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.
diary, friday june 27 (redact in hindsight, monday march 12)
it’s late on a friday and i slump barefoot on a couch that isn’t mine
picking at dead skin on the bottoms of my feet, red & raw from the dress shoes
i wore to a wedding (which also wasn’t mine–
but where i arrived late & had stopped only to dance one slow, slow dance.)
it’s nearly quitting time on a friday; i’m looking out a window which
belongs to someone else but i’ve opened the shades halfway and they rest,
crooked, on a curtainless sill.
someone’s thrown a rock, and the glass is cracked in one of the center panes. i don’t
wonder at this, but i guess at what the window-owner did to deserve it.
i’m dreaming of home on a friday and my fingers as they type this don’t smell like my own,
as if they knew i were pecking out a destiny which i surely didn’t sign up for.
strangely, the smell is of mice: caged, fed and raised for breeding. i do wonder
what that means.
as the title suggests, this piece is a revised version of a much earlier piece, which i re-discovered recently and was consequently re-enchanted by. the original can be found here. interesting how our writing changes with time, no?
molting
barefoot in the snow, pre-sun. icewater-drawn dawn baths & midnight
velvet across a slightly shattered mirror. dreamcatching by hand. from
a hammock by the water, she fig-picks the yellow twilights out of late
August, pulls laughter out of the lake with old cane poles. trawling
for blackberry-stained summer-skins, bartering breadcrumbs for bor-
rowed affection. a peeling front porch in grey reflects moonset on nights
as transparent as mother’s white nightgown (like the one i fished from
the rag box to cloak the scarlet & the steam, that first time). like head-
lights through dark bedroom windows. like January frost on fever.
