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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
poem ex nihilo
we burn
as the sun sets.
i am watching smoke curl,
feeding sticks into the flames
one by one by one, searching
the shapes of autumn’s shadow
for a metaphor fragile
enough to carry trust
in its silky, river-
fed palms;
for the words to drip
down your open-mouthed
throat like a benediction
and swallow naked, like a sword;
for the way silent twilight
fills the negative space
and becomes a poem
ex nihilo.
exercise in Southern Gothic
train comes, its wrack
the undisguisably pickled
dregs of hope de-
composing, dreaming acidly
in blue glass, mason. so
much for bloated beginnings,
point-of-departure daggered
summer afternoons in the market
where souls are at auction as
they were lifetimes ago
and charlatans lien awned
forevers under skies that
darken and gradually un-
remember. she presses
thin dress over pale thigh, fights
wind-made wrack in torn fabric,
holds her voice white-knuckled:
what price would you pay
to drain the vinegar,
slough history, begin again?
they told me this was a poem
the notebook i burned that day i learned hate:
i wish i had those words again.
the one long coat i’ll never wear
and the books i’ll never sell, that sit damply expiring
in the back of the closet beside this box
(since they don’t all fit).
the nights you spend alone, every
one folded tight like an unused rain slicker.
my mother’s wedding ring.
my father’s Saint Christopher, the one
he wore for years after they told his sixteen-year-old self
he had a fourteen-percent-chance.
the Saint Jude i lit for the ones who didn’t, their names
melded to the bottom now.
all the poems i write but that no-one can see, and this one,
tucked underneath.
that picture frame she threw at me, before she could throw it:
those hours picking glass shards from skin i will
never get back.
urban farmhouse at twilight
there is the subtlest of breezes from full-flung windows where the world
comes in, dragging its day-end noises: settling birds, slowing traffic.
It smells still of dark coffee & morning-baked bread. someone
coughs. the last sighs of light reflect against glass and chrome;
shadows pool between the cobbles. a scrape of chairs as this place
slowly empties, we the dregs of what had been an over-full cup.
my wine is sweeter with every
swallow.
fluorescent heartbeat,
a new green pulses lamplit;
last lip-stained-glass kiss.
epitaph for the soulless
there are
wide-eyed whiskey
truths that trace
velocities, backward. this
was never about you,
the unfrozen intensity
of a moment stretched
into a night, a pair
of nights, sub-
aqueous drownings
in a river that knows too
many mornings,
inconstancy of under-
current winter
horizons & jagged
edges below the smooth
dark of summer waters;; an
itch inside my skin i
bury deeper with each
rasping handful of you
and that the sunlight won’t re-
wind; this,
this was never about you ex-
cept that it is.
Between May and December
Between May and December
many things change.
I’ll do the falling
if you’ll clean
up the mess,
she says with closed eyes,
glowing. All the stars
in the universe
won’t save you from
breaking. Tamed,
she walks the snows
like lonely Saturday nights,
suffers too many li(n)es
woven into two-
hour unhung
afternoon
windows. Un-
heroed: she offers
the exquisite absolution
of her scars,
pale scalpel-sighs
on wrist & thigh & page,
stale redemptions in
unlit firelight.
I won’t burn
without you.
déjà vu
sometimes i
ache
for the darkness,
turn my eyes
before the ocean of his
mouth
has d(r)ied
on my
lips,
remember
distinctly
the thick taste
of charcoal sucked
through the brown
slatted shades
that hid sunshine
from the secrets
inside.
there are scalpel-
scars still on
flushed flesh,
mirror-marks
of time that
doesn’t pass,
connective tissue
knotted into daisy-
chains of white tomorrows:
where waters whisper
of salt and rust,
there is yet
frost
to come.
i accustom
myself
to the sound
of endings, learn
to hold my hands
close(d). sleep
is the natural
consequence
of over-
dreaming,
an exhaustive
star-eyed
lumbering
collapse. sometimes
i think i
think too much.
character study no.1
When she arches her spine,
the line of her chin cuts
like a laser; the sway of her hair
smells of late-summer roses.
Her hips
are glorious;
her calves, twin plumes
of aerosolized ecstasy.
Her puddled skirt
drips secret joys
onto night canvasses best
found in oblivion.
But as the fog lifts off the river, she
shrinks like an angel’s
trumpet in the rising sun,
her pale pink petals
thorning and wilted.
The slats of half-closed blinds
leave stippled
oubliettes across
the valley of her back.
Forlorn,
he pricks
until she bleeds,
puddling her blue iron
tears onto narrow
pineboard floors.
