God writes me poets and nightlights.

Until I was in the sixth grade my parents waited for me to fall asleep. They read stories. They told stories. They answered questions. They lit nightlights like advent wreaths in the altar that has always been my windowsill. I have never understood why I had been so scared to fall asleep alone. Some nights when my parents lost patience I would go to my younger brother’s room and wake him up. I’d tell him that I’d heard something and that I was there to protect him. I’d sleep on the top of his bunk bed and check every few minutes to make sure he was still there.

My mother read from a Saint book and my father read from the Holy Gospel of fiction. One night I asked my mother if I had a guardian angel. I was thinking about how many there must be to take care of so many people and she had said that maybe they shared. I imagined angles taking shifts to look over me when I walked along the edge of the creek with the audacious bare feet of a seven-year-old who wasn’t worried about the way her jeans always wore away on the inside of her thighs and who ate peanut butter from porch spoons in the summer. I didn’t like that. I wanted one for myself. I didn’t want to be a shift or a nightlight or to fall asleep alone.

Sometimes I pretended to be asleep because I knew they were tired and I wanted them to get to sleep even if I was stuck counting cycles of noises on the sound machine by my bed.

My father read from all sorts of books. We read series but we never had a genre and I remember telling him “no one more, no please one more” I meant one more page or word or promise or minute that the air was still thick and creamy like peanut butter. The page was a wick, was a scripture, was a nightlight. The words poured themselves in late night cups of water procrastinating the loneliness of sleep. They were a stone in a river. They had always been a guardian.

What my mother didn’t tell me was guardian angels work at least three jobs—mine worked one for each of her three sons, they all had a different colored bruise on their forehead. She guarded so many children on the block and she was always really sorry— she bumped into things and knocked over lamps in the corner. She didn’t need to be sorry. We’re all too sorry. She couldn’t stay up all night—she had to sleep too. I just wanted her to read me something sometimes. She was trying. I know she was trying. We’re all trying—aren’t we though?

She’d drink coffee from sticky lips through sunsets and fell asleep like an apology.

And so we don’t sleep sometimes–

we rip skirts, we spill coffee on shoes and tables making mud puddles to fall into like drained swimming pools– we melt ice cream on our wrists next to scars–we burn holes in our skin with matches that light incense or the edges of scrap paper– we forget we have angels and we forget there were once people who waited for us to fall asleep — we don’t eat peanut butter– we eat moth-wing heart beats– we don’t remember what it was like to wear bare feet on porches and not think about on bellies full of sticky bun spiral– fall down stair-cases to the attic where we keep all our insecurities in flower vases.

I remember laying on the floor of my bedroom and thinking about cheerios. Dry cheerios. It was midnight and I was thirteen and I was thinking about breakfast. I was thinking about waiting till breakfast and how sleep wasn’t hungry. I was thinking about a third of a cup of cheerios, tracing their circles on my belly button. I remember thinking about the angel I had asked about when I was seven. I was wondering where she was that night. I traced the spin of a book on the shelf and thought about how you couldn’t feel the vertebrae of a book and something made me open it and I read until I feel asleep on the floor of my bedroom like a coffee stain.

And I woke up and I ate cheerios from a measuring cup. I swore they tasted like peanut butter but I am sure they tasted like a sonnet’s ending couplet. See my doctor said he didn’t believe me when I told him I ate 500 calories a day. He said that nothing held me up but God– but I was thinking how my guardian angel wasn’t holding anything but a nightlight. I was thinking how God fed me poetry from a porch-spoon like sleeping pills– how I learned to live hungry for everything  but words. How my guardian angel lives in between the lines written by dead people who also felt moth-wings in the chests and had their nightlights blown out by gusts of wind between their curtains. I find God in the splicing of saint stories and Kurt Vonnegut. Between Saint Clare and the thrown of Prince Caspian.

God writes me poets. God writes me nightlights.

 

 

 

We think

about rain

but not asphalt creeks

or the tributaries of

sidewalk canals that

sing in steam.

Take the

ferry with

me. We can sail to

the shoreline of my front lawn

between gum wrapper

capes, sleep like

tube socks.

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.