I’m trying.

I’m trying to not turn midnight into a ledge with wing beats of a fan and the anxious cyclops of a lamp light. I dangle my feet and I lean back into approximations. I lay on my back and pretend that I know the constellations.

A broken blue jay. A shirt cup. A collar bone boomerang that swing back around to bang on the glass of my window.

I’m telling myself there are things that are beautiful. There are still things that are beautiful. There are always things that are beautiful.

I’m threading a needle through the stars to make a necklace for a dance I went to when I was in sixth grade and I ate red velvet cupcakes.

I’m counting beads of frost like decades of the rosary.

I’m mapping the veins on my arm like underground rivers holding fish with no eyes.

I’m dissecting myself into parts– my fingernails are goldfish scales

My knuckles are droughted plums

My cheeks are bare red cushions that I just want to fill with pins

I’m counting my freckles like speckles of cinnamon.

I’m threading a needle through the hairs of eye brows to hem my herim pants.

I’m telling myself there are things that are beautiful. There are still things that are beautiful. There are always things that are beautiful.

And even my body holds things that are beautiful.

At Hawk Mountain there is a ledge called North Lookout that makes an imax theater screen of the sky and removes the ground from beneath you.

The boulders hold you up like a sacrifice to the mouth of crumbling wisdom teeth called The River of Rocks that meanders like broken jaw bone. Gravels chews you up and spits you out like gypsy mouth cocoons and the toothpick arms of newly birth screaming samplings.

When I feel small I think of that place and imagine I’m suspended there.

How even boulders are nothing but incisors gnawing on the edges of a horizon they can never fully consume.

I think about how I’ve only been there four times but I feel like I’ve been there forever. I feel like I was born there and maybe we all were born on a ledge of a mountain. Some mountain.

I think about how in sixth grade I ate cold squishy macaroni cheese for lunch there. I worried about a hole in the inner thigh of my jeans and about how no one else wanted to get close to the ledge.

Yes. I thought about falling. Not about jumping, about falling like a degraded tree– like a leaf– like a breeze– like a page turn– not to die

but to test how small I was.

You told me that you were a river and I asked you what were the

leaves, and the

petals

and the

dandy lion crowns

and the

pieces of steams like wrist veins

or mouse whiskers.

You said you didn’t know yet.

I wanted to know what I was if you were a river.

If I could the drop of a stone from the hands of a girl whose mother still braids her hair like the veins of leaves

or the unfortunate descent of a gypsy moth given in to the corrosive kisses of a cold breeze. An Ircarus laying on her back in the water.

or if I was the careful fingers of ivy and moss eyebrows on the bank.

But you said I was a river too– that we were all rivers– that mine had met his–

I had never thought of myself as capable of a River.

Melancholy 

I slice up a melon-choly and hand it to my brother over the phone in the space between our sentences when we don’t know what we’re going to say next because he’s sixteen now and we’re both in the process of becoming something.

The melancholy is ripe and I nibble at the rind like I did with sandy cantaloupe of late July when my father my brother and I would cut the fruit into smiles and gnaw on all the teeth down to the gum.

For both of us it will always taste a little different. So I’m already wrong to describe it. For me it was

Tangled leashes of wilting balloons

cold stale soliloquies of movie theater popcorn still sauntering about the carpet like blind mice

pink carcass of cotton candy on the kitchen table bleeding unlit fireworks

times I have neglected to slice up honey dew moments with my brother

and leave the rinds in the sink.

I want to belong to you like argyle socks with worn-in heels.

 like knotted black shoe laces

like silver gum wrappers folded into triangles

like crumpled clementine peels–

I wanted to belong to you like grey blankets covering toes

like the frost that makes the earth a statue

like the tongue of a watering can

like shivering umbrellas when it sleets–

Keep me here in a wooden heart-shaped box quiet in

the second drawer of your desk.

I can hold paper clips, tic tacs, and haikus.

I can say “I love you” each time

you open the lid.

You’ll find that I saved our movie stubs

our pho noodle take out receipts

our index card love letters

And from them made a story about

rested heads and fingers through hair.

I’m not afraid  to be a pier.

I’m not afraid to be a pier.

Unfurled arm of a girl reaching out for the God of coke-bottle boats and rescue rafts of milk way wrappers.

I’m dissolved by spring tides– my loose candy cane legs licked by oyster oscillations. I have warf wobble thighs but I’m not afraid for you to walk through the labyrinths of my finger prints only to meet me there.

I can’t promise we won’t fall into the water– but I can tell you that we could find lost wedding rings and teapots without arms. I’ll find pieces of sea glass for you each morning and tell you I love you as I breathe through the petals of sea shells. I’ll kiss you in the arms of sea weed gardens– fall asleep by the warmth of the a hydrothermal vent.

Dance with me on the crinkling fingernails of the old pier. I’m not afraid to know that sometimes the only things I can believer are that I exist and that I love you and I want to be lost with you

walk off the pier

float on a breath

look up to see

coral clouds

and a star fish moon.

 

 

We were once sorceresses in lavender-bed-sheet kingdoms.

Castles beams from microphone stands and walls fortified by cloths pins.

Camped in the wilderness of the attic encircled by plastic dinosaur shadows cast by key chain flashlights and the lantern we believed to be a fire.

Fed by rows of scavenged Milano cookies and a tiny tea-set with missing saucers filled with sips of raspberry Snapple tea.

Pasted our capes together with clear plastic tape and staples.

I was eight and more alive, more rugged, more untouched, more miraculous, more bold than I have ever been eating canned tomato soup by lamp light in the my apartment still encircled by shadows and held together by nothing more than cloths pins and the perhaps pancake pillows and morning.

La lluvía, dentro del crepúsculo, entre de días

There have been times

both the moon and the sun

dip into the crust of the earth–

two spoons in creme brulee

hold each other at a distance.

stop moving falling– in pendulums

somewhere between a crescendo

of our sleep.

La música suspira entre sueños

entre gotitas de miel

gotitas de ambrosía

gotitas de nightlight flicker

veil of the la lluvía

underneath our skin– my skin

estoy entre dos mundos

dos de sol a sol

de the horizon de almohadas

y malvaviscos.

Abrázame entre más de trece ojas

de vidas que caen en la lluvía.

No estoy nadie.

Nunca fue nadie.

I am only the time between.

Entre gotitas.

Entre infinitas vidas.

Most days I

want to run away to

memories I’ve

never actually

had.

Street-saunter

down the double-yellow

lines on Main at one-a.m.

in July when

Kutztown is a breathing

husk.

Follow the road to the hill

with the graveyard

where no one I know

is buried.

Half the tomb stones are

caressed faceless.

Lay on my back

alone and pretend

I’m kissing a boy

I’ve not yet met– eat

peach rings like manna.

Camp beneath the moon

shadows of anonymous obelisks–

stuck in the soil like pen caps.

I reach up to spoon

the moon from between

warm wisps of brothy clouds

like a won-ton–

Peel it open as I would

a bag of 99 cent gas station

gummy worms. I’ll

save the last pieces for you

and leave the rest in a bouquet

by the grave made for everyone

and no one.

Morning is a mishmash of Macintosh memories that still taste like corn mazes in October when the sun is too hot for the sky to hold it– gives birth to Indian corn pupils that simmer like mismatched socks in closet drawers.

I am a fisherman for a ripe tide to take me somewhere other than my head and I can never pick a pair of shoes. I keep a jar of widowed ear rings from times I have neglected the other half.

I piece myself together like the collective of three puzzles from a shelf in the back corner of a the Once Again thrift store. Apple corn baskets. Vienna sunrise. Your mother’s herb garden after the frost.