Down with the ship

“ Haul Once and Twice Again” the sailors sang,

on a boat run aground on an iceberg made of the

hardened bits of birthday cake you throw out only

after it’s been sitting on your counter for a week while

you’ve been too hungover to remember it’s still there.

“Confound it! Not Again!” the captain screeched,

but no man listened, too busy bailing out buckets of

rancid popcorn oil, the kind that coats the floor of the

movie theater and somehow clings to your hair even though

you only had a piece or two since you’re on that new fad diet.

“Starboard and Port! All hands on deck!” the crow’s nest cries,

as the oil rises to knee level through the cracks made by the cakeberg

but the ship’s Chef just hears the “port” part and thinks “WINE” and like any

reasonable human in his situation gets as drunk as you did at your ex-boyfriend’s

going away party your senior year of high school and we all know how well that turned out.

“Goddamn it! This is not a good time!” yells the second-in-command

who had lately been getting frisky with the chambermaid in cabin three

as he runs across the deck, half pulling up his pants as he goes like that time

you accidentally walked in on your sister and her idiotic boyfriend who thought

you were your father so he vaulted out the window bare-ass naked across your yard.

“Terribly inconvenient, terribly inconvenient” the chambermaid chants

as the oil rises to thigh-level and she gives up on holding her skirts up high because

she can’t even find one of her petticoats, which she supposes is a hazard of finding the

second in command attractive in the middle of a popcorn-related emergency which

reminds you of the time a fireman asked you out when he was supposed to be stopping

your kitchen from burning down so you had to sacrifice your beloved sweater to the

popcorn-related flames.

“Fucking ridiculous”, the stowaway sighs,

hearing all the moaning from above as he sits safely in the storage hold,

all the cracks plugged with half-chewed Bazooka bubble gum, which every sailor

worth his salt keeps around for emergencies because the gum turns to cement within

three seconds, which you know because of that one time you forgot to take your gum out

before you fell asleep at grandma’s house and couldn’t pull your teeth apart for one whole

terrifying minute, so really it’s only good for the comics, which the stowaway thinks

says something about life.

Bad Lighting

Men made of paper have come calling for me

Each with his name scrawled in ink on his side

They have come for the light and the heat but

There was a quick burst and a shattering and so

I am no longer the bulb, but the flame.

And they reach and they reach and they slide

in their blindness across surfaces thought to be

familiar and safe, smooth etchings on plaster

But I have been steadily consuming and am no

longer content to sit and burn with so little filament,

to remain always untouching. 

“Be aware” I whisper in half-hearted warning,

“the end of your world comes in electric flames”. 

Longing

I have been half-awake, dreaming of you,

of the pictures you’ve painted across your biceps 

and down your spine in greyscale and multicolor,

the way they tell the story of your yesterdays and 

your tomorrows but somehow never your nows; 

of the way cupid’s-bow lips never made sense 

until I saw yours, until I memorized their deep dip

and flare, the precise inequality of the full lower lip

over the top which came of your habit of biting it; 

of the calluses and scars which hug your fingertips,

products of repeated singeing on the barrell of 

a gun or those old cars you refuse to give up on,

(you won’t tell me which) and how those same hands

trembled as they reached towards my face, in the dead 

of a winter so chill even the wind shivered. 

Don't crack the porcelain, darling

I met a fellow poet, several times,

he had half his head shaved and wore

ugly short sleeve button ups ironically and

considered some things too mainstream to speak of. 

The problem with poets is,

we’re nearsighted,

we race across the rushing ground, losing ourselves in

the caress of the wind

oblivious

to the brick wall twenty feet ahead. 

I have long been made of secret things

 of tattoos covered by clothing and

piercings tucked behind hair and 

rings worn band out.

Hidden disasters, hidden rebellions. 

And he looked at me like he’d never seen me before,

nervous and shy and unsure of my being, believing in 

a purity of self I no longer possessed. 

Conservation

To save myself the paper 

I won’t tell you that I love you. 

I like this notebook and

there’s enough terrible metaphors, I think

about broken promises and broken hearts.

I should know, I’ve

written a few of them. 

All I know is 

I’ll never love anyone the way I did at fifteen-

naive but fearless. 

So to save us the energy of 

lifting your baggage and mine,

of screaming matches and

of meeting your mother

I won’t tell you.

You’ve heard it before, I’m sure, from 

some other girl who looks a bit like me,

(I snuck into your drawers to see her photographs)

so that will have to suffice. 

Besides, behind the candles and the roses

and the glow of adoration 

circling around your irises,

I can still hear the echo of 

“emotionally unavailable.”

Respirate

There’s a dusty trail that leads to

the end of the world where every blade of 

grass isn’t green but 

has a scene of your lifetime

painted in microcosm and we 

walked to the cerulean edge but I couldn’t

look over the cliff so 

heavy boned, we lay beneath the giving tree,

just as it burst into flames,

or into fall,

basking in the dying warmth of almost october

I never needed reverence so badly

hands and lips and cheeks and 

something like healing

something like loving 

but perfectly,

not. 

Sweet Tooth

When I was small my fingers were thin,

sharp like spider’s legs and just as clever,

and I would pick the lock on the candy cabinet

after bedtime and lay to waste my freshly toothbrushed teeth. 

It’s how I think of us, mostly. 

How I sneak into your darkened room and

lay to waste my freshly confessed soul with 

your dark chocolate hair and toffee eyes

sweet cinnamon sugar hands and that jawbreaker mouth,

touched with licorice lips that beg me without sound. 

We’ve all got a weakness. 

The Paper Maple

I have lately been wondering what it would be like 

to become a tree. 

To seep into the bark like so much sap and to cling to the woody pulp

until my very cells dissolve from circles into squares, so much stronger

than this fragile thing called body. 

To reach out to the four winds and to bear witness to the stars 

as they pass and turn and fall to the earth at my feet, 

brilliant and ebbing like so many past lives. 

To live a lifetime in the span of a year,

the birth and the blooming and the youth and the waning and the death

which rattles the bones and breaks the more fragile. 

To feel the sinking of roots deep into the damp earth and the stretching

of the self under the sun, snatching wayward balloons tossed

from the hands of careless children. 

To feel the squirrels and birds nest in the highest reaches of my hair 

and see the cats prowl below around my ankles, slow and seductive,

watching the drama of survival unfazed by modernity.

To have names carved upon my trunk, misshapen and misguided and

somehow lovely, so much like 

the human I once was. 

Moleskine Sunday

6:42 p.m.

I check out a book by William Carlos Williams 

(and the man ahead of me in the check out line,

bless whoever invented suit pants) and wonder

if Williams knew his name would be famous one

day, or at least unobscure enough for a transplant

from way north of here to remember its sound

and long for it. 

6:58 p.m.

I ride the elevator down seven floors and think

of every possible scenario involving the cable

and my untimely death in the two minutes and

twenty-seven seconds it talkes to reach rock bottom.

The creaky old box sways but someone actually 

runs to get inside as the doors close with my exit.

I almost vomit. 

7:04 p.m. 

I scribble in the margins of a forty year old book and

become adept at watching fit men stretch out of the

corner of my eyes. We’re all human somehow. So much

for poetry being the last bastion of the learned. 

Bad News Bears

Tonight is one of those nights

when my soul screams “love me!”

and my heart breaks out the gag.

Letter to my future daughter

I do not wonder what you’ll look like. 

You will look like me, but

longer in the face,

like I look like my mother,

and she hers,

shorter and shorter to facelessness.

I don’t wonder what your laugh will sound like.

You will laugh like me, but 

hopefully more often,

like I laugh like my mother,

and she hers,

on and on into softness but

I do wonder things like

whether or not you’ll drink

the bitter dregs caught at the 

bottom of your wine and if 

you will tease your lovers with 

the knowing smile I will 

teach you in your twelfth

summer, when your father

isn’t home.  

I wonder how you’ll take your coffee and

how you’ll style your hair and

what your favorite famous last words will be,

if you’ll prefer silver jewelry to gold.

I wonder what you’ll think of me thinking of you,

on a particular wednesday in October,

years before I wished for you. 

Come on baby tell me something

You talk like an open book but I can’t see past the ending,

Inevitable, cliche, please don’t spin the story that way,

all candy coated sharp edges dusted with cyanide

taste it, taste it, poison-apple red in the garden of where were you

when I needed you,

back in the trenches somewhere, didn’t you hear the clank of

dog-tagged silver sent through the post?

Couldn’t over the softened wails of a cotton-lined nest,

over lullabies and bouncing knees and spiking fevers 

And folded flags and twenty-one guns and 

aren’t all men made of steel?

melt a few to pave the roads and take care not to step on any cracks. 

Kissing Frogs

When I was in junior high we had to dissect a frog and my partner was “out sick” that day, so I had to peel the skin off myself and I knew I wasn’t strong enough to do it properly (I was a little slip of thing back then) since the only neat way to do it was quickly, forcefully, all in one go, with at least four hands, but since I only had my two one side of the green-grey sticky skin pulled up from the muscles faster than the other side so that formaldehyde splattered all over my cheeks and my dress and I remember the smell distinctly, it’s the kind of smell that burns right through the pores in your nostrils straight down to your bones, it stays with you forever, and anyway as soon as I felt the sticky, cold gel on my face I ran to the trash can and vomited profusely, which didn’t help the smell much, particularly since I still had half a frog skin in my hand and since the trash can was right in front of the teacher’s desk, where she was giving a demonstration on how muscles are controlled by electric pulses- I had to watch her rip the demonstration frog’s legs clean off his body (I knew it was a him because she accidentally ripped his little balls off too), right in front of me, while I was vomiting, and watching didn’t particularly help that situation either- anyways then I had to watch her stab the dismembered legs with stripped copper wires, making them dance like some vicious parody of ballet, spinning in small circles across the black tabletop like the pirouettes I practiced obsessively in my kitchen using the countertop as a barre and so now whenever I hear people talk about love I think about my junior high biology teacher, stabbing dead muscles with frayed copper wires just to watch them dance into some parody of living. 

When the dam breaks

Angelic things with broken wings

she sings the song while she’s dancing

Of silver bells and concrete shells 

and broken glass and waiting

Of fairy dust and cry-if-you-must

and hearts that have stopped their beating

Of elves in shoes and Baton Rouge 

she slides over mud while she’s cleaning

bits of things like fear and wayward tears

and running instead of just going

Of hopelessness and feeling less 

and worrying your unravelling is showing

Of angelic things with broken wings

she sings the song while she’s sobbing. 

Metus

There are colder places than this, I think

I have known them in past lives, in pieces of memories almost

forgotten save for the postcards taped behind the bedroom door.

I put things in boxes and fold things into drawers and 

tuck my failures behind my throw pillow, 

no one ever looks there. 

I hide old love letters in my collection of encyclopedias,

between the editions of BS and BV… there aren’t that many entries in BS

but it’s an old set. 

I vacuum every trace of dust and open every window to the morning light

but the air still feels musty and heavy with the weight 

of my terror. 

I paint my face and pack my bag,

My watch ticks and the four white walls grow bright and close,

I contemplate the doorframe and breathe only with difficulty 

I push and I shove but my feet disobey,

choosing prison,

people are monsters in the morning. 

Amaretto Morning

Coffee and skim milk foam and

cherry-almond liqueur, a bit of hair of the dog

swirl once, two sugars.

Curl up on the office couches-

brown plaid checked with maroon, heinous things-

sit and warm cold shoulders with early sunlit windowpanes

leaning in until we hear the glass creak in protest.

Trade vowels and consonants, Venice for Rome

stories about getting lost and getting found and

falling asleep at the symphony;

somebody find me an electric guitar, I mean really,

this is absurd.

Gossip about the pros and cons of

leather jackets versus button-downs:

One leaves you wanting more, one leaves you period.

The right side of fifty and the right side of twenty-one

cross invisible bridges at nine am

towards the white hot center.

Deliverance

The women at the bubble mill slide paint

across glass faces made by the dozen

a pixel-by number operation

fragility begot by the fragile.

A man on a dragon invades Times Square

and all around chaos reigns by volume

tin soldiers rage with clash of steel and lead

in the center of the madness circle

Red-lipped Lady Life and Skeleton Death

cast lots for souls and court the end of time

The earth heats, grows molten, swallows tin men 

The bulls across the field sing with broken necks,

The cyprus trees lose form, collapse to ash,

The women do not look up from their work. 

Almost There

I should figure out how to forgive you.

After all you’re just an amalgam now,

a patchwork cloud of film reels

struck out in hues of cobalt, 

vaguely human in shape,

a conversation starter I pull out 

and dust off before parties. 

But

I remember sewing the ocean together with grains of sand, desperate to

pull closer to your shadow and you once cried out to me that it

was possible for us to outrun this wind turned rain but we

outran the wrong way, since the air wasn’t thinner where we

ended up but thick with salt and heat, heavy in the lungs and I can’t forget 

looking out across the islands for lamplight and

finding only fog and a love song. 

Slow Burn

There’s a reason I don’t drink vodka, even though it’s kind enough to spin the room for me and leave without the painful morning after. But last night I forgot. 

So I sat on the cracked linoleum floor of this apartment on Hartwick and did shots out of Dixie cups, chased with watered-down Sprite, and then

I was at some bar, drinking it drowned in Red Bull, listening to shitty house music and this frat boy telling me how he’s gonna inherit his father’s company one day and pretending not to notice

how low his hand kept slipping on my low rise jeans.

He was tan and tall and big and wrong but I danced with him anyway. 

Killed another few shots laced with green-apple-something and lost my earring somewhere between the bar and the dance floor when he leaned in and I leaned out,

thinking about how awful it is that you both wear the same cologne.

I know I said I wouldn’t, but

Vodka makes me miss you. 

Red Eye turns to Blue

I met a dreamer in Union Station

painting portraits with his toes

for spare change.

He has a private audition for the part

of Jean Valjean

on Broadway

Next week.

 The Metro train comes caterwauling

down the trackline with lights blaring

while kids in power ranger costumes

usher me back,

rescue me from imminent danger. 

One tells me he’ll be a real superhero someday.

A cop like his daddy,

same mustache too. 

The posh lady on the recording tells me to 

“Allow customers to exit” but 

rebel that I am,

I push inside to where the sticky orange seats

reek of twenty or thirty years’ brown-green grime,

the kind that sticks to library books

left to rot too long. 

I pop in my earbuds and fall asleep against the cool window on my way home. 

Necessary Part

We lean against each other like bookends,

mirror images down to our thoughts on the evening

perched on the shelf above the bar

screaming drinking songs

gratuitously out of tune. 

We drop ourselves into language

playing in it, drunkenly puddle jumping 

through nouns and verbs and made-up in-betweens

coating ourselves in dirty water and pencil lead.

You’ll play a nonsense tune on your beat-up guitar,

serenading me to sleep,

pretending things rhyme with my name. 

Incubus

Oh lover, lover, I have been calling for you,

deep in the dusking of the night just before dawn.

The air grows still and frosty,

holding it’s breath for the imminent sun and

I stare at the deep cracks in the ceiling,

naming the shapes the dusty watermarks make and

my twin bed feels big and empty.   

The sandman clambers through my open window,

tugs his hardest at my canthi,

begging for my submission

“It’s almost dawn, after all “ but

I will not follow where he beckons. 

Every settling in this haunted house gives me shivers,

I search the greying shadows for yours,

scouring the corners for your translucent smile and 

the red of my sheets mocks the blood in my veins,

rushing and reaching and remembering,

in the deadness.