257. Serenade

Each evening I dip my hand

into the bottom of my mailbox

praying that it won’t come up

with your set of keys.

256. Haiku: Black winds and the crosses we made over our chests.

Here, why you left me:
I was the kind of monster
that made you happy.

255. It took years but it rebuilt us.

We ran through corn fields reaching towards velvet sky,

with ghost fingers at our heels while we learned

how to make the shadows move for us. I am your gravity,

the pill that helps you sleep at night. You tell me that I am brightness,

bettering. We are the pillars, the chariots, the temperance.

Once I tried, and failed, to explain what it is like

when you step into a room. How miraculous it is, the light

that fills up the cracks.

I think this took more work than you expected.

I ask to dream about you, and in the morning am disappointed

that it was only darkness. I am told,

“It will be a quiet passage through this sorrow.”

I am told to not tell you what I want, that it is not for you anymore.

I think that I am too much fire and water to live with, and never at the same time.

254. Please let your boat come back home.

In a dream, you walk into a grey sea and I don’t 

follow you. Clothes and all. 

Later, you are reborn 

and we are kissing in a grey room. Gunfire, 

meant for me, and then it is my turn to run 

without being followed. 

I am over the fence. 

I am in the fox hole. 

I am in the dusted shadows. 

I am in a forest of brilliant jeweled blue-greens, 

but the shots still scream out behind me. 

I am never out of sight 

but at least in here, 

the color permeates everything.

253. Marblehead

When I came home from work today there was glass on the floor.
The window, next to the front door. The cat had bloody paws.

When waiting, time slows like sticky sap from a tree
and nobody wants to get their hands dirty. I think I'm out.
I'm not comfortable with this level of vulnerability.
There isn't even any skin left.

You are the lightning of my life. Am I the leaping crocodile?
I could hit my head on the curb and dream about you for days,
and when I wake up my hands will still go right through you.

I am tired of taking myself so seriously.
There is always a hidden dragon in the fields, but I just want it all
to look like gold, swaying and singing.

252.

When she loves you and she puts her hands inside of you

When it’s what you’ve wanted your whole life

And you can sleep through the night now, dreamless

Something that looks like peace, a spark in the fog

You are allowed to say it then, allow it to be yours:

Joy, joy, joy.

1. I know, it’s been quiet here. I haven’t been finishing anything. I start and I start, but something always happens. An ending is missing. A middle. I get bored. I get frustrated. I have so many pieces of poems, but nothing is fitting together somehow. 

2. How about a secret? Will that make up for it, for now? I am in love with someone and we keep ending up in the wrong places. I have never been in love with someone that was so scared of other human beings. We all are, sure, but I think the trick is to stick around and fight through it. Most of the time, he doesn’t stick around and fight through it, and I’m not sure what kind of person that makes me, for staying.

3. Above: I have three poems in this. I am very grateful. I am also not sure where you will be able to purchase it quite yet, but I will tell you as soon as I know.

4. Most of you are strangers, but I hope you are well all the same.

251. (Untitled.)

I have lost count of how many times this has failed me.

You wore white to our funeral. The grief is water,
then fire, a sword on my forehead. A bridge through the clouds

too large for our hands. You want to know about my lover?

He is the tide that will not acknowledge the moon,

the hands of a watch that do not want the gears,

when I am washing dishes, he is the sound of a thousand plates

breaking against stainless steel.

It is terrifying, the nervous electricity,

the lifeboat and the teeth of the whale,

even the occasional grace. He is the airplane in the cathedral,

the silver magnetic voice rippling across my skin.

He is the wish, the mistake, the daydream stretching across

my Tuesday afternoon, the 4am blush, the blood in my mouth.

He is my shadow, the physical manifestation

of my inability to remain quiet, stagnant. A slow unfolding

and snapping shut.

You want to know about my lover? Sometimes it is a dream,

sometimes it is implanted so far into the earth, my waking life,

I don’t know how to uproot myself. It is the first time

I have not wanted to uproot myself.

250.

In a dream, she sees me across the street
but when she steps off the sidewalk she falls through the earth.
I don’t mean to be this far away from everyone.
It is the first time they have blamed me for your leaving.

249.

I would sell every ghost I have to buy something solid.

248.

He looks at me with hearts in his eyes, and I worry that he’ll blink and bleed all over the floor. He is my favorite lover. We have been charting this for a long time. It has stopped being a demolition. The body is a comfort, the body has stopped believing in the boundaries of skin.

247.

Yesterday I was a burning building.
Today I am a cup of water.
What does it matter
that you remember the day we met?

246. Blood Moon

My body wakes me
at the time of the eclipse.
Your shadow is connected at my heels,
some days more than others
of course, and those are the ones
where you darken the room.

The freckles on your back
sure do look nice in the morning.
It doesn't matter,
I have bruises as deep as lakes.

How much of this will you hang

from the ceiling today?

You pull up our shirts
and press our bellies together
because you hope that this time
we won't stay in separate bodies.
Vodka means you're losing it,
beer means you're trying to behave.

When saying that you're happy
means it's time to go.
To be both the brave and the weak one.
That, you will not understand.

245.

Seeing you changes everything.

244. My heart is the golden tip of an arrow.

It is difficult to harness anger. To survive,
I am told that I am to whistle for it
whenever the harsher weather settles in
as if it were a wild dog that owes me
its command. Anger, they say,
will burn up the rest of it.
I'm supposed to call people cruel when I mean it
and I'm supposed to take back my power
while not accidentally picking up any of the weight.
I'm not grounded. I went over the goddamn moon
and it's cold out here. Too quiet.
Speckles of light are nice to look at
but my arms aren't light years long.
Space is much larger when you're actually out here.
I was wrong, you aren't getting smaller and smaller
the further I get from the earth.
I need a cup of coffee. I need to learn another language.
Need need need. I need to run out of room,
but not like this, not in the way
that keeps everyone else from getting through.
And so my name sends you to splinters.
We leave and circle over and over,
our footprints scarred into the floorboards.
Patience has turned into something disgusting.
When I see you. I will not know what to do.

243. The portraits I draw of myself in your absence.

I would like to have less edges.
I would like to be easier
to love, or simply stand next to.
When they find the wreckage,
remember
there are always harder things
happening somewhere else,
and there is light, light,
light.

242. I dream about my lover.

We are not speaking.
I am many colors
when he appears.
First, a diner, a bar,
my front lawn. He does not give
me his voice. I do not want to look up,
do not want to see how close
our bodies are. If I do, once,

he says, You broke my heart.
I begin:
No, no
that's not the way it happened,
and that is not the way
you would say it. 
But his voice
is already gone and I
am walking down the street. He follows,
staying behind, he thinks I can't see him
and every time we are on this road,
it is erupting in green, new.
Nobody has touched this yet.
No cars, everything is growing into
where it is supposed to be.

Then, it is a new room
and he has turned into someone else.
Something more tender, more present.
We tie ourselves together with thin pieces
of silver, kiss each others' wrists goodnight.
We are afraid of waking up
and forgetting.
In the morning, he's changed again,
a small dead bird, and I go outside
and mourn to the first stranger I find.
I wrap his body in plastic,
worry out loud that his soul hasn't gotten out yet,
that he won't be able to come back
to me as something else,

but I have nothing better
to bury him in.

241. A fraction of a poem in response to the fraction of which you are able to give me, and the fraction you take away.

I am the princess
cutting the heads off the beast,
and I am the queen
with my hands in my lap,
waiting for you to come home.
No, I cannot see how we will collect
all the cups, dig our hearts out
of the earth and say, "let's go."
I see the dead in my dreams
and hang myself from trees,
hands like auroras.

240. XVI

Good,
I hope you see me as
the tower. I want you
to take one look at me
and know
what I could make
crumble.

-

(I am going to miss you so very much.)

239. This time, I put out the fire.

For all of our synchronicities and golden threads,
I have not even seen your hometown.
I'd like to learn about the sounds
your chest makes, what elements exactly
are needed to create such a person.

The morning finds my crown
on the floor. When we are good,
your body is the hand of a clock
striking into my hour and we are brilliant,
explosive, all of the fireworks
brought to the party. When we are bad,
it takes you longer to make your way back
to me and I search your skin
for the remnants of other people.

Inhaling, I taste you in my throat.
One of us is the trophy, here.

238. 2013

January.
Being eaten alive,
my mother's suicide,
all of the cake and disappearances
after.

February.
My birthday.
The sound of a crash
coming from the kitchen.

March.
Counting years (ten, nineteen).
When he left, they told me
I should celebrate.

April.
The names I gave myself
and the places I forgot them
in.

May.
There is too much quiet
here.

June.
The sun found my skin
again. Discipline. I do not know
where I am.

July.
I burned your life
to the ground.
I'm sorry.

August.
I am almost far enough
away.

September.
Cancer, a body covered
in blossoms.
Help me be better.

October.
Nobody ever stays dead.

November.
Filling holes in the front yard.
I don't mean to love you still.
Turn red, turn
white.

December.
Honesty
that we are done
outrunning. Finally,
finally.