Welcome. 

I wait coiled in my wooden desk chair

like a chestnut or a wad of violet gum

stuck in the crux of a bathroom stall door.

My spine has always curved inwards.

concave, convex, influx, inflex of my arches

my trajectory, cove, coin-crawling crinkle

my hunched silhouette by a desk lamp is

like the cupped hands of an ice cream scoop

like after-rain mud pools

like Dixie cups full of fruit loops

like the hesitant smile of a banana

or the smirk of a spoon's neck.

I feel the careful curvature of

each skyline tiptoe cautiously on my vertebrata--

I'll patiently roll back my shoulders

like cookie dough or sun-faded sleep bags

lazy-eyed like a new moon.

I'll feel like a hex sign-haloed covered bridge

and a welcome mat with the black bristles

or a place for God to wipe his bare feet

on my forehead.

 

 

 

Keeper of Spoons.

Instead of a key ring I'll wear 
a lasso of spoons on my belt
to spurn on the vernal pools
of each concave in-cave
where tad pools play hopscotch 
with the skipped stones that
skidded three times in sauce.

Each one unlocks
my lips like a licorice rope
like a locket holding
a photo of alphabet soup
without any 'Q's to be found
there's never enough Qs.
Sip slow like sunburn.

Instead of a wedding ring I'll wear 
spoons by my nightlight.
Glisten like pearl glazed donuts
and escape through the whole
of my throat like the dying
of sugar-dandruff-stars
falling like Cheerios and Orions.

A elegy for all that didn’t fit in today

I’m shucking pocket watches like oysters.

Stuff  their shells like pencil cases.

Each cog has to be engraved my number of sneezes.

I have never met a day that I felt was truly over.

It’s like the last line of novel

punctuated with the close of my eyelids

but there were still boxes of double decadence

brownies we were going to bake

and eat with the chocolate finger of

our fourth grade selves reincarnated.

Always orphaned socks left knotted

to a widowed partner– mismatched at

the front of the drawer.

Always paths that needed to be walked

in bare feet– gravel meant to be brushed

from toes. Stories I was meant

to tell about why I like hard boiled eggs

even though they;re kind of gross.

Stories about the bottoms of cereal

bowls lined with banana slices.

Stories of bed sheet canopies and

bowler had salesmen.

This is an elegy of everything

that I will forget to tell you because the day is

a blink of light with night crust on

the eye lashes.

An elegy for everything you will forget to say

because there wasn’t enough minutes

left to say it how you wanted to.

I’m shucking pocket watches like oysters

and tossing the shells back into the canal

between the two islands

with crustacean cheek bones

and prawned lips.

I'm collecting the handles of broken coffee mugs
off the decades of my speckled kitchen floor.
They're scattered like broken ribs
of a beast with no eyes
and hardened play dough tongues.
I'm using the handles as a coat rack 
to hang all the times
I've missed the paper lanterns on the porch
we never had and the mud puddle
in the yard where the battle ship
sank on the fourth of July.
I played taps. 
I'm making a scrap book held together
with marshmallows and chocolate squares
I couldn't eat anymore--
finger sticky on the pages--
I'll insert the images of everything
in between. Everything that we had
missed while we were too busy listening 
for how many fireflies would 
commit suicide that night.
I'm making a mirror from the pieces
of fragments and fingernails of
broken glasses and mason jars--
waiting for it to yield a 
reflection of something or someone 
we had all once known. 

In the

dying time

only the frogs escape.

They pull leaves over their heads

like Tupperware lids.

Seal their thoughts

for spring.

After

the rain comes

the frogs skip stones in

jeep headlights. Chirp about fall

and how their crock pots

are warming

pot-pie.

I unfurled like a zucchini flower
in olive oil--
let down the hair I didn't have anymore
so the frost can
braid honey-suckles into a crown
into a halo
into a jump rope
into a hop scotch board
into merry go round.
Put my curls into pig tails
into bunny tails
into sting-ray tails
into squirrel tails
into platypus tails 
play four-square with the chick-a-dees.
feed them gummy worms
and the crumbs from my 
peanut butter sandwich crusts.
I unfurl like a fruit roll up
but I trade it for pretzel sticks.

Have I

told you that

I think about us

like juju-bee-thick-cloud rain–

Like my blue lightning

veins always

knew you?

Like you

traversed cold

river stones– held rocks

between your your toes like pistols–

emmersed your pockets

with pebbles

like me?

In the streets of dance the trees seek

tap shoes in the soil– entangled in dandy lion roots.

break them loose with cruets of oil–

slither out like strawberry worms–

on their own turns– flamenco on the crosswalk

tell us to wait– tell us there is rain and

air gaits like canned pudding–

put hair gel to hold up their branches

like punk rockers and mayonnaise–

put back their tap shoes

after forty days and forty afternoons to grow

spring tulips with wonky necks.

 

I’ll set a path of bread crumbs

for us to find our way back.

You can be my brother or

my lover or my father or

my dead grandmother who

fed me hard candy from crystal bowls

–kept purse peppermints.

I know that the breeze and the gasps

of gods will take the bread crumbs away–

Scatter them to seas like wedding petals

or business cards.

If you are my brother you will eat

the trial behind us because he likes rye bread.

If you are my lover you will

wonder where the crumbs led and collect

the remaining pieces in a back pocket–

trying to fasten a topoiographic map of a person

who keeps stale bread to pin-down memories.

If you are my father you will

tell me that snapping turtles ate

the bread crumbs– and that there

was never really a path. I had just

made up my past from images

in other people’s photo albums.

If you are my grandmother

you will say it’s good that I dropped

the bread crumbs. It is good to remember

something– even if there’s nothing

left to remember.

And she’ll crunch ice cream cones in

the corner at night

in the chair from her old apartment– thinking about

sourdough and English muffins.

If you are me you will leave bread crumbs.

You will get lost

on the way to gingerbread houses.

Climb in ovens.

Sleep in warmth.

set a path of bread crumbs

for us to find our way back.

Set me on fire like orange creamsicles.
I was always sherbet
on sticky fingers
making sewage pools 
on hot pavement. I feed the ants
that crawl under my skin-- under 
my bed sheets-- weak waves
of centipede's uncoiling fingers.
When I'm burned thin-- tangerine skin--
scrape up my ashes that have become
blue and red and bruise pastels
rub them on the forehead of a
stranger in the sign of a cross.
Say "In the name of my mother
and her mother and saint clare
who cut her hair"
Tell them how many sunsets
they have been.
How many layers of tire rubber
they have worn down.
Tell them how they are the erosion 
that breaks rocks off mountains.
Tell them they are both fire
and palm branch soot. My grandfather
fell off a train in a flourish of steam
and died and his daughter never forgot.
I take that train to the beach each summer.
I drink nectar from plastic tubes.
I set fire to my wrists
because they look like
bug bites.
I used to light eight matches
before lighting the candles in the church
as an acolyte
just to smell fire in the threads
of a white robe
smeared with pastels.