Take a

walk with me

between sea urchin

needles– we can collect fresh

pine cones– hold acorns

like clam tongues

hold pearls.

Take the

bridge with me

between tendril arms

 of a sea-

lily.

An Open Letter for Those Who Love a Poet

A poet is the epitome of the unrequited lover– agape– open-eyed manic at the craned neck of night– entangled in the unfinished verse that never relented– never turned their head in caesura, trailed off without punctuation.

A poet is in love with a concept they do not want to have a definition for, they piece it together with their walks alone on brisk mornings that make their faces prickly Velcro– peeled off like unhealed scabs. They write it in syrup on burnt pancakes.

A poet wears binoculars around their neck in case they catch a glimpse of a stanza pacing the telephone wire– the chirp of chiasmus in the throat of a chick-a-dee– indented metaphor moaning in a morning  dove.

A poet is making notes underneath their tongue– muttering sonnet titles in a game of whisper down the alley with themselves– thinking of your lips like litotes–

A poet will never feel solace in an end-stopped line. The line kisses them goodnight but never guarantees their affection will still be somewhere in the sunrise.

A poet is nervous and sifts similes through their fingers like panning for gold in a droughting river– uses fish-nets for flip-flops so as to not miss a fleck of passing language between their pinky toes. Follow their eyes on the sidewalk–

Touch the base of their neck when their unwritten ellipses at the end of the day keep them from sleep. Tell them it’s perfect even if it’s not.

Tell them you love it.

You love it.

Who taught you to play hop scotch?

i play hop scotch on walkways

behind the mausoleum that I still think

looks like a museum.

i am a child of catacomb bones

that ring like wind chimes

in November. i like thumping

in the throat of this farm house

at midnight– my breath quick

like i am alive somewhere inside

my own coffin.

When i was ten i discovered

rigor mortis in the body of a dead bird

— i couldn’t put it down.

i am a girl who

makes a coffin on my desk

out of posted notes–

an undertaker of unfulfilled plans

to walk across a bridge so we can count

fish waiting patiently

and ringing bells above their heads.

I’m not thinking about suicide.

I’m thinking about dying

not like the fixed letters on a gravestone– in an unexplained

wincing of a door frame kind of way

like wearing your dead grandmother’s gloves

seeing your dead aunt in pictures

tasting an element of her smile

in a stale package of M and M cookies.

In the pause after you hear a dead person’s name–

that passing though

And they’re not here anymore

But they were.

I’m not thinking about suicide

I’m thinking about haunting  the creases of this house

and kissing your cheek in curls of steam

escaped from tea cups.

Of remembering sleep

Splice me like the segments of a worm–

in between hearts

wriggle in two pieces

to be tapped on the shoulder

by my other half

who is also someone else’s twin.

I don’t know where I go

tips of thistle on a window frame

I am the shards- the angles we take

between dropped dish plate

bones on the red tile floor

whose speckles hide like landmines.

They say we don’t remember sleep

but I do. I stand at the side

of my bed as if waiting for

myself to wake up or die– or both.

I call myself a dormant sleeper

my soul quakes in lava-thunder bellows.

I walk away from the girl who rolls over

thirteen times each night

who counts heart beats like ripples

who closes her eyes like

licked envelopes

and stamps seated in the corner.

I would return only to find we are one.

Somewhere between body

and ghost– somewhere between

lips of chalk and fingers

that drop bread crumbs

out the window like dying

stars.

Of Books half-read and days Half-lived

I don’t know how many books I’ve only read the first page of, I’m kind of ashamed of it actually– like introducing yourself on a busy Baltimore street-corner in august when everyone is discovering somewheres. Introducing yourself only to turn back into the crowd and avert your eyes– like meeting a former elementary school classmate in McDonalds– bumping glances– not even passing hesitant hellos.

My unfinished books are as haunting as days that you wait for night to come– days where I live on the perhaps of countries I don’t speak the language of or the prospect of living out of purple backpacks with torn straps on the beach we sued to visit when I was 7 and 8 and 12 and 14.

I know I’d be lonely even though I say I want to be a hermit so I imagine you with me, I know that’s selfish and I don’t know if we’d be happy but I can promise I’d wait for night to come with you. I’d whisper the cliche “Times moves so fast… It’s moving so fast…” and you’d read my unfinished books and tell me I didn’t miss anything even if they were your favorites.

Regret turns us into street corners, rounds our edges like the arched eye-brows of each question mark. I don’t want to regret dusk. I have never regretted running away with you to July beaches and the ruffled necks of pine trees on Sunday nights when I feel like leaving all my books unfinished– you pick them up, turn the page and out loud until it is dark out the pursed lips of the window.

I repeat the cliche “Time moves so slow… It’s moving so slow.”

“And I love you.”

I like humidity– film like espresso hairlines or Elmer’s glue skins on 3rd grade thumbs– wear it like crown of larkspur or hyacinths– kiss it when I roll over in the night– whenever I wake up before morning I’m at the pancake beach house– the one with the unpredictable ants in the kitchen that laid eggs in the sugar bowl– the ones we mistook for chocolate sprinkles. Where we peeled off each morning like a fresh clementine veins– boiled them to dismantle the hell of another person’s house that we occupied like the mucus arms of a sea anemone. At dusk when the storm gnawed at the pen-cap lighthouse I wanted the structure to fall– a spoon into the bubbling soup of chicken broth-air. I woke up with the odd feeling that I was swimming on earth– skin unfurling like a porch-flag or broken eggs in a pot of salt water in a pot without a handle– I like humidity– I like my skin as your skin. I like to wake up from insomnia to look out the window and watch the storm’s jaws gnashing across the channel– the pine trees cells as my cells– your dead skin peeling harsh like a tangerine into mine– share my white veins wake with me in the storm– pull your fingers through the crema of my hair and go back to sleep simmering with me– orange peels lost like ants in the soup pot with out a handle.

We write too many poems about flowers

and not enough poems about the fake lilacs that collect dust on my great-aunts egg-shaped dining room table. Three places ready for Mary, Flo, and Joan are set with the white and pink fine china plates even though Joan was buried in Saint Catherine’s cemetery last cold April.

not enough poems about the fake blue roses in the vase on the reception desk at the maternity ward at Saint Joseph’s hospital. The ones with the fake dew drops on them as if they have just persisted through a rain.

not enough poems about the fake sunflowers at the Lutheran Nursing Home next to the piano that no one ever plays because it’s locked. The one that George Schaffer comes to every morning tugs at the petals of to check if it’s alive only touch the scratchy surface of plastic petals.

 

 

 

In fourth grade I gave up candy for Lent. At a sleepover my friend Jackie waived peach rings in front of my nose and told me, “Eat it! It doesn’t matter!”

In fifth grade I gave up ice cream for Lent. My teacher Mrs. Barron sent me to the nurse’s office after I refused the class Saint Patrick’s Day ice cream social.

In sixth grade I gave up soda and halfway through March I set a can of diet coke down on the counter. I had forgotten. That week I went to confession, bouncing my knee across the table from Monsieur Schaffer who always hung his head like the slouching neck of a daffodil in the rain.

“I broke my Lent promise.”

He leaned across the table and pushed the sheet with the act of contrition written on it away from my face so he could look at me.

“There’s no one way to prepare for Him. It can be easy to give up things. It’s hard to pray.”

I took Lent and erased both ends to smooth them out into ordinary time. I said I’ll make hail Mary’s from the decades of peach rings– count our Fathers in plastic sundae spoonfuls–

I’m trying to make my mouth a steadfast prophecy– no I’m not a Saint but even a girl who drinks diet soda and gets coffee with the devil sometimes and pray with her rib cage and her lips like a coffin lid holding nothing inside.

Tuck my hair behind my ears like dog-eared pages.

Underline my veins in black pen so you don’t forget the palindromes in my simile sinews.

Like all of us I have only ever been a book of “100 poems”.

Passed from card board book sale boxes

to the wrong library shelf

to the leg under the wobbly dining  room table.

Most days I book mark my sonnets in my elbows and free verse for my fingers

The haikus of my cheekbones.

I can’t tell if I want you to read me cover to cover or write love poems in my margins in colored purple pencil. You can be my 101st poem that I can write into the table of contents, hidden in my queasy flyleaf pages.

We are the people of tiny spaces.

We are the people of tiny spaces.

Of loft beds.

Of antique lamp light reading leather bond

books of “100 best poems”

we’ve read before.

Of reading Wordsworth and feeling eternal.

Of arguing ourselves wielding

ball point pens in the margins.

Of coffee cup mist licking our chins.

Of window sills in the morning.

Of lumpy pillow corners.

Of pauses.

Of silences.

Of the people who savor the breath

between people’s words.

Of tiny spaces.