Blinds up

The best surprise was four warm bodies
(seen better days, curlier hair, more supple skin)
Sitting around the dark wood gleaming with a coat
Of fresh polish and four faces (seen better days,
fewer wrinkles, eyes sparkling with light at the beginning
of the tunnel) reflected back in stainless
steel plates adorned with overbaked chestnuts and too cold
pizza. But the strangers staring in at the bay window
(seen better days, freshly windexed) wouldn't look twice
Because our holy silence is almost normal.

Thank you for small unnoticed miracles.
Thank you for giving Clarence his wings

loves me

Everyday is a shattering
a smattering of petals ripped
from dozens of long stems your former lovers never gave you,
your fingers mindlessly meditating on a childhood mantra,
and now the air is thick with pollen
and bees droning at their targets, missing their guides,
and around you the colors make all the suffering seem worth it,
and you sneeze

before I wasted my youth he gave me tulips in a blue glass
made for sipping, for morning routines, for water enemas,
and those flowers draped over the walls of their new home
like the limbs of a gangly teenager, wilting despite
their sprightliness
and I flashed him dimples he'll never forget

when my beauty was seeping away
I delivered a morning bouquet of tacky carnations and daisies
to a brunette whose smile I'll never forget

to receive is human
to give is to be God

I wanted you to be different
I wanted you to make me God

Lambert

This woman I love told me she is from another planet,
and as we sit in the car, engine running, watching the
suitcases and trolleys and goodbye kisses float by
one by one like snowflakes landing on our tongues
--ephemeral, beautiful, flavorless impressions--
I think I agree with her.

Her eyes are vibrant, her cheekbones tall and proud,
and her hair curly, short, inspires you to cut off your own,
overnight gray from a spiritual awakening that left her
too wise for my kind. We hold hands and my mind feels blank
as one of the travelers--an old friend I've never met--catches my eye,
catches me people-watching, catches sight of my parted lips
and my arrested heartbeat.

She and I, we hug goodbye, our farewell more esoteric than normal.
More unsettling. More eerie. More permanent. Frighteningly permanent.
The wheels of my luggage grate against the pavement and
my heart wishes these unpleasant thoughts away
and she drives away.

He greets me at the water fountain. His dark eyes, the dimple
on his left cheek, his outstretched hand beg the question of why
it's been six long years without more than a smile in the parking lot.
We talk like long-lost brother and sister about Peru, about injustice
(we always knew it would be so) until it's time for me to board,
until it's time for me to lose her.

recovery

The gratification of
erasing false starts
finds you just as unravelled as
any other pleasure

tingling fingers
itching, frozen, honey icicles
threatening to drip over
all of your opus, your corpus, like
naughty candle wax

with every heartbeat he didn't call
you grew a little older and one foot
inched carefully in front of the other
along the slick ice of despondency

what gets elided in the viscosity
is the rigmarole of feeling
dull feeling

No alarms and no surprises

Change is the nature of this fractal self, modulation
to the point that I no longer recognize the real,
no longer distinguish it from the accoutrements I've grown for
the benefit of those who don't give a shit
and when these appendages take on a life of their own
and cease to become vestigial, enigmatic, but essential
for those who love me for what was never organic but
only pruned, manicured, I am but a structure of feeling
a constructed other ready for consumption

Maybe this is the point of a low birth as an empty womb

Privilege, an unchanging self, you are unfathomable
And no less green plastic fibers on a fake tree than I

We are all covered in the maya of ishwara

Steel wires

If your tendrils contracted
my heart would be shredded.
Am I your rhizome too?

Until I die

Some of the ants don't follow the pheromones

Everyone wields a machete, everyone cuts leaves
and those little trails get wet in the rain

Some storm clouds never disappear, they just roll
over the mountains, a perpetual misty fog threatening
to unleash the known unknown on muddy slopes and tiny
settlements of forlorn humans under tents and tarps
and nylon

These six legs scramble across strange surfaces
and this hardened skin shouldn't feel the weight of
the day but it does

And so they stray

Experiment 2

Gut wrenching guilt. The power of words,
speaking them aloud makes them true,
truer than they were before.
This is why we joke not about accidents, misinterpretations,
heart attacks, cancers, one-hundred-year-old women dying
in hospital beds against their wishes.

Death

we die many deaths

Dark chocolate used to make my brain tingle
and the high trickled down into my fingertips and
made me a new woman: bolder. More in love.

After I died for the seventh time I could no longer relish
you, your smoky texture. All you left me with was
bitter aftertaste, a gritty tongue cleaning teeth,
thirst.

Parched
waiting for number eight
skulls and bones nudging my addiction to fear
heckle me until the new dawn

Experiment

A new stilted walk in plum, forty dollars you'd have rather
spent on the fruit. Shadows and smiles and a seedy bar along
old haunts, dotted with stones. You feel every one, a princess on peas,
big toes butting up against long steps down a dark alleyway:
the full moon blushing behind the lone patch of clouds,
fluorescent lights fluttering like moths' wings, morse code for
a city that people's hearts leave behind before they move in.

alive

Oh, to be a fish,
to feel eddies lick your gills,
to defy mazes of coral, to dart,
to disappear, to move as one with many...

To see the bait,
to take it unblinkingly,
and swallow the razor sharp hook
latching onto your innards.
Oh, that cruel blood:
a reminder of life and a harbinger of death
--but a simple death for there is no distinction
between instinct and temptation

But I was born human

Halloween

"Focus," she said, otherwise life will grab you by the skin
of your neck and dunk your head underwater and lead you
to so many apples your teeth barely graze as your dying
breath escapes from lungs too fragile to resist drowning
in an ice cooler of temptation:

A precious smile, one corner upturned, one corner
a scowl dotted with stubble you wish he wouldn't shave
pigment has crept out of that little patch of gray
he's salt and pepper
good for your palate and bad for your heart

You wish for a second, a minute, that the pad of your index finger
landed on those albino whiskers, the pad of your middle finger
on his carotid, the paint rubbing off and coloring you yellow,
your thumb on his lips, guiding his jaw gently towards yours

The last grain has tumbled from the top of your hourglass
down your sternum, sticky, into your navel and stuck there
it stays and the clock perpetually strikes midnight and
the pendulum swings and you both close your eyes and your conscience
steals that kiss

all you have is the haunting
the memory of lapse
and welts on your nape from those forceful fingers of fate

Anticipation

There are no stanzas for the unfaithful, no words for those
addicted to words, no couplets for your fingers scrawling out
letters, tracing alphabets of foreign languages they never learned.
The calloused tips flutter over a novel of temptation you want
to wish you never succumbed to but Hemingway's lemonade parted
your lips and circulated blood to your cheeks and every word
is a miracle, orgasmic, an uncertain god who will surely vanish
in your most desperate moment. There are no haikus for that kind
of crumbling, I-warned-you-so loss, no sonnets for the fading memory
of a fading smile, no poems for a broken man.

Soham

The day you learned that everything must end
in love, your heart began to sprout its wings;
the pain tremendous, reciprocity
a demon slain, with hissing hair of snakes
glimpsed in the mirror of a sword and turned
to stone, a bleeding rhythm to your pulse,
veins oozing syrup on the bark, you gush
away your karma. So the solitude
has left you: dessicated, sweet, and whole.

drums of affliction

Human drums, we are
human drums more resonant on the upper back
than the thighs, the sacrum.

These moments we share are a serein on
the brightest day of summer, the red sun setting
like a sweet lollipop swallowed by the most devoted demigod
over a concrete jungle, reaching for each other's
lifelines--yours broken, mine too long

And we beat and thump and tap and clap
this rhythm distracts me from my dark night of the soul

And in hermitude I will wait for the dark knight of the soul
to hoist me onto his shoulder and away from this life

the way I am

some things take a long time
but we're here for less than the blink of God's eye
so I will listen to this song on repeat
when I should be sleeping
because sometimes it's better to grant yourself a wish
instead of obsessing, brooding, fantasizing about
humming along to this sultry sweet song and feeling
the vibrations in my vocal cords
reach my jaw, my chest, my sternum.
like a muse, a goddess, a siren
just hum it:
one and done.

we are all God
and I will laugh and cry at once
as I appreciate the way you Love me

and share how beautiful your imperfect devotion is
with the universe

and hope that tomorrow morning you have two minutes
to dance

oleander

there are reminders, coming in daily now,
that this canvas is covered in vomit
because you inhaled too many paint fumes and passed out
and your body tried to detoxify itself

"are you married?"
the standard question you ask a woman covering
her shoulders
her back, her clavicles,
her breasts
with a shawl

categorize me because you have no other way of understanding me
because you loved your own kids too much and they
were not selfish shits like me who lie
like corpses fantasizing about dying alone
in a warehouse of paint and infinite palettes
replete with a cruel twilight zone twist of blindness
and this is why I vomit on the fucking canvas
these sunglasses hide what I can't do with these pentacles
the universe placed around me

"I wouldn't give you a second look," he said to my veiled form

it was the right answer
but it was not the truth

open love letters

dirty laundry
you don't bother taking down because everyone's already seen it
making the private public came into vogue and now
our pasts float around in cyberspace

maybe it would have been easier if I left those stained
shirts and bleached jeans and lacy unmentionables
waving in the wind, anchored down by clothespins
starched dry by the summer heat
visible to anyone who wanted to see

it took some time but
I realized your every step was the love song I so
wanted to hear again
the small acts of kindness your melody
the warmth of your whistle your calloused fingers
your tilted head your strum

the love letter you'd never write was
etched into the end-of-the-day smiles
and the clinking forks competing for cantaloupe

it's up to me to write my own poem
feels like buying my own valentine
but we never believed too much in that holiday
and I don't like chocolate anymore anyway

I found a card I thought you'd like
and it didn't make you laugh the way I did
the way my parents can never hear without
scolding this unladylike lady

barely cracked a smile

and I take a deep breath and remind myself
that writing burns
and a song dies the last time anyone hums it

on sugar mountain

half-lotus pose on a velvety vintage armchair
without arms, without shoes
because barefoot is how we like to be
heels kicked off, deskless secretary
out of place provoking stares
where we don't belong out west

these are ordinary affects,
this is how kathleen stewart scribbled out
potentials onto napkins with ink pens
and her words ran like mascara under
melting ice cubes
or so we imagine

pale faces, hazel eyes, glancing our way
and wondering if we'll glance back
yawning, arms upstretched, back arched like a cat
the silver on our ring fingers glint towards him
but it doesn't stop him from stealing a moment for a dream
and the acoustic guitar reminds him
if you can't be with the one you love,
love the one you're with

God

Made some of us to love and to risk love
And to give until we croak like frogs
Stewing in gradients of green moss on soft bark
After the earth in her might has soaked in the rains

Some of us whistle and wait for the echo to boomerang back
Only our own voices resounding from the fog of cliffs
Keeps us from going over the edge

God made some of us to love everyone as we want to be loved
Made our purpose to seesaw between
The isolation of hermitude and the isolation of
plummeting precipitous vulnerability

To love is to surrender like a frog to her night song
To resist is to seek safety in silence
To forget
To unlearn

thunderstorm

there were apricots and broken plates and shy palms

E.B. White wrote his letters before I was born but the pages
of that collection dented my lifeline

the first time I ever felt beautiful was in those dilated eyes
drunk or something else lit that lambent flame that tickles
my lips and once that sea parted part of the world became my eternal oyster

with every U-turn, the screeching tires, the memory
of the buzz cuts and identical bricks and the sand
and swallowing every single stair for four flights and unraveling
every single thread of a white and blue hammock and every single thread
of my wavy locks

when your fingertips calloused over and i couldn't draw blood
we still laughed

when our hearts calloused over and we couldn't pump blood
did we keep laughing

much ado about darkness

what to do with darkness when we discover it
within ourselves, within the secret chambers
of our hearts we never knew, we never noticed?
dark, musky, beauty in the purity of evil that
licks you like a serpent's tongue and leaves a welt,
a burn, poison, seared into disembodied flesh you
don't recognize as your own.

your fights clarify your love, your attachment, but
the pigeon with the broken wing still carries disease
and envy and lust for the freedom of wings beating
against the city air on a sunny day

we see our darkness so that we can forgive, a wisewoman told you,
darkness breeds compassion breeds forgiveness and all of that is
love.

still you hurt, and you go on hurting.

remember i'm awful in love with you

some thoughts were never meant to be penned

she lies prone, hair loose like a beautiful witch
humming that haunting little melody to herself
a decade since her heart strings vibrated to that tune

memory terrorism, he called it, but how delightful
it is to indulge when everything is quiet except
the friction of your ribs expanding and contracting
against the ground, and he was the only one
who knew the pleasurable rush of breathing
like that

fractal, ever-splintering

one line tangent to the
opium smoke you burn incessantly
and his accustomed eyes don't get smoky,
his vessels immune to red,
ears to your mantras tune in, tune out
at the same time

a split self

one vector pierces right through you when
you're not looking and there's something
rabid about that bite that makes you want
to bite back knowing
you only have forty days before
complete intoxication and thoughts of water
and drowning

a circle
marked by salt around the edges,
salt and vulnerability
make the land fertile and barren
at the same time

exile

Some wounds don't heal

Silent tears over potholes and you hope no one will see
these strangers you will sleep with in the heat in the dark
will not see your eyes as long as you suffocate them away
with a pillow and breathe slowly, deeply, as not to sniffle
over these overstarched cotton sheets, not beaten hard enough
against audacious, gaudy painted concrete, fraying at the edges
in this rural dream where you blister in the shade

not a move, be still, let these little creeks find their way past your crows' feet
and tingle at the soft and tender fruit of your earlobe

Some wounds don't heal

They make you resort to salt and honey until you have forgotten
pleasure, grown numb to a rigmarole of english muffins enshrined in
too-bright, too-reflective plastic that you pitch
into a trash can overfilled with shells of melons and
spiky pineapple progeny that none of the men bother
to empty and you wonder how you ended up the only woman
in this mosquito-infested palace of illusions
and you lock your door and you don't come out at night because you don't trust
these strangers you will sleep with in the heat in the dark
will not see your eyes as long as you suffocate them away

Some wounds don't heal

Ending

Some smiles are too much to bear in color

Her upturned lips over a griddle of roasting tomatoes
and peppers and the sound of running water
and slurring shouting Christmas
drunks and the smell, the texture of
dust and smoke and sticky children

But her eyes
her eyes are euphemisms
"a coconut dropped on my head"
swelling where a human hand struck
"he's working far away"
a no-show on a holiday with plump spherical supermarket grapes
for another woman
"everything's in God's hands"
the spirits of the young dead
hover unintentionally
cruelly

Only those who have wept bitterly over injustice
recognize the dull before the sparkle

I made her smile black and white to help everyone see

"She looks so happy!" you told me,
and I fell out of love with you

five of swords reversed

The hopeless romantic in you died
a strange death: the power went out
and in the dark she rummaged
through the cabinet under the sink--
clasping an old sponge, a container
of silver polish, a rubber glove, and finally,
the waxy frame of a candle saved for
those rare, dark occasions.

The hopeless romantic bumped her head
as she rose from hands and knees
and muttering disgruntled nothings
under her breath, she struck a match,
cautiously inched up the stairs,
fell asleep,
and vanished.

Sometimes you thought you saw her ghost
floating around the fireplace, hovering
behind those old brown curtains, but anytime
she caught your eye, you'd blink her away.

You learned not to blink, but she
learned to disappear.

You made it through anger, denial,
you bargained, you cast off the fog of
depression and you accepted
she was gone

and then she came back.
And, bumpy head intact, she tried to seduce you,
and you were not so sure you wanted her
anymore.

Ya lo perdí

A list of things you couldn't recall:
the name of the first love song (an ironic canary in the mine)
a string of prepositions at the end of a sentence
(that still makes you laugh)

The power to be a muse lies dormant

How far one must dig
through piles of crumpled up paper
wadded up yellow sheets lined with pink and blue
some within, some near misses from a gray trashcan
that tripped you over in a physics classroom

and digital reminders of our embarrassing pasts
those images
those letters
those mp3s
you thought you deleted

Latent inspiration is an engram

And a trip down memory lane
that once filled you with shame
makes you whole again

Daydreams

That blue summer dream whispers itself in your ear

She leaves her thoughts hanging on your lower lip
and it is so weighed down that you look perpetually paused
as if searching for words

That blue summer dream whispers itself in your ear
and you wonder if that's what's tickling you or if
it's only your imagination reveling in its own cruelty

The smoggy sunset, the witty words like ping pong balls
bouncing back and forth between practiced hands
that never tire of their paddles.
Somehow, because your eyes have locked,
because your weary bodies find respite from
the isolating worlds that constantly threaten to engulf you
in each other's arms,
because your selective memories pretend
terrible things have not happened,
terrible things that you yourself have carved in stone
with chisels and mallets on the hearts of the innocent,
you two still find love
and overlooking the squalor, the misery, the crime, the poverty
etched into the city streets,
you two find the world perfect
in an ironic and nauseating way.

That blue summer dream whispers herself in your ear
and rests her finger in the small of your back where only lovers
dare to go
and your eyes dilate
and her lips graze your earlobe
and you tremble wishing
you didn't want more

only when she slips away
does the salt stir the intelligence of the raw bleeding wounds
she has left everywhere
she touched you

ladles and laundries and tiffs

freshly tumbled, warm, crinkled
lay them out, slip them in
a flat rush of fabric softener between us
an unreturned hug, a flash in the eye,
white plastic hangers in hand,
open closet doors and fan on
lights waiting to be snapped off
no eye contact for the former doe
in the headlights who
collided and limped away.

Today gets
swept under the rug
dampened by tears shed through dehydrated ducts
Tomorrow gets
swept under the rug
wrinkled like crows feet under the friction
of heels and flats and muddy hiking boots
The day after gets
dusty, gritty, and the

tin
crystal
china
silver
pearl
ruby
gold

gets dusty, gritty, with the patina of
too much to be swept

Primero Dios

Crumpled scrubs rings the doorbell with on-the-way-home pie in hand
straight from work in the summer heat, baby Einstein hair
dishevels beads of sweaty forehead.
Voices inside crowd out the familiar ding-dong and
it's unlocked anyway. Crumpled scrubs opens the screen door slowly,
deliberately, edges her way around sticky wood,
at once graceful and awkward, pie in hand,
holds her breath at the sight of cardboard boxes
near the stairs, the sheen of clear packing tape, a mirror for
incandescent bulbs and the rotating shadows of a ceiling fan.
These faces are foreign and her inner wallflower blooms.
T-shirt and gym shorts is out back with a cold IPA,
laughing and entertaining people from this place he won't miss.
Buyers hauling away the couches tomorrow morning,
cleaning crew scheduled for two, books and clothes shipped,
and a flight the day after
to the new place. New dawns, new dusks, new dreams.
His eyes' magnets drawn to a silhouette at the kitchen counter,
she steps outside straight-from-work hungry with a piece of pie in hand,
draws a fork to her mouth, pie on lips,
catches sight of t-shirt and gym shorts catching sight of her.
For a darting daring second their eyes lock and they feel
what could have been
crumble away

Mirage

Nervous. Hair between lips, nails between teeth.

Those first steps are tentative. We are guarded
like animals, circling in our cages, assessing
prey and predators, friends and foes, and over
months of sharing the waterhole and baring our
stripes and spots, we decide we are both cats.

They walk out of your life more quickly than they walk in.

We've rehearsed. The hunts, the dreams, the confinement,
but there's nothing like the real thing.
Breathing against ribs heavy with sadness.
Tending to thorny paws on my own.
It's not the end, but it's not the beginning,
and the ripples have dissipated
and the water is still here at home.

Eppie and Silas

"She can't stand being at the dinner table with us," Eppie shares
with a toothy grin. As soon as the words have been spoken her heart
stops because she forgot they were untrue.
What Mom would give to sit down and listen to medical talk
with those three bores! Louie brimming with enthusiasm for a
shared moment (otherwise unattainable for eighteen years), Silas
nodding patiently and chiming in with decades of bookish wisdom,
Eppie only conversational, not yet fluent--still but a listener
whose lips lack wings.

It has been one year since dinner. One solid year.
One solid slab of mahogany that swelled under the wrath of
rainwater leaking through a roof reshingled by underpaid Mexicans.
Lightning zapped the power and Mom thought, "I told you so," with
buckets and pots in a storm all over the house,
but she never said it.

The wood they replaced with something darker.

Silas is too true to his word to dine on pathology again.
Louie's lost himself in losing his liver.
How Mom longs for medicine.
Eppie finally learned how to speak it
(but that painful longing,
that knotted ball of fear and sorrow in her throat,
lodged in her heart like an unmentionable thrombus), but Eppie,
she will not talk.

The fallacy of empty vessels

She tells you why she hasn't been around of late
with concerned, kind eyes, a thoughtfulness few
of the others display--she knows
your hollowness. Like a chocolate Santa, an Easter bunny,
you will break if squeezed
you will melt if held
but you will be relished

Orange you glad?

Day 4: Orange you glad? – Write a haiku about an orange without using any of the following words (or variations of them): orange, round, citrus, sweet, juice, fruit, seeds, peel, rind, and squeeze.
--

Fingernail digs in
Olfactory neurons fire
Flavor burst; enjoy.

Shadows of

Day 3: Open to Interpretation - What does the word "shadow" mean to you? Write a poem about it.
--

We put things in boxes.
Sunglasses (frames white, lenses tinged with blue, two smiling
faces with an orca under the Miami sun); blanket
(velveteen fibers, blue and fuzzy, your insignia embroidered
in white); feather (peacock, multi-colored, marking my place
in a book too esoteric to read through. "Even the greatest
disobeyed," she told me, but I am no Prahalad,
I am not even greater or great.)
Packed away in a brown box, flaps with
corrugated innards sealed up with tape
from a bureaucratic post office.
We put years in boxes
and we become shadows of ourselves.

Let it be

You and I, we are a splash of red and blue
against the bright skies
and rocky red plateaus.

You and I, we are a shared glance
and a hearty guffaw
in front of a flickering screen.

We are a breath of fresh air and
footsteps padding in tandem and
contagious smiles

We are interrupted

These pictures, these feelings
a self-inflicted torture
the uncertainty is suffocating
and we bury our heads in pillows
and music boxes.

malaise

Orange. Green. The blue bursts unpredictably across the square
the 28th forms an X only because its neighbors do
(inference by association)
you have to toss that marker, felt tip crusty with age,
one more survivor of the nine-year-old bunch
bites the dust.

Vague recollections of wandering the aisles under
fluorescent lights, finding one hundred colors, consuming,
adding them to a black canvas bag of paints and origami paper
things collecting dust and cobwebs and tiny tumbleweeds of hair
things intermittently resurrected
things let go: there, but no longer part of your life.

Thick orange like the skin of a clementine
has been your weapon of choice for this countdown
with no endpoint
and the bold lines simply remind you
that time drones on and on and the present
offers a brighter source of hope
than the future.

an ode to things and wisdom in places

Jangle the lock
like an incompetent guest entering your own home
push the door and stumble in
to a fresh breath of warmth and marijuana
seeping in from the neighbors

upstairs holds
plants and nailed planks and furniture
wooden tables, a wicker chair, flowers
things that shackle you to
something like a comfortable prison

things you thought you wanted
material, ideological
things you can no longer keep up with,
things now meaningless

respite is an ironic rocking chair you
can't leave on the porch untethered
due to weather and
the high incidence of crime

books on the floor
evidence of your fading heritage all too real

the doorbell rings and a deliveryman with a soggy box of roses
hands you a clipboard and collects your half-inked signature

that pen is dying, you muse, because of the cold
and the vase goes in the warmest room
because here the food won't spoil
and the mung won't sprout
like it does in the summer

our androgynous gods

something compels you to reread those letters.
the snow dripping down the glass panes as the
temperature teeters between thirty and thirty-two,
your cold feet over the vent snugged between
the couch cushions your dad never wanted until
he loved them, the confusing phone call that cast doubts
on your doubts and left your heart hollower but still
churning out its boring rhythm as if nothing were amiss
something compels you to reread those letters.
cleverer than you remember them and funny
in a way that nothing has been for months
the smile spreads before you can control it and
your cheeks are flushed and that genuine joy
embarrasses you, troubles you. you were always guilty
of falling for the written word.