You're sure you're not in love with me
she says with her eyes, nonchalantly,
a woman accustomed to asking.
they glint green just around the rim
some verdant ancestor refusing to die.
she tilts her head, furrows her brow, repeats
"You're sure you won't come with me?"
words swollen with entendre, you’re convinced
her hair backlit and sparkling,
"virgin" she's joked, never once dyed.
she kisses your cheek in departure,
wants to get back to the way our parents generation did it.
daunting,
the cliff of her jaw
the curve of her shoulder
all not nearly near enough;
haunting,
too many of your days,
inexorable from your nights,
this ghost who hasn't even died.
rule breaker, you think,
no,
rewriter,
carving them as she goes in gold,
a lightning strike, a mountain in smoke,
consummate impossibility.
where were you before this
lost
or worse, complacent
what were you before this
a dissident
an infidel
now
a man with a living exodus -
perhaps no better off, no closer to salvation,
but at least renewed in belief.
a heretic
commanded testily back to the faith.
Category: renaissance
-
idolatry.
-
turnpike.
just beyond the runaway truck ramp
ROUTE 80, NEXT LEFT illuminates beneath my headlights,
a shoestring road
stretching taught between the tin cans of our hometowns.
all i can see
is the brightly lit booth in the distance,
signs detailing price-per-mile,
toll tag readers flashing against the moonlight,
everything trying to warn me:
honey,
driving down this road is gunna cost you.
-
immersion.
another night of youth
wasted.
on the walk from the bars we kicked rocks and whined aloud
at the fickleness of our latest crushes. stewing over the injustice of it all.
my porchlight was tucked into the alley you'd continue down;
we'd reach it in a few more dark jokes,
wave, smile,
shout good wishes to the sound of my turning key.
i don't know who said something first;
i don't know if we said anything at all.
only that suddenly there was the flavor of your grin
the rough of five o'clock shadow pushing three am.
it was all so luxuriously simple,
so naturally unfussy -
we'd loved others before
we'd love again but for now
we were sticking middle fingers up and tongues out to Big Lonely.
fingertips swirling conspiratorially across thighs,
lips playing house against collarbones;
the assuaging breaths between bouts
hanging from the corners of the room, our canopy of relief.
there was the smallest sense of wrong in how right we blended,
stunning how we dissolved one another into puddles then giggles -
a spice i relished as i fancied myself recklessly daring.
i wasn't of course.
falsely audacious about everything,
i bet safe; i bet you.
because in even the smallest of things, you treasure - that's what i'd love about you
for years to come
as we each went about our lives, the easiest semisecret i've ever kept
(it was too fun to watch our friends' jaws drop, who could resist)
all of it
faded
so far into the distance now
nothing but depth patinaed into dark joke filled reunions.
-
electricity.
a heavy evening rain rose as a loaded fog,
cloaked us like a dimming theater light.
grateful for an excuse to hush under the guise of proper manners
we sat shoulder to shoulder, our eyes focused safely in the distance,
unsure exactly the show to follow but knowing with certainty
that it was starting.
just for the fun of it, i turned your smile over in my lap until it softened,
bated your breath,
sparked flint against the base of my own spine.
i fancied an impossibility
that this moment was inevitable, found myself shuffling through versions
of the vastly different people we could have arrived to it as.
after all,
what were we but shoe boxes full of trading cards shelved at our childhood homes,
each bearing our face with different uniforms, records?
what more had we done to reach right now but closed our eyes, stuck our hands in, and plucked one out?
i thought
how easy it is, to burn a box of cardstock.
the plastic coating would add an edge of stubbornness
clinging to its former form
before giving way
curling into a puff of black smoke.
-
weatherman.
i remember the air was balmy before we knew him. desperate for a breeze we'd throw open every window - dance, sweaty and barefoot, on an oak floor decades our senior. something powerful and ancient came screaming out when we gathered: chanting songs that reminded us of being young (chart toppers from three summers ago) throwing our arms up, out, around each other (the joy was too big to hold on our own) innocence sloshing rhythmically 'round the rims of our cups (three girlish grins colluding with six batting eyelashes to escape the consequence of some small town barkeep; "my sir, i've no idea! that pink lemonade really got mixed up with the wrong crowd!") it was so hard to notice at first - you, adultily checking the weather each day, to help decide whether it'd be cold without a jacket, when to leave to beat the rain. the world spun slowly on an axis of frilly distractions: for us - a creaky maple porch swing and worn dive bar jukeboxes and whirling around the front lawn with boys, for you - the weatherman, who had you lagging behind to apply sunscreen, to fiddle with your thermostat until it was just right. as the air cooled around us, between us, the checks kept piling up. bit by bit, you transformed beneath his radar. whether to wear that outfit, what activities would be appropriate to do; the whetherman guided your when, your what, your wear. snow fell. you bundled up. our toes froze stubbornly in high heels. it grew so bad near Christmas we tore up the floorboards, "to keep it warm in here" he said. each taking shifts to silently stoke the open flames, our planks of red oak burning to a bright cherry, a blackened mahogany, ash. dawn broke. you stood to fill the glasses, a muscle-memory intimacy interrupted by a brow furrow - our lemonade was suddenly plain. the last stubborn embers crackled television static through the stillness. i looked up at the funeral pyre in the middle of our living room and suddenly understood the term "meteorologist." he'd collided into the group of us and blown everything recognizable to pieces.
-
eclipse.
in hindsight, almost none of the words i wrote during him were beautiful. i think of him as an eclipse as some suspension of time where (arrogant in his impenetrability, preoccupied by his victory, basking in the surety of my retention even as i flared from every edge) he forgot: even stifled, warmth can be sensed. light seeks light. impermanent by definition, his incredulousness was delicious as his last sliver slipped back into the blackness - as he began to wane as i broke as i rose
-
ATLONGLAST
all of the resentment is gone.
trickled out the holes in my heart
shaped
colander,
the one sitting silent now in my mothers sink,
leaving only air-dried, starchy, sticky love
the kind that
stands up on it’s own
has a bit of back
bone,
the kind that’s
known
around town, eyes that meet, hat tips;
the kind that
brims.
-
apostrophe
you swooped in
stole some part of the heart of me
leaving behind a stitch, a scar,
a patch; pieces indelibly swiped.today everyone knows me as my eighty percent and oh
how i’ve simmered at the thought
aggravated at you being the understood, the generally accepted;
the catch in my breath, the white space.you’re the placard,
the place-card;
in me,
everyone knows what you signify.but while for so long i’ve seen you as a pause,
i’m suddenly realizing before you came along i was pieces;
bits
scattered and gapped and uncertain.
thanks to you, i’m changed
formed into a familiarity
granted an ease
opened up by being sewn shut.
your goal was never my contraction,
i see that now.
you stuck around
invested in me
visibly
permanently
you’re all that has ever held me together.
musée 