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.

God took up a bamboo brush

Dipped it in the space between

his knuckles– drew lilac blood

in drying dew droplets of daffodils.

He said,

“Let me make something so beautiful

that they can almost forget death.”

Licked their foreheads to stick them on like stamps

in a cautious Sakura shrug

or the impending imperfection of

drying rose petals forming bushy mold.

God made the bride’s maids bouquet

of fingernails and bird bones.

My brother wakes up

in a Germany

he made in our attic.

The gun-fire mist of an encampment in Verdun–

The approximations of his leather straps, compasses,

bayonets, and black boots still scuffed from the

frantic somersaults of shovels are displayed

like a museum or a picnic.

His pocket watches hang themselves

like deserters by his digital alarm clock

that wakes him up in musket-fire.

I’m fascinated by a boy who is such a pacifist

to want to imagine himself at war everyday.

His voice trails off when he talks about a battle–

void of glory– like the hesitations of  a veteran–

as if he’s seen death.

My brother is a corporal.

My brother is saint.

My brother is rusted bayonets and dead men’s

war medals.

My brother is a sixteen-year-old

scholar who reads the first chapter of

book from our attic.

 

 

The Phrenologist

I wish there was a splotch

the size of skipping stone

above my ear lobe for my phrenologist

take out and put in a mason jar

like blueberry sauce my

mother used to boil in early August.

Always too runny– dripped from toast

on the counter top to become

sticky like scabs for mandibles of the

ants that came when it was

disquietingly damp.

He would likely find me to be abnormal.

He would say I was a jigsaw puzzle

of senseless guilt

 and hungry arm veins.

He would say that I think too much

about clouds and windowsill.

He would see that I was a torrent

between hope

the sublime, and the tiny corner

that a banished all sense of

self worth.

I wish he take his scalpel and cut out my OCD —

make the sticky spiral pacing always

under my fingers nails

on the counter

in the jaws of the ant colony

still dormant under

the kitchen sink.

 

Highways I pace like veins

but don’t know the names of.

I forget that I drive myself home from places now.

No– I don’t need a taxi driver

or a chauffeur.

I will never be too old to admit I sometimes

pick up my phone to pretend that I could

just call my mom to come get me.

I want the seamless travel, sleepy weaving of locations,

thumb print of static sifting on the radio

in my temples.

Rest my head against the door– breath only through a trickle

of wind.

I want a conversation that meanders back into

the hum of slave-hymns in the rubber wheels and

wincing of seat belts at stoplights.

I want to steer like my mother does.

like a tired swaying crucifix on a rosary.

I wait at the street corner of a strip mall for a blue station wagon

that’s not coming.

The car still has sharpie doodles of ghosts scribble on the

ceiling from when my brother and I were young

enough that if we called it art it could be framed.

I once tore plastic hunks out of the door frame

on one trip to Chingoteague Island

and the wholes are still there.

Car trip boredom makes anarchists of eight-year-olds.

The car that was frequently late to guitar lessons on Wednesdays

that cradles stray french fries from Wendies in its throat

and stroked my hair from the passenger seat

on the way home from orthodontists and therapists

both trying to piece together the remnants of

a fourteen-year-old girl

who rode in the passenger seat.

A. Aurelia

I have known each wrinkle of the ocean

bled salt water from my exumbrella. I have breathed with the haggard

lungs  and arthritic fingers of the coral. The staghorn that opens their ribs like gallows.

I was pulled from the tangled hair of Medusa– dropped into the sea– a silken shower cap. I learned to eat with a hallow tongue and think about how everything that dies sinks to the bottom to die again in the mouths of crustaceans.

They will thrash their legs to resist me– tread water– tread drowning thighs. Men will

call me a bloom. Call me dead skin and milk foam. I will wait. I will see with the

eyes of the water.

It’s                    water

all                     that

I                  formed

ever                          my

was.                            her

                stinging                           hands

My bunk bed is a gallery of girls of I have been.

a testament to the person I haven’t quite yet become.

There’s still a wad of gum lodged in one of the shoulders of the bunk bed’s steel frame from when I used to collect gum balls in a bag that I hid beneath my pillow. She didn’t have the ability to lie– only to serve as the sage to her brother.

Billy and her sat on the floor and laid out to the gumballs and she pointed to the blue one. Said that it stopped time. Pointed to the green one. Said it made you invisible. Pointed to the white one. Said it made you breath fire. Billy eat the gummy worms.

One the outside edge of the bunk bed there are rows of stick hearts from unfinished fifth-grade Valentines. Everyone got Valentines and no one knew what they meant.

She had short hair. She was annoyed most times about how her stomach folded over the waist band of her jeans. She didn’t like the lines that bra straps made beneath her shirts. She had short hair. She liked orchids. In blue pen she wrote her crush’s name on her knee cap after she finished his Valentine.

Strings tied to the beams are relics of afternoons during August after sixth grade when the bunk bed became a caravan without a destination– selling dragon eggs and crepes.

She made a fire from a nightlight. Traced shadow puppets on the make-shift walls of blankets that made the bottom bunk into a cloth room. Told Billy to move over. Woke him up when she got the feeling she was all alone. She could only hear her breath and the fan. She was old enough to know that it was silly to make a caravan out of blankets but young enough to let herself pretend for fading instances.

Yesterday they slept on the floor of the gallery and still thought of gumballs and crushes and caravans. Fell asleep like an art critique in the mattress-valley their body had deepened for almost a decade.