Dear Scott,
Remember how I told you,
“I am really only myself
when I’m somebody else whom I have endowed
with these wonderful qualities from my imagination?”
I’ve been thinking, all those pieces of me
are like pecans in a loaf of bread
baking in the oven and as it bakes,
those pecans get further
divided by space
and fluffy dough stuff/
think that’s why space
with all its soundless,
cold in-between
was something
I didn’t care for at first
but now I look up
and see myself
in the reach between stars
in the places of nothing:
a soundless place
I can speak and
hear it.
I am not silent in a clothes basket,
4 years old and thinking I am hidden-
no, I am un-shelving continents
with my dancing
with my love
having everything to say
and nothing worth saying,
according to myself.
When I went insane, love
I was caught up
being every version of me,
a puppeteer holding the strings
poised but unmoving
uncertain in where
this one goes or
that one came from/
‘they’ see
an effervescent, socialite
dancing on tables, and
I believe I’m showing daddy
I don’t need hard work
to build character,
that my beauty is enough
but, truth is
I was working hard,
I could live off the wistful smiles
on boys faces and be plump
as a jelly bean
stuck to their cheek,
that sweet aching
they don’t really like
but take all the same.
I was many versions of myself
scattered around a sun
and I could feel a warmth
but it was skin deep
and these parts of me searched
one tip-toeing on the event horizon
with a spoon in her mouth
flask of vodka on her hip
and another draped along Europa’s
smooth surface orbiting Jupiter,
her tidally locked, lover
(they say Europa spins faster than its orbit,
because the stuff inside is unbalanced, Scott).
Remember when I jumped in the fountain
in my red swimsuit? The space between stars.
Remember how our feet burned on white sands
bright as whiskey fire when we lived
at the end of everything
and the beginning of anything?
That burning was close as we could get
to finding the sun I speak of.
I was most beautiful
picking all the things I love
about people all the things
I love about living: laughter, dancing,
drinking- all the things that please me
scant almost too much
the way men turn me
like hands turn the pages
of a book
a blank page
opened in the night
and wanting to be
filled, or to know
finally, what do you find
between the stars
and the sun?
and was it enough.
On that beach we lived for awhile
where I should have felt some peace,
my hunger just became greater/
all those versions of me I created
and not one sun upon which to orbit
like the pecans in that loaf,
I am lost now
foot stuck in an air pocket
in that fluffy stuff and
100,000 versions
scattered across the universe-
the paths are all broken
or were they just
never charted.
Before you sent me away
sometimes I would think of baby birds
when hungry, but I wouldn’t know
I was hungry or
I’d think of a zipper over the mouth
of little girls and all the stories
that could be told
watching our daughter reading
under the oak tree
and didn’t know
there was a sadness,
I just kept dancing
hours upon hours
so I could be as
worthy as you were
to be alive.
And, when I said to you,
‘People look like ants in a bottle’
I was just afraid I was the same as them,
these people that looked like strangers
walking in circles and
that I was a stranger, too
all of us like ants
marching in straight lines,
protecting the queen, carrying
bits of leaf back to our anthills, so
I needed to love you first
and live incidentally
and that’s really
the story,
don’t you think?
Now, all these grown men
try to fix what’s gone wrong
with shots that make me shake
with violence,
and my mind is hoarfrost clinging
to bare branches,
my self, a ghostly butterfly
too insubstantial
to rest on the flowers/
I wish
I’d stayed with the girl
in the clothes basket. She
liked to talk about happy elves
in a make-believe place
everyone told her she needed
to leave behind, but she
is real, can follow the path
from her smile to
the stories creating
who she will be
when she is stronger
if she trusts
she is strong
and not a woman
who needs you.
I am the empty cup
with no handle,
the handle is somewhere?
Maybe
it was your hand on my stomach
as you slept maybe
I am a little girl you told
could only bloom when
you were sleeping
so you could be
F. Scott Fitzgerald
without inconvenience.
No one could have survived us, Scott,
but everyone really did love me,
didn’t they? All of my
stars and the space
between them,
if I could choose again
to chart the paths
with someone by my side:
you, my family, this world
or even my own heart
if I would stop and
feel this hunger.
Category: Poetry
beginnings
I don’t believe in endings, by which I mean,
it’s difficult for me to believe in endings
by which I mean, I have known many
so-called endings, and can
no longer see why it was an end
when I began then.
A segue- the end of a thread
tucked in my eye where I could
track where it came from. Or a messy,
frayed bit I licked a few times before
placing in an envelope I folded into my curly hair:
my hair is long enough, I can hold all the
love letters I’ve sent now.
At night I let my friend untie me
and read the words that mean
an ending that never came-
just the beginning of
finding us. Funny to me how
I am so much myself
with another, the
many, so-called endings
in the making of.
I want to remember this
when what I love must
inevitably transform, and
change is the only thing
that stays. To ask
I still love what is left
of before/ a wave
on these soft sands
comes again.
in caves
Sunflowers
grow | beneath
cliffs, a din heard
in the mouth
small sound
of
roots deep,
stems bracing
waves that crash
high like a hand
held to the face
with eyes closed
pauses all
of it
here,
some will arrive
by wandering
but it is dark
and so much
unknown
to wander
freely or
consider
to stay.
We see only
their crowns
as they breach
the unseen,
their beginning
is close, just
a step
into a place
the sun holds
without ever saying,
hello/
we could know them:
their bright faces
petals a happy
yellow and lovely,
framed in what some
would say is joy
but they are shaking
their heads slowly
no, yet again
with each rising
and setting,
they follow from
the place they
would leave
if only these
deep roots
inch by inch
would pull
free
-
Did you know
stems grow in
the night to
the west so
the head can
sway to the east
at sunrise. The
stem guides
like stars in the
night, desert sky
are persistent
or pollen on
a honeybee
is small
easy to miss
but irrefutable
they,
are guided far
round cold corners
wide, clementine
eye, happy and
content/ how
the heart
keeps the mind
stays the heart
to keep on
and the sound
in this hidden place,
brushing upon
damp walls: the
wind at the end
of its journey
over wave
and accidentally
in this hollow
is song like
woman who
whispers, do not
let me break,
please but
same way,
rounds corners
and rejoins
the sky-
wandering
you may slide
cliffside into
deep ocean,
not seeing
it is a cliff
where waves
will slam
the mark of
this place,
and will swim
near a place
dry but dark
and cold
when no one
is around
to see you.
Wild sunflower
grow, long
stemmed
and
leave, I
would say
this old cave-
eventually.
Eye following
the sun even
as it sets with
you, no madness
or sad keeping
of memory but
growing round
cold walls into
the quiet beauty
one day, of
knowing nothing
of the previously known.
preservation
In that former innocence
a second sun bloomed
in my heart, and I
tucked dreams
and hopes
within my small fist
a moth within-
I held it
tense,
in careful regard.
Sometimes
I would tear, slightly
a ghostly wing
having
no space
in a hand to
move:
I shook or would
startle.
And so I began
when it was night
and I could hear the
urgency silenced
day-to-day
to still squirrel away
each fold of brain, the
tender stomach
delicate bones of a toe/
all beneath my pillow
where I would remember
whenever
I could rest
and today, there
I hold my hand
in sleep, reaching
feeling
something
alive
in my hands.
paper crane prayer
Blooming in dark alleys these bullets called innocence: children who discover the world sting my eyes these bullets called innocence pepper on the page sting my eyes and they are wet like my father’s when reading, The Little Prince and they are wet between the pages when reading, The Little Prince and I am riddled with responsibility between the pages a crumpled paper crane, a bookmark and I am riddled with responsibility leaning between pages now a pause a crumpled paper crane, a bookmark this tired from saving the world leaning between pages now a pause thinking what kind of story is as good as: this tired from saving the world and knowing/ the beauty of night jasmine thinking what kind of story is as good as: children who discover the world not knowing the beauty is them, blooming in dark alleys.
athena
I will build a bridge
when it is dark
and you cannot see
the mark of your survival
to remind you- take
the birds broken
at your feet where
they rest and sing
to them, humming
in small beaks a song
if you think
they no longer
can hear.
Remember the trophies
we shattered in the dumpster
that night they came in the
mail? – my sadness,
I will hold a fist
to you and pound
until the dirt lifts.
On the night they died and
took truths from which
you were sculpted- I
scaffold the mind in memory
balance upon broken strands
of silk like a spider, and
find the center/
let us read a tale
I saw between the stars
scripting us- it was
just as true
as this tragedy
and build a bridge
of broken trophies and
birds’ wings between
one story and the next.
a moment, still
Seven years ago I lived in the mist and rain of the Olympic Peninsula to walk where wild things walked and lay upon the moss though a spider sunk into my soft stomach. It only hurt momentarily, and regardless, it is never safe to be where it seems safest, where lightning would never touch, waves, could never crash in the long dark of winter- never the crackling cold the moment-stilled heart though days pass. Truth is my hair has been standing on end since I was born from the shock but I comb it smooth and lay across another’s shoulder like a cloak and walking again into the quiet of the Cascades or the Hoh maybe I will find a big, black bear and not be reminded how any moment the sky may fall like hers did unexpected and violent, maybe she was afraid, I keep wondering. I, am sharp flint of ebon eye facing bear, am rock of trembling, St. Helens/ could blow could sleep instead, for awhile peaceful as flowers grow bright upon the back. I think of my tree that is only memory now, how Magdalena strong and twisted could lean into the cold and wild storms, how memory is the willowy heart/ a captured softness to put in a box with her gray eyes and my father’s calloused hands.
In Due Proportion 