charge is freshly
Mounted. Mountains later, no entry but blank body in the rolling steam.
And X with its back off. Mother of the off-color smoke. Can you take
A joke in the evening. In the mothy evening out of this slew of low
Offers. It is round and black in the closest parts what I am. As close as comes
To blue before burst. Mother is my birth on offer in the end
Dwelling nether. Or am I bark out, white crow with its feather
Cropped. Meanly I know songs in the morning sloppy like udders
And she is a bone then a fever. A blanket with its sharp. The rubber in her
Blows blankly stark answer across another mother, middle mark.
After she draws the black from me we are thin. Blood without body our sturdy
Frames study brother bells till we too will sound their roiling brim tinly. We ring
Blind from sister base camp, moot safety. Bell with her thread, her sound ambers
Roundly through the hour. Thus the year goes, it is warm. It is the bees
Again. Everything sticks to my brown drone as old buzz offerings. Other swells,
Belts and crowns bind us, we loosely meaningful pawns. Even then the ease
Back in supples out every home ever had. Our heart and stagger roll only on.


Anne Marie Rooney is the author of Spitshine (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2012), as well as the chapbooks The Buff (The Cupboard, 2011) and Shell of an egg in an effort (Birds of Lace, forthcoming 2013). Her writing has been featured in Best New Poets and Best American Poetry anthologies. She currently lives in New Orleans, where she is a teaching artist.