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