Loving you unfurls like cream cheese spread. Like marmalade on the dark toast with the seed-dotted crust. It’s pen clicks and the profiles of our faces. I love how we can lay together like puzzle pieces. we drew in the silt. There was never a full picture– never a full puzzle for us to fall into. We make our own illustration from warmth and quiet breath. I wrote a map for us this morning between our clasped hands. I don’t know where it goes but I know it’s in the oscillating distance of our orbits. Call me Despina and I’ll call you Neptune. I’m sorry about the constellations I’ve found in you– but only because I never wrote them down. You wear Orion’s belt like a crown. I write you poems as a cartographer. Let’s build a mountain range upside down in the ocean. Right on the fault line. We can leave hand prints in the magma and tell Triton we’ll put everything back where we found it.

 

I’m wondering

what I would become if the snow

never stopped–

if God decided to flood the earth again–

only this time in white.

I’m wondering if I could learn

to live from the windowsill.

I think maybe we would

make nations of

our door steps.

We could to let

each day warm like a

tea kettle and whistle

like the birds that long ago

flew to a planet without

winters.

We would have families.

We would play poker

with dimes because would

would have forgotten

what they were used for.

Our children would ask

if God loved the earth

why did he pack it in white.

We would explain that he

was just packing us in safe

like dolls– but really we

would try to remember what

grass looked like.

We would think about how

the sun felt on our freckles.

We would look up at the ceiling

at night and try to approximate the

stars.

I dissolve like lemon hard candies

and the coiled up edges

of midnight on Thursday.

I squirm in crinkled wrappers.

I suffocate in the spiral of my own

razor wrists.

I said I could stop writing

sad poems but people

like my sad poems

because they some from

somewhere in between my lips and the cold air

that bites my teeth

in January.

Because everyone likes the

taste of blood

because we don’t look away from

car accidents

because poetry is a cheap therapist

because poetry doesn’t ask me if

I’m still thinking about quiet

ways I could die on a Thursday

night.

Poetry doesn’t prescribe me

medication.

Poetry would understand

why I burn my wrists

like wicks.

Poetry knows

I’m not special but

something in my pen is sewing me

to the collective suffering

of so many other victims

of humanity. Something

about Thursdays always

feels like a precipice.

Tonight I’ll sleep

on the calm edge and wrap

myself in words until

my breath is slow

and warm.

Dear Fred, My Former Pet Turtle,

I wish you would send a postcard

so I could know that your arrived

where you intended.

I pretended I was upset

when you escaped

from the blue plastic

kiddie pool in the yard.

It always sat under the tree

and killed the grass in a great

big egg– like a crop circle.

I had wanted you to leave.

I asked my father

if you would survive the winter

if you climbed out.

When he said he did not know

I still thought you knew

you would arrive where you intended.

You were a Texas Slider but maybe on

you way down there you

stopped in New Orleans

and fell in love with Creole

and now play your guitar on

a cobblestone street corner.

Maybe you stopped in Florida

at a sunglasses hut

and bought your own franchise.

All I’m saying is of

all the creatures I have

seen I never know one who

seemed to understand so

well where they were going

and where they intended to

end up.

I’ll meet you when I know.

Until then I’ll read your postcards.

Sincerely,

Sarah, the owner of the kiddie pool

 

 

 

I think I’ve begun the process

of becoming everything

and nothing.

I think that is what

it is to be human.

I read about the Incas

and how their poetry

is in pictures

so each time you

read it aloud it

is a new poem

from the same

slabs of stone–

I want to sing

from my skin like

that each morning.

Knot my hair to

remember the day.

I’ve coiled

myself like

walnut shells

in the margins

of books

with yellowed

pages that

smell like

other people’s

finger prints.

I keep

the company

of the brief

voices of

dead writers’

rattling paragraphs

of ribs, marrow,

and wind chimes.

I’m perched on

an indent and

cupping

punctuations

in the palm

of my hand.

I’ll emerge into

stinging tongues of flaming ice.

Hands like stones I trek.

Make hearths of door ways.

Peel off my scarf like a scab.

Reopen the wound.

I have died many times.

I have been the pastel dust on the palm.

I have been the burnt candle wicks.

the incense smudges like evening

eyeliner.

I have died many times.

I have never been the breath

in fresh ashes. She doesn’t return.

I don’t find myself in the phoenix’s feathers.

I have died many times.

The same dust from the shoes

of a twelve year old girl named

Sarah– who wanted people to call

her “Saga” because she wanted to be

the journey is in my lungs.

She speaks sometimes but it is not me.

I have died many times.

 

We all have a room that we have left

at some point.

There was a door you closed.

The hinges were made from brown leaves

on the trail by your house.

Throw blankets with images of

cats screen printed on them

were the frame.

Locked the door with incense smoke.

You have drawings from first grade

scattered like tiles on the floor.

In one drawing you wrote a poem about your

turtle but only you think it’s profound.

You know that you

wrote it because your turtle

died when the frost came early that year.

The poem is happy to everyone else.

You linger at the threshold.

You turn out the light.

You wrap yourself with the

throw blanket like a cape.

You stack picture books on your

head. You cradle the limp

shell of a lime-green monkey

your dad one for you when the

carnival came to town on schedule.

like a train stop.

Somehow you pack your room around

your body like a parka or

and astronaut suite.

Because all you’ve ever done

is walk along the

edge of a nebula.

You peel off the layers that night.

You have clementine skin

and blue veins

that gush like the creek

when the frost came early that year.

My Grandmother’s Kitchen

On the cold counter

I sat dangling my bare feet.

“Be still” she had said.

I wasn’t the type to sit.

I was of green grass stained knees.

She was slicing carrots

and peeled off pastrami for

me like sticky notes.

I ate the peppered edges

same as the crust of grilled cheese.