Follow me again to this precipice.

All my friends sit on boulders and wait.

I’ve always surmised what a forever is.

Maybe it’s God– perched on jaws of slate.

 

All my friends sit on boulders and wait.

We leave foot prints in crumbs of corn bread.

Maybe it’s God– perched on jaws of slate.

By next year’s tomorrow this skin will be dead.

 

We leave foot prints in crumbs of corn bread.

Hike with banana muffin wrappers as maps.

By next year’s tomorrow this skin will be dead.

We’re clementines in the sun’s pirouetted elapse.

 

 

 

I will build us a nest

each night

from other people’s book shelves

strained backpacks zippers

widowed socks

and zip lock bags with damp tooth brushes.

I’ll nestle in the space between

couch cushions and whenever

I encounter your voice

through a line in a song

on the radio.

I’ll make picture frames

from scotch tape.

 

I was a necklace of wind chimes.

I sing for the voice of the wind

lodged in your throat.

I was a trickle of mud and rain water.

I mumble for the gravel

secured in the currents of your spine.

I was a skeleton of a blue jay’s nest.

I crack my knuckles with the houses’s foundation

for the tremor of the tails of your

brown scarf behind you.

 

 

Dear Emmett,

I’ve never written names in love poems.

It has always felt too much like a promise.

Dear Emmett you are sesame seeds

on blue counter top.

You are mornings that steep

like lemon ginger tea.

I wanted to tell you about

how I will know you

on silty beaches and gravel bays

when it’s cold and rain

is painting the street

with a fine tipped bamboo brush.

Dear Emmett you are my necklace clasps

and the hand that clips them.

You are the blue lines

on blank notebook pages

and poems that I’ve yet to set

free like black parakeets

from my fingers.

Yes I know parakeets aren’t black.

Dear Emmett you are my promises.

Dear Emmett I’ll be your blue bird

Dear Emmett I’ll be sunny-side up eggs

 

page turns, page turns

and bus tickets to somewheres.

 

Imagine what it’s like

when the corn is high.

When the sun sets

a eight.

Day burns long–

trails off like incense

out the window of my

room in July when

breeze saunters through

the house and slams doors

like the ghost of my grandfather.

or the spirit of tornadoes

and lightning bolts

that somehow miss

our roof.

Imagine wind chimes.

Hear window chimes.

Imagine what the fields

are like with fox paths.

Follow them into the

home with slammed

hallway doors

and incense tentacles.

Tomorrow morning I will wake up

and take the first flight to Estonia

because it was the first country I could think

of that I think I don’t know anything about

Other than that it’s next to Latvia and Lithuania.

I don’t even know what language they speak there.

Maybe they speak German– and I would call

my brother and ask him to crudely translate

menus for me so I could order the same

garden salad  how I like it

with balsamic dressing demoted

to a cup on the side.

I wouldn’t try to read street signs.

I would pretend that I always knew

Estonia. That it was my homeland

that I was returning to after years of finding

myself lost in the life of a girl with blue

hair who loved old baseball movies

and falling in love by accident with everything.

I would first visit my father and tell him

that I was sorry I had missed so many birthdays

while I was lost as an American.

He would tell me that I wasn’t his daughter

and I would insist that I was.

I would cook dinner of instant noodles

with edamame beans if I would find them there.

I would get lost in America again but before I left

I would buy something from a corner

store that didn’t serve a purpose– like a ceramic

turtle dove or a snow globe that rained purple

confetti flower petals instead of snow.

I would buy a box of chocolates

to give to whoever I encountered from my

American life first. I would tell them that I had

seen them and thought of them.

I would buy a red delicious apple to eat on the plane.

I would pretend like I discovered something

in Estonia about myself other than

that I have a father I never bought a birthday card for.

He would remember me by my blue hair.

When I flew home I would pretend like I

was embarking on a journey

into a place that I had never been.

I would visit the farmer’s market up the

street from my house and act like a tourist–

I’d ask if everyone in Kutztown was Amish.

I’d sample the local delicacy of shoe fly pie

and wash it down with glass bottle root beer.

 

 

 

Christmas Cookies and How I Learned to Bake Myself into Holidays

I don’t know if my mother liked the

actual act of baking cookies or just

the idea of being surrounded by such a variety

that if our cluttered counter of church bulletins

Bed, Bath and Beyond advertisements  and

shards of notebook paper with phone numbers

scrawled on them were to

be permanently cleared away

that our muddled kitchen

could be the centerfold of the Martha Stewart Magazine

Holiday cookie edition.

I remember the days when I had been the egg

cracker or the one who put the raisin eyes

on the gingerbread men.

If I held a measuring cup it would only be

to pour what my mother told me.

I pretended to be a sous chef and

I wore a red and yellow apron with flowers to play the part.

We watched Chopped and Iron Chef

while the oven held bouquets of

pecan tassies, snicker doodles

thumb prints, and anise spritz flowers

tight to its chest like unopened love letters.

She doesn’t bake cookies anymore really

and it’s no body’s fault.

There was one year where she was in the hospital

the week before Christmas and the only present

I remember is an ultra-sound image of my

unborn brother– I remember asking if

it was a picture of me.

She had only gotten to bake the lemon pepper cookies.

I think that was the last year I ate cookies.

I learned how to use measuring cups.

I never stopped tasting cookies even

if I don’t eat them.

There is something about my anorexia

that has made me a wonderful baker–

better than the sous chef should be.

Instead of licking spoons I can

taste the way the butter and the sugar thicken

in the greedy arms of the mixer when

the batter brushes against my fingers.

I bite into the chalky surface of a chocolate meringue

with my eyelids as I watch them grown like

little crowns in the oven.

I know I should be trying to eat more cookies.

I know it’s weird that I hold oatmeal cranberry

dough in my palms like bird eggs

because I feel like I can almost

feel the oats between my teeth.

I know I didn’t eat enough cookies this Christmas

but when you told me about them

I felt like I knew what compelled the sugar

cookie dinosaurs to raise for the breath of the oven.

And soon I’ll be golden brown around the edges.

And soon I’ll brush the taste of

chocolate chip blondies from my teeth before bed.

Until then I’ll make my brother the sous chef

and I can be the baker.

And he can put the eyes on the gingerbread men.

And my mom can tell me they look beautiful.

 

When I say I want to live in a tiny apartment in Manhattan with potted bonsai trees and a black and white ikea sofa.

When I say I want to live in a tiny apartment in

Manhattan with potted bonsai trees and a

black and white ikea sofa

I mean to say that I want people to mistake

my life for novella. I say a novella

because my flicker of existence does not

need a novel. I want people to hear

the last sentence and ask if there was ever anything more–

I want them to peel frantically through

the flyleaf pages looking for another piece of punctuation.

When I say “New York” I mean I want to live

at the threshold of myself

I don’t want to apologize

for my callouses or how I hold

my hands tight together as if

each step I take is some sort of prayer– I want

to wake up each morning unfurling like

crimson red autumn leaves and tossing

myself to drift between worn suede boots

and sneakers jogging in place at stop lights.

I want to smile at so many people

because I can’t stop each one to say

how damn beautiful they are that day

even if they are walking too fast in

shiny black shoes to see me

smiling at them. Even if they

look down at a green shopping cart

full of coats that were never new to them

because they think I want to talk to them.

I’m too much in awe to speak most of the time

so I only think of what I would say.

When I say “City” I mean I want to live in the heels

of wide-eyed three-year-olds

who wonder if skyscrapers are

as big as a T-Rex was and nibble at the corners

of bagels like a pigeon missing a toe.

When I say I want to live as a poet in Manhattan

I mean I love how the city lets me fade into

nothing but my own words.

I don’t have to be Sarah

I can be a girl who is stirring thoughts

with a thick wooden spoon

on a gas stove.

I’m carrying a secret between the jostle of the crowds.

My smile means I love you but it also means

I get to write about you– I get to imagine you

when I find a cafe to stop

and water color myself into the corner

to describe you in my little notebook

with the navy blue cover.

When I say I want to move to New York City

I say it because it’s the only way I know how

to say that I want be everything and no one.

I want to be slippers

and unworn sequin high-heels.

I want to be yellow stop lights

and chipped black nail polish.

I want to be coffee filters

and holes in the elbows of shirt sleeves.

I want to live in so much awe at everything

that my blood turns to mint tea

and I my pulse to trumpets

accompanied by mandolin.

 

 

 

The winking of

taillights makes me pounce at the

break pedal and I’m not

particularly fond of the act of driving a 1997 Oldsmobile down

the Pennsylvania turnpike.

I do like to be a tourist of small towns though.

An art critic of faded tooth brush factory billboards

Maker of postcards for places

who never bothered to print their own.

I love to imagine what it would have been like

if every Tuesday night after softball practice

in the seventh grade my mom

and I would have stopped at Marky’s Subs with the

blinking checked sign out front or

Russo’s Pizzeria– crudely painted red white

and green.

We have the same places in Kutztown but they

have different names and their own stories

blended in each corroded brick.

I wonder if I would have still liked to take the cheese off pizza

or learned to playe the trumpet if I would have spawned in the veins

of a different town.

Maybe we paint ourselves into whatever

stone settlement comes to know us.

I’m nostalgic for sidewalks I’ve never walked on

and street lamps that have never made my shadow.

I want you to know my streets because they’re

part of my own skin now– my past–

my breath is somewhere in the gusts

between the iron gated alleys.

Fallen factory buildings feel like amputations.

Everyone knows a place that memorized

the feeling of their bare feet on asphalt

and every place is beautiful because

someone remembers something there.

It’s true– I could stop and see for myself.

I prefer the tour though– the zoom in

zoom out of the places where we light candles in the

windows.

I’m making my own postcards–

dropping out an open car window to

watch each square to turn to ash

in the simmer of the tail lights

in front of me.

A petition to the concept of beauty from a girl who cuts herself out each morning from a sheet of sugar cookie dough.

I’m hoping I have more than fifteen years before they embalm me.

I’d like to see Tokyo or be in a place so quiet that I could only

hear my own hinges swinging open.

I’d like to eat Belgian waffles from the diner

next to the airport and everything bagels

with vegetable cream cheese from my blue kitchen counter

next to my mother who knits wash rags

before I’m embalmed.

Until then I want to learn to stop preserving myself.

I can leave that to the mortician’s

tray of tweezers and twisty rods.

I live in a county who duct tapes my eyes open

to the shape it wants me to be. I know I should

have a manicure if I want an office job

but not too bold a color or I’d stand out.

I should eat a salad with raspberry vinaigrette on the side

on my first date. I should buy food

with the word “lean” in it.

I should learn young how to listen to

the radio on an elliptical to drown out

my own ragged breathing.

I should know that mirrors were for enumerating

my imperfection each morning.

Dear concept of beauty– you gave me callous elbows.

You taught me there was nothing worse

than the word “fat”.

Don’t say it like it such a small word.

You can hear “fat” resonate in every pour

of you skin if you’re a woman in America.

Each letter explains how we were never

anything more than the roller skating Barbie

we wrapped up for our daughters birthday party–

as if pouring her into a waffle iron was a present–

a gift. “How lovely to be a woman?”

I don’t want to be a woman– you’ve made that

something I never want to be. Maybe I’m

queer because all I hear in “woman”

is the sulking figure of my anorexic sugar-cookie

finger nails.

I hope I scare you.

I hope you don’t know what my pronouns are.

I know my OCD will

continue to cup me in his palms like loose nickles

but I want to write beauty in how many steps

I took on gravel side roads that day

I’ll count snapped twigs and cardboard

coffee cups instead of sit ups or my

own ribs.

I have never wanted to be a sugar cookie

even though I have always

loved rainbow sprinkles.

I’ll eat them with a spoon.

I want to be banana bread or

three a.m. caramel brownies.

Someday I will eat food like I read books–

without fear of what they will change in me.

I’m not ready to be embalmed yet.

Leave that to the dentist’s chair.

Whatever I am now, tomorrow, and

next Thursday morning is beautiful.

Whatever you are now, tomorrow, and

next Thursday morning at the diner

waiting to order sunny-side up eggs

and a everything bagel

is beautiful.