End
Even if something ends, you have to remember the love you gave out was never wasted.
Even the flower girl runs out of petals.
But how beautiful her path is made by the ones she lets go, & so is made a path for others to walk on after her.
True Love
Maybe true love isn’t what we think it is. Maybe it doesn’t always end in marriage — maybe it’s the day-to-day support of someone that knows you better than anyone else. Maybe it’s being able to call at midnight & ask for rescue on both ends of the tin-can telephones. Maybe it’s silence, maybe it’s space, maybe it’s letting someone find their place in the world while you wait. Maybe true love isn’t romance at all.
A Small Crystal Bell
let’s get lost in happiness
inside a sugarplum facedown
in a snow angel let’s
take every running moment
that we spend in each other‘s eyes
and weave them into a needlepoint
pillow our conversations
are a small crystal bell
let’s ring it in the evenings
when the world quiets
when we can finally hear
the other speak
Thin Cotton
I am an ankle-length, cotton dress hanging thin.
You watch over me as I blow in the wind.
How do I hold that feeling — the cusp of spring?
I remember April’s laundry. You praised the way I hung and folded. I laid out on the field and fell asleep in the breeze before you draped my body over a wire. You admired how everything becomes new, even me for you.
Outside, I hang myself over the vision of your hands. I practice wringing my neck to dry faster, but my hands are just holes.
A piece of my laced edge blows by me. My hemline has come undone.
Luggage
when he boarded his plane, he left me
with a bag. he never told me where to send it,
so i carry it with me. it’s locked
in my hand. his name is embroidered
on its side. people ask
who he was to me, and i tell them,
i don’t know. people ask who he is,
and again, i’m left guessing. but
i do have his bag, and i wish he’d come
back to get me, or it,
so i’d at least be a little lighter
and have another hand.
maybe then, i could hold someone
else’s bag, or even their hand,
if they offered.
Easter Sunday and Blueberry Pie
the silence the day after someone dies / is painful, usually, for me, because / we are all too grief-stricken to speak. / and then, everyone’s sitting there, / awkwardly sad, wishing they had / the emotional capacity to hold the other / up, and feeling even worse, as they / are so obviously incapable. but today, / the day after someone died / didn’t feel so impossible. we covered / blueberries, like it was a cold winter, / in white layers of snow-flour, / and pushed the butter sticks out / onto the flour-hills to play. / then, after throwing them all / in a small, round, glass room, / we warmed them in our oven-hearth. / they finished warming their coldest places, / then came to us, and we sat / with the multitudes of blueberries / and butters. they cried with us; / their tears floated up in tiny, hot beads / in a strange, silent, and golden way. / and at the very, very end / of my numb sunday, i thanked God / for the silence of the baking-white winter / and of the cold creatures that existed / with me in a way that made grief / feel possible.
Grounding On County Road 3201
five things you can see the horizontal road boats in a fog
the swallowable midday sun blackbirds in a waving sheet
a rabbit and a half four things you can hear a voice
that cannot sing the sound of clouds when the world
stops sharing oxygen three things you can feel a blue
velvet ribbon a house all alone fights that turn
into silver tears two things you can smell one
white flower the violets that surround me one thing
you can taste the sunset in my mouth
Love is a Bright Winter Morning
Love is a bright winter morning. Love has been described to us in fires and passions, in explosions and violence, but I think love is much gentler than that. I think love is blue and tolerant, that it is has the strength of an ocean wave and the peace of its recession; love is not red, or heat, or intensity; love is blue, and cool, and gentle.
Needlepoint
I push the silver toothpick until umber knots
become a rabbit. Half-moons cross into carnations
with the stitch’s breeding passion. The rabbit, now,
with a lignite nose kisses the blossom’s yellow center.
His whiskers wear speckles of pollen; a flower gazes
into his freckles, blushing since his nose, so near,
tickles pink her threaded petals. The rabbit’s eyes
count dew drops, clear. Brown, he brings a rouge
from meadows simply by his gentleness. A blossom
from within me reaches for that love he has, but with
impermanent creatures. I want a human: curious,
permanent, who counts my freckles, ignorant of
pink that dances in my cheeks. I stitch tear drops,
but I can’t embroider into life that love.
Advice From A Footnote
Do not let him slam the book (see 1 below) on the bed so near to your face that it makes a bluster in your hair when you are sleeping; do not let him push the book into your arm as he surges from the sheets, since he doesn’t care that your eyes jar open at his upheaval; do not let him skim you when you are carefully chosen words on a line; do not let him overlook you like a footnote when you are a title; do not let him punctuate you when you are an infinite alphabet; do not let him unnotice you.
1. But here I am in the bed with tangled hair and the closed book pushed into my arm and his back turned to me with the light in my eyes as I try to sleep. I can’t, so I sit up instead. Slouched, he faces the wall and reads; I am behind him. He turns a crevice, just enough to notice my blankness. He says, “What are you thinking,” just to keep me around. To make me think he cares. His too-loud voice jams into my silence. I know he asks me these things just to say he did, to shut my misery up in a wooden room. “You look thoughtful,” he says. “I am.”
Spring Triptych 1/3
let me tell you about rape / it is not like poison that eats the edges of something / and it is not like water that soaks the entirety / rape kills you from the inside out
rape is magma / it burns up what loves in your soul and leaves nothing behind / when it triggers / it is not like a rush of emotion that overwhelms and brings tears / it is the opposite
it is a quieting of emotions / a numbing / like ice / like grief / the same thing / if you think about it
rape punishes everything that thrives inside of you just for thriving / it steals compassion from its home / it extracts grace and ambition into the air / into another dimension / where they cannot peek through the cracks / or cry out
rape is like watching flowers grow in reverse / or seeing the way they flatten after a wild gust
rape is a great wind / it quiets a person the way silence falls over a town / and the people are left with sorting through what’s been taken / and what’s been destroyed
Panic Disorder
bus sibilates after halt and
tallest boy cuts by left side to continue on trajectory and
cold water drips from bus’s air vent onto newly straightened hair and
sharpening pencil breaks stillness of library and
a voice monopolizes quiet air and there is
that feeling right before the faint,
extended over many long minutes,
the one that makes the face red but
the skin gray, as though
the soul has left the body,
the glass that disallows the eyes
to connect with people on the other side of them, and
the sticky-jam spill of adrenalin burning through
each wire in the brain.
Ripples
Heron with sepia and white neck stands on two legs in the reeds. His eyes watch penny-sized frogs pop in olive ripples. A fawn makes his way through forest-marsh, his hairs catching early sun.
Just today, I held a bird in my hand, but I could barely see the honey-yellow glow on its wings, because grief was so violently present there instead of me. When I held her,
she was gone. She was a starving figure then. She used to call me and laugh. I don’t remember that sound anymore, but I remember holding her body and how it got smaller every time.
Heron sees fawn’s shadow in the reeds; fawn pauses, eyes widening as sepia colors flee from him.