bitter fruit
we are lulled by
candlestrewn news-
casts into some sense
of wax-puddled forever,
by the delibility
of asphalt footprints
into the tend-
encies to forget.
dripping elegies
for the fallen, we
count cherry-
blossomed blessings
petal by petal like
a lonely child’s game:
he loves me, he
loves me not. we stain
our subconscious
in pink nostalgia,
as if we, too, knew
the sting of April,
as if we could some-
how make it better, as if
by our crying, the world
would be a better place
come May, the cherry
trees then in full bloom.
Dear poet,
i learned a new word today,
and the earth smells like a fresh wound
where tiny waves lick the riverbanks,
catastrophizing early spring.
sometimes the guilt is gone for a moment,
and eternities blunted by the marks
of sharp scissors. your questions
i carve into the shape of april:
if we shine lights on the moon,
is the starglow indifferent?
if we make dents in the mattress,
does that make this just
another lust poem?
what i mean when we talk about the weather
i am writing the same poems
i was before i met you, where,
raining, i was then too pre-
sprung and ungainly and in-
congruent, lofting
plastic smiles
and polysyllabic line-
breaks despite the yellow
of my skirt. alas, you say,
and i like the letters in the word,
how they spell wings
in other tongues, but we
are far from flying,
drown down in our
respective sadnesses,
can’t remember
conjugations or cloud
patterns or what it was
to love easy. it must be
snowing hard, still,
somewhere.
mindful.
this is how spring comes,
stripes of green between
herring-boned brick, fern-fronding,
bare-armed, broken-eternitied;
mindful. (i am) convalescent,
cognizant of the dragons
that still lean in, hungry.
they bite at me, at
wrists and cheeks and eyes,
blindfully, so that my shape
is not the shape of others, ever.
after dinner, your stereo
won’t work; you ask me to sing, but
i’ve got only that song
where the girl is leaving and the boy
must drop everything to catch her.
(and that is
not us, after all.)
dragons, as everyone knows,
hate the sun. while you are gone, i sit
on the winter-warmed stoop
bare-armed, watching spring come,
scars palely fade, wondering
how this song will end.
the last rhetorical question
where do we dream,
now? i ask, remembering
monday afternoons
that could run through our fingers
like the juice from an overripe
plum. the snow this year
wasn’t as wonder-sunk as the last.
you didn’t dress me up and say
let’s make the most of this.
no, we sat with our backs
to a bar and watched the
flakes fall until they
didn’t. like a disconnect. suddenly
i feel i am stop-gap, filling-
in, badly wrapped
arm-candy. like winter-grass,
pale and limp and persistent.
like the snow that cries, fading.
so i do my dying during
daylight hours, afraid
the neighbors will hear,
call the cops, take
the cat, run. somehow i
am, still; embittered
& embroidered and melting
in what was. you are trim &
full up with prospects & when
you say let’s make the most
of this, it doesn’t sound
the same at all, at all.
Don’t apologize.
Sorry is not a poem
you post on your wall,
framed in flimsy black plastic
that wouldn’t hold a body.
Sorry looks at you,
dead straight, only
when the war is over.
Then it unfriends you on Facebook.
Sorry has no metaphors.
No spindly pale analogies.
It smells like your future
ex running late on a Thursday,
face scrubbed
with a stale washcloth.
Sorry tastes
like what i imagine
funeral flowers taste like,
broiled. Sorry is the sound
of a silence two
seconds too long;
is the difference
between stalking
and lingering, between
dancing and dithering,
between a kiss
and being caught.
Sorry is always caught.
But is hardly ever contrite.
thunder-and-lightning love
they razor
across a face opaque
as sugared absinthe, her smile-
shanks, swearing nothing
could ever come between them, nothing:
the studded starlight, the straightness
of his spine;
there was a time i would’ve moved
everything; now all
that is left is to move on,
the piles of pills uncut, un-
touched on the kitchen counter, a
caress in their cold aloneness. no
half measures in this meeting; she
reads too fast, so crazy she
mustbe in-love, in-
fatuated (i find
i do not believe youmuch, anymore), un-
characteristically alive; still, she reads
too fast, like cobblestones
coming up to meet you, & there is no
sorry in cement, like our
footsteps that day we walked
the beach in the cold, like
elbows in a coffeeshop
on a streetcorner
where they sit and argue
(will they remember my voice,
when i am dead?)
over what it means to be crazy.
becomings
she breaks hearts
like she breaks
bread, gnawing &
soft, follows
the trail
of heartbeats
as it grows
more obliquely
spaced, slowing.
she is searching
for a place to rest
among the wreckings;
she is silent,
like an empty
tattoo, like a bruise
on a thigh. she is
chewing up her past,
tearing it in tiny pieces
and swallowing.
it is fibrous,
absolving, like a train
whistle, like you
in bed on saturday
mornings. she
still dreams of snow
and red dresses, of
the stuffed bear
he left when she left:
please don’t go
again.
crazy (déjà something)
is the sum of us
counted out into highway miles
between here and the ocean: two-
oh-seven the plastic
inscribed on the single room
key; three close
hours we fight
to keep the bed
from squeaking while your
four gushing walls tattoo
against my own
ever, a millisecond that melts
skin into skin & still
hurts with yearning; the backdrop blue-
lit bourbons spilt
through drip-
ping minutes of Saturday night
into the misty evanescence
of Sunday morning &
suddenly it’s five
twenty-five and unbearable:
the distance, the leaving in
darkness, the cleaving
breathless-ness of one.
just another suicide poem
you don’t want to read this.
untethered and still in tangles, some words
should only ever be sung at song’s end.
for some hurts, there are no words.
here. put your finger just…
here. where it pulses.
feel the slow.
red-black, it giggles
as it drips from skin to
brick-l(e)aden sheets.
you don’t want (anyone)
to read this.
they’ll take away your shoelaces,
your plastic knives.
but then, what’s a razorblade
when all you need
is the will to stop
breathing?
for some pain,
there is no air.
i know these things,
the giddiness of a dripping
pulse. trust me, i’m
a doctor.
here. they’ll take away
your shoelaces
and you’ll walk barefoot,
without dignity.
but they won’t let you
leave. you’ll walk hobbled,
in small circles,
barefoot,
broken.
like poetry.
your story
on some stage far from here,
another bleeder.
here. as it gushes.
trust me, i’m
a poet. feel the slow,
the red-black breath
of forever
a single, beaten tomorrow
that will never
be yours again.
read barefoot,
untangled,
how it gushed
(in the end),
how they wouldn’t
let you leave.
broken, the whole world
will applaud, crying in the end (;)
you don’t want to read this.
for the singer with the cyanide eyes
Maybe this
winter
will be easier;
maybe there is hope beyond frost;
maybe our breath will jut
in steamy tomorrows
across a river that never
freezes; maybe your dreams will dream yet
tachycardic, wild and blue,
like the pulse of the ocean,
muffling the deaths that lie spread-
eagled across decades,
hissing obscenities
under the bedspread, the deaths
that smell ever-so-softly
of overripe promises,
understated like
magnolia blossoms
at the end of summer…
like secrets for a December
no man has seen.
re: the first falling star
this poem
is written under a gray sky,
looking out, poem-level,
at the power lines & december-naked
branches.
it has never smelled heather
in winter; it prickles
with gooseflesh but won’t
let you turn on the heat.
this poem
says: you must make
your own fire. it owes me
nothing. like you, it dreams
in cats.
this poem has no hands.
it sleeps naked. it likes
summer nights and
long walks under the stars.
this poem
is winter on paper,
a message in a bottle
washed upon a cold
Atlantic beach.
its breath steams,
champs, hisses &
waits for us, all, melting,
in the dark.
reflecting as we turn from the water
there was such hope
in this morning.
there were springs
and summers all
jumbled up in our eyes.
there were poems
scrawled in neon, winding
between our fingers:
binding, not bound. now
they slog through wet
descent, flailing, &
here we are at the back
of the notebook, a single
leaf remaining
before october ends.
cold settles in
like a low fog,
like tequila hung-
over, like
responsibility.
the river keeps rising,
and i will miss it.
there was such hope
in this morning.
& i am waiting still.
under construction
like a new notebook or a good clean wind,
summer songs can’t make a dream
exist if it doesn’t want, and
happy poems should not be
items on to-do lists.
he winked at me in fall sunlight
from under his fedora.
[insert standard plot-twist-slash-
voicechange
here]
even happy poems should
have a little mystery.
or a kiss.
i am, after all, not
an iceberg. but i have been
too long among novelists
& nighttime heartache, and
this isn’t a true story.
is it?
definitely a kiss.
on a streetcorner.
[someone dies here]
just
here.
the things we burn
you say we are descended
from giants,
but i
am more impressed
by the tenacity
of acorns,
how they worm
their way into the wet
fall ground. inside
their porcupined-cap heads
they are oaks already, & we
mere children
playing in the dirt, watching
sparks curl round the thread-
bare dark. their every breath
threatens to catch the night on fire,
and my eyelashes are singed
with soot-stained doubting.
these are the things we burn;
with smoke in my hair,
will you love me still?
doubt
is a dragon
who eats love poems,
chews up their beginnings
and chars my pages
with the white li(n)es
and black letters of regret.
fall has not even
truly fallen, yet we stall out
like gas-starved engines:
sparks that stutter, flame,
consume. will winter find
us hitch-hiking home,
the snow melt sogging
through wet leaves, limp
socks? what can rev up for-
ever, catch us now on fire?
who will teach me, again,
to purr?
waiting (outside the same cafe where i wrote my mother’s funeral poem)
across the street, two men
argue over the ubermensch,
and a cricket hops brokenly
cross paving stones. from
the corner, scrying: how long
have we sung summer songs
and dreamt of october? running
yellows as they slip to fall,
sometimes it feels
like putting a bandaid
on a bleeder, not tying it off
with knots-in-silk. surgeons
would know these things,
but it is too late
to catch the sun heading
already south, and south
again. across the street,
two women argue
over love & champagne.
the cricket is gone. a maple
tree sighs sickening
as it sleeps in an ocean
breeze, and finally
october yawns & stretches.
reckoning season
summer passes. all its hot-
cropped doubts and match-
struck storms leave
a vacuum where we used to sit
on high-backed stools
and sip on laughter. this is
why i fall in love
though it makes me sad, why
we kiss on street corners
and write poems
about poems. autumn
comes welcome and in-
between, filling the sky
with empty spaces
to tell a story
of matched rails
and sunlight-through-leaves.
today is a good day
for the beginning
of end-
ings, wet-burnt
and rising as they carry us
off in laughter and smoke,
leave us fearless, bare-
footed in rain.
on tuesday at fourteenth and v
a poet might just save your life he
nodded, knowing, the truths spit
out from wine-red lips onto the floor
like that bottle of rioja the waiter
spilt that night we sat
in the corner and heard the priest
argue for equality
of ordination; you said
it was the candlelight
on my breast that caused
the contention; i said it was just
capitalism. it was still
raining; we walked
through sad poems
to get home, umbrellaless& reciting
rosaries of glass tomorrows.
we drowned only
in standing water once.
everything looks deeper with broken rainbow eyes
warm-hard, these moments are like stone
as the leaves fall, browning. i
could fall with them, almost.
there is a loneliness
to this air, its wind. a pushing-away.
hover close, she seems
to say, warm-soft in the wet
light of her eyes. she could fall too,
almost, her wings so translucent
they don’t quite exist.
so i hover, resting.
it is a long way down
even for those who can fly.
i hover, staying. i know: pick
the sun-light out of stone and pulse
and air, and watch, and stay. there
is a loneliness to this sky
in its blue dry light
as the leaves brown and fall,
even for those who can fly.
it is too early
for sad winter metaphors.
september holds
a hard enough leaving
in her crumpled fist:
dry and caustic and
eager to flame. like
tracing flowers in bleach,
like soaking cattails in gasoline.
day-dreaming in stolen words
children chase the shadows
of butterflies round a fountain
of stone; pink
blooms of crepe myrtle drift in
the august breeze to land
teasingly on skin, clothes, hair.
she finds it strange
how every man who has ever said
he loves her has also said
you deserve better;
hikes up her skirt to let
the late afternoon sun
kiss knees, thighs;
wonders. the moon
will be small and orange
tonight, a plaything
for summer’s dying gods.
who will kiss
her noon-shadow,
chase the butterfly wings down
the arch of her back, crown
her summer-glow
like a prom queen in pink crepe,
carry her home when
august has ended?
drifting
it is august in earnest.
yesterday was almost
autumn, yet here we are again,
dripping. the sticky blueness
of these last few holdout days
clings to the streets like gauze.
by a series of unfortunate
coincidents, i
am thinking of laboratories,
of thinning lines of blood, of my
mother’s dead white hands.
the walls of her hospital room
were that same sticky un-sterile blue,
like an oil painting of some South sea.
it is not the same blue of puddled
dress they found me
in before they called the paramedics
at summer’s end the year of her death;
no, it is deeper and better
for drowning. most seasons i
don’t believe in faith,
but i thank god on august days
for ambles along the river,
for his rich earthy browns.
meditations on the death of summer
fog curling
off the water makes me feel
like falling
off the world; some-
times it’s damn hard
to feel at home here,
the drips of our lonelinesses
bubbling up from a depth which,
in august, is of consequence
to no-one. the sky is as oppressive
as oblivion, a smoky mono-
chromed sheet where
the saddest lines are typed
in a cloudy times new roman
and tossed in God’s wastepaper
basket. we dream
of dragons and decembers,
snowfallen starlight, autumn’s
bittersweet gold like sun
on dappled saturday
mornings, like the flamed tendrils
of my strawberry hair
in the dark field of absence
behind your closed caramel eyes.
