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.