Instructions on getting to Someday. 

I'm starting to build us a day
between Sunday and Monday
out of wooden blocks
and how in the spring
the grass feels cold like
mouth wash.
I know it's rude but I won't
invite anyone else--
And you can listen to that
poem I wrote about us--
The one with the metaphors
And too many repeating
lines of "I love you like"s 
approximating a feeling that 
could only ever fit between Monday
and Sunday.
No not that one--
...
Yes! That one!
The one where I say I
think about you like flyleaf
pages where there is enough
space to write a sonnet
or draw a picture of a
soup bowl I saw
flipped upside down in the sky.
The one with hummus platters
and our fingers practicing
cartography on each other.

So I'll meet you there between
Sunday and Monday.
I'll sit in the grass 
and I'll bring a beach towl
because it's still a little
cold in April-- Just follow
the map my index finger
left on your palm. 

 

I have apple skin.

Hips-- course from crates
toss me like a worn baseball--
you won't taste the bruises
in the pie crust--
simmered down into a sauce.
I've got cinnamon under my cuticles.
Never mistake me for a Mutzu--
I was only ever a Macintosh--
microwaved in closeness of
October afternoons-- warm
like marshmallow innards.
He thought I was a red delicious
and I used to think of myself
as golden--
Stuck a sticker on my forehead 
for the shelf-- never pick
me from a tree-- for get I had
a steam and a mother like
every other fruit.
We all could have been Winesap
of Gala or Ambrosia if
we tricked ourselves for long enough--
bodies filleted at the market.
I could have been Fuji
honey crisp-- sun crisp--
tart granny smith waiting for 
a cup of sugar, butter, and simmer--
I could have been. 
But I am a Macintosh-- wrap
myself in corn husks
and dry sun.

If only for a moment I want
you to remember that me and you
are nothing more than bodies--

the caverns of whale carcasses 
traversed by divers like rivers
to the life after this one--
I was a mermaid before
they cut off my tail
to make into sushi-- spun me
between sticky rice and nori--
sliced in hex-sign wheels
like a spinal column.

I like to think someday
they'll walk through my
body like a subway station
and mistake my ribs for
a cathedral whose
stained glass melted like
gum-drops and sinew.
Just so that they know
that someone wasn't supposed
to live here-- I have
been a plastic bag who sleeps
underneath the park bench.

So for today walk this
body with me-- I'll show you
where my legs grew back--
kiss me on the verandas 
of my vertebrae and we
can pretend there's still
stained glass-- catch a subway
to the life after this one
with me-- on a train with
hex-sign wheels and end up
pursed between the lips
of a whale. 

What color is the scent of shoe laces?

Yellow. 
Newspapers in the attic of
a cinnamon-tangerine-peppermint
house. The attic.
The musty museum flea market
glimmering faintly like fried eggs--
Blue like a bent-knee father 
on the sidewalk who 
skips with the rabbit through
the hole-- but you're too
busy tasting alien flowers--
"You should know how to tie them
by now" was my maroon second grade
teacher who was always a type
of red. 
There's a lot of people
who smell like red or
scarlet or crimson--
never auburn because auburn
smells too much like
dried leaves to let in smoke--
Green. Spearmint candy crystals
that pour out June from
their jeweled lips.
Like dead purple worms
around my ankles in violet vines--
Would you still tie my shoes for me?
Even though I'm auburn now
and red too.

 

I'm afraid of the cold, the silence, and the wind chimes.

When I was in sixth grade I was afraid of dying.
I used to go to bathroom when I heard
the medi-vac helicopter pass over the school
watch it out the window 
swing blades like frying pans
like wind chimes
like maple leaves and whirly-gigs.
Some how it always seemed like
it was headed for my house--
firetrucks always turned left down
Noble street-- and I wasn't so much
afraid of being alone
of losing my parents
so much as the prospect of dying.
I was scared of hearing my own
heart beat because I knew it meant
the perhaps of a silence--
The scotch tape mending my
grandmother's metronome--
always a skip-- click-- wind chime-- 
I know it's morbid for thirteen year old
to worry so much about the cold--
the stillness-- the silence.
I'd never been to a funeral because my 
family is one of urns
and attic ashes.
I was afraid of dead bodies not
of silence-- I was afraid cold--
not being alone.
I'm still terrified of stethoscopes.
Of metal.
I my parent dying and me being
too scared to sit with them--
I'm scared of hospitals--
I think what I'm really scared of
it the cold of it all--
I'm scared to die inhuman--
I'm scared of machines-- of silence.
I hope I die like wind chime.
I hope you're there with me.
I'm almost 20 and I'm scared of the cold. 

 

I am a girl of lightning rods, purple carrot-root 
veins and counting the seconds after the flash
1.
My father taught me about love
in a lighting storm.
We sat on the metal porch
and my mom said to come inside
because she knows that my father
and I are lighting rods--
There was a yellow-jacket nest that
scattered like refugees 
There was fire in the sting
of the rain drops-- 
There was a bolt that snapped like
celery and barbecue chips
and my hair dangled drenched
over my face like dead leaves.
2.
My father taught me about love
in a lightning storm.
We drove his blue jeep into the
downpour as soon as the lights 
in the house started to flicker
and ground quivered-- shivered--
with every sliver of slick
silver that descended from 
a sky we only said was heaven
on Sundays. I asked my dad if
God would strike us down and
he said that he'd never been
that lucky-- and he laughed
so that I knew he was half-kidding.
Drove into the fields--
stood like lighting rods
and watched God sting the earth
with purple-carrot veins--
and the corn thrashed like neck hairs.
3.
My father taught me about love 
in a lighting storm.
"1, 2, -- it's so close" he said.
"Should we go inside?"
"No." and we sat on orange paint
buckets in the garage
between flat-tire bicycles 
he taught me how to ride and
collapsed hula-hoops that 
were used for dragon circuses
and sorcery. We say nothing else.
Watch the rain make a dead sea
of our drive way-- we can
swim in paddle boats
made of black Chuck Taylors--
And then comes the flash again--
and they're taking our picture 
like two poets meeting 
in a cafe to discuss each other's egos.
And he's a better writer but
I'm the one who writes.

1.
My father taught me about love in a lighting storm.
2.
My father taught me nothing about what comes after the flash.
3.
Neither of us bother much with thunder. We like celery 
and barbecue chips and we snap like carrot-roots. 
4.
And then the thunder. 

 

Roar.

I want

to die like

a dandy lion–

fade into white-eye lashes

to lose my powdered–

sugar hair

in breath.

To be

remembered

in the futile roars

of the almost-flowers that

could only mean hope.

Scatter my

ashes.

Wish on

my mane.

We are a generation of
burning afternoons in fireplaces
for warmth and aestic--
the children who strangle the dusk
-- wash the maroon ash from
leg hairs-- use cumin for
war paint.
We draw sunset
after sun set after sunset
on our thighs
We were really trying to
decide if anyone still painted
the stars or if
that was impractical too.
Tucking them behind our ears 
in tattoos to remind ours that at
least sometimes we can own ours skin--
I come from a generation
who is already spoken for
from the choking sigh of
a cigarette gripped in the teeth
of a grinning girls on curbs and
smug boys waiting for a school
bus called "Greyhound".
For my generation smoking
is a form of suicide-- a form 
of forgetting-- and we're all
smoking though we don't all buy cigarettes--
some of us smoke our veins 
in the serpentine tentacles of 
our own flesh-- we smoke ourselves
in chalked-scabby incense cones--
pour ourselves into vapor vases
looking some place to solidify 
and become am ice cube 
or a state
or a sunset
or at least a pile of
ash someone can use
as cumin.

 

Night Lights.

Tonight I make a pier out of 
light from street lamps.
I walk. 
I think about asphalt.
Soil sublimates after it rains.
I steep like mint tea. 
Everything reminds me of nostalgia
but not of a specific memory
and the concrete is blotchy
like broken blood vessels
on the insides of my forearms.
I feel guilty for letting myself feel alone.
There is something indulgent about
building a pier from street lamps.
I've taken myself on a dinner date--
round-belly candles on the arms
of a wood bench who wishes
I was another pair of lovers
writing promises on each other's 
skin with their fingers-- outlining
their decades with the curt
tips of their nails.
Kissing-- like wax seals on the envelopes
of credit card offers.
No I am not in love-- I am inseparable.
I am benches. I am backbones.
I am soil that fills the tea cup
and still grows a street light--
I took a walk with the parts of
myself that I wear in broken blood vessels.
Check them like wrist watches
that never had any batteries--
I'm not thinking about the edges of piers
but sometimes the soil feels
like summer there. And there was always
something about the summer to me--
and the waves rolled from the
tires of sleep-saunter cars
in the street-- filled my tea cup
in the bay and turned out
the street lamps
with a draw string.  

 

 

"What is behind the stars?"

-he asked me because we are all seven years old
a some point in the day when we let
our mind rediscover that juju bees 
look like teeth and skylines and
stop lights.

God unfurled the sky like
the white mouth of a snare drum--
yanked wide like a dentist
the gaunt cheeks of canvas--

God pulled nothing into 

a sky. 
Rested it on an easel in the corner
of his studio. It waits
beside the clay molds of tap-dancers
--he punctured holes in the surface
with a fringed tooth pick when
he was done making club sandwiches 
for him and the sunset.
He always forgot that the sunset is vegan. 

Burnt the BLTs and lettuce lily pads in
morning rays he fried on the skillet
of the horizon.

Behind the stars God had curtains
that don't match the tile floor.
God dangles a prism from the windowsill
and when he sends out light each new morning
it spouts rainbows on the toaster.

Behind the stars God saunters
to a round table and eats toast
with strawberry jam. He thinks about
tap dancers-- flicks crumb-meteors
to watch them crackle in the atmosphere
and never find themselves
in the juju bee jaws of the roof tops.

Behind the stars I find you
and me and fringed caps of tooth-picks
that we can pretend are swords.
Behind the stars I'll meet you 
and we can tap dance to snare drums
and make stop lights into 
skyscrapers.