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.

10 Best Paying College Majors of 2015

1. Sticky notes– leave them in your books like foot sprints and flick them like yellow lizard tongues. Adhere them to your walls like band aides that embellish what they hide beneath.
2.  The spirals of notebooks– unravel them and re-thread them at the beginning of each class so you can remember that everything you are during that hour is fitting between the clutched talons of a metal wire.
3. White coffee mugs- drop in Splenda like a wishing well.
4. Windowsills– learn to write prayers with your breath and the fog– make a confessional and each street lamp a visiting deacon. Count your Hail Marys with finger nail clippings.
5. Soup spoons– turn them into mash potato ladles, macaroni and cheese vessels, and  peanut butter boats to form the wet lands beneath your skin.
6. Dryer lint– stuff teddy bears and take them to dinner at the tavern up the street that cuts their fries thick like river stones.
7. Backpack straps– hang like hammocks full of the hope they want you to believe is only written in other people’s veins.
8. Mismatched socks– that never had a partner.
9. Unfinished applications to jobs with acronyms for titles– use them for scrap paper and doodle yourself on the back of a dragon with long eye lashes and blue claws.
10. Blank spaces– when they ask you what you’re going to be lie and tell them you’re going to be a dentist or a high school teacher because even if you are all the things that you will become will never fit in the parameters of a blank space that anyone will ask you to fill in. Leave them your thumb print in blood– tell them you’re going to paint every day and life off welfare and make modern art from food stamps– paste them to your eye lids like postage and mail yourself into a new existence each morning.

I was the first to wake up this morning

or maybe the last to fall asleep–

I touched the wall by my bed–

approximated shadow puppets

in the dark.

Outside the wind or a car was breathing

into my blanket.

I breathed slow so as to not let

it know I was awake

and faces cluttered the window

like a zoo–

Took pictures with the muted

sunrise.

I conformed to my

ostrich egg shell– my cocoon

of blanket silks.

I coughed up wings of moths–

Wiped the knees of needle-legged

spiders from eye creases–

Removed the boiled-crustacean shells

from my elbows.

I was the first to wake up this morning

and saunter back behind

the macaroon curtain of a zoo

tigress– still waiting for a room

without a window.

 

 

My window turns

on with the street

lamps like a

television.

I watch like an

eight-year-old–

Nose to the glass–

Breath making vaporous

snow angels–

frosted wings on cold

surface from my lips.

I’ve seen this episode

before– I watch

it for the comfort

of the sequence I know–

the dialog of salt trucks

crunching on snow

like sour cream and onion

chips–

the same bundled figures

tottering like hard boiled

eggs–

Hum of the collective

churn of heaters melting

snowflake skeletons–

Hush of the long finger nails

of the wind raking

fallen snow its personal

zen garden.

When I was ten my dad took me to a barber shop and I turned into a boy with a buzz cut. I loved it. I touched my head and said, “Dad I’m a peach!” I turned into a boy who wore skirts some days. He wore one black converse shoe and she wore one pink converse shoe.

“Of course you still look like a girl,” my mother said. “It’s in your face.”

I had asked her because walking up to the bleaches at a Phillies game in my purple skirt and baseball camp the usher had said, “Right this way sir.” I was actually worried that I wouldn’t mind if someone called me “sir”. I wouldn’t mind them no knowing if I was a boy in a skirt or a girl with buzzed-cut hair. I didn’t correct them. I felt elusive. I ate my mango water ice proudly in the stands.

I played with hair gel between my fingers some mornings and others I peppered my thicket of brown hair with glitter or a white bow hair-band that faded to a grayish shade from use.

Sometimes during karate practice I would imagine what it would be like to kiss a girl. I was scared that I was going to be gay.

Sixth grade girls moved to the other side of the locker room because they said I watched them change– which was ironic because I was too busy fumbling with my contraption of a sports bra and worrying about them seeing the subtle fold of my stomach over the waist band of my gym shorts.

Some days I wanted to change in the boys locker room or just in the bathroom stall alone to figure out for myself what I was.

I don’t always know what I am but that applies to everything. I’m a poet and sweet potato chef and an explorer and a moth.

I am mismatched socks and one pink and one black converse shoe.

 

Zucchini Bread

I haven’t

eaten zucchini

bread since I

was in seventh grade but I

remember

waiting by our stove

in farm feet.

Wiped raspberry blood

from June hands–

watched night fall

like a television show.

 

 

If I were an anchor in a dark room alone with God I think I would have imagined what a lover would be like.

I would have thought of the curl of your lips like the crusts of bread– arrange your curly hair from the wooden planks of the floor– I could have imagined your eye brows by the arch of the door frame.

However, I could not fabricate the way you laugh like rain boots or that look you get when you’re thinking of something no one has a word for yet.

I could not know there would be a boy who could tilt his head like the lip of tea cup when he listens and like the corner of a snare drum when he remembers what everyone else forgot.

I could not know there would be a boy who was a minstrel and a pastry chef and a traveling salesmen of used poetry books.

I would hold myself at night alone with only my own lips and the bible. I would trace the holy spine of the book– pretending I could know that your spine is soft like the space between the rails of train tracks or rungs of fire

escapes.

Would I be different if I woke up in the body of a baker who lives on fifth street above his oven and glass cases of oatmeal cookies in line like soldiers?

Would they still call me ‘Sarah’ or would there be a girl who eats apple cores only dormant in the feelings of doubt on the ledge of a Sunday night before the cherry pies are done baking?

Have I been a refuge? An interior designer who eats the same Thai food every Wednesday with a man that she’s in love with but never works up the courage to speak to?

Have I owned a laundry mat with a pac man arcade machine in the far left corner?

Have I pulled the trigger of a gun and felt regret? Not me, not me.

I woke up this morning in the burnt thumbs of a baker who remembers only sometimes that he was a girl who baked lemon squares who remembers only sometimes that he’s been everyone and no one each morning.

 

Of course Saint Valentine was a martyr.

We all are. Really. 

They don’t know when or why exactly–

but it seems at some point a Roman cut off his head.

I wish I knew more about ancient Rome.

Then I could fully appreciate the idea

of Saint Valentine bolstering a bright pink

tin heart full of chocolate-dipped strawberries

in one hand and the other grasping a

bouquet of half-wilted Grocery store roses

like a Shepard’s staff in the other.

He would find niether very useful when seized by

emperor Claudius for marrying Christians

in a pagan state.

He might think chocolate is too sweet.

He might get annoyed by Hershey kiss wrappers.

He might think the roses could be

used as a weapon to swat at the soldiers who

took him away to be executed.

He might have wished for a lumpy teddy bear

as a shelf.

He might put his thumbs on

blind girl eyes– let her see

the world in sweet hearts

that she eats in the line at the grocery

store– thinking about how people

made candy to pretend love

is nothing but sweet cavities

and chocolate planets.

But aren’t we all made of the blood

of blind girls AND martyrs.