break

In the back there were blue clowns and faces and you're getting me off track. "Oh, I like rhyming too," with a sly smile and brown socks worn down by the toes toy boxers and tyra banks. Make me have a few more when I promise I'm satiated because the hunger kills twice on the way down, way down by Fort Worth and fort-making in the dark. You're stark and you're lazy. I want to shake you and make you look me directly in the eyes.

spring

I think you're so wonderful and you weren't at all what I expected. I think I can't write a poem about it just yet, but I'll get there eventually.

peel the plastic, smell the flowers

easy as falling asleep

song of myself

"A poem must sing," she says.

"If it's beautiful, it whispers in

sleepsong to its reader. The worst

poems shout across the street to whichever

bedraggled soul passes first.

Make yours sing."

With this, we shuffle in our seats,

we try to find writerly insight from

some divine place, we clear our throats

once or twice. My name is called; I read aloud.

The chubby Asian girl in an orange headscarf pulls

at her knotted thumbs and maybe sighs -

I can't remember.

"I have never crumbled pita chips in a lightless

corner of the Mediterranean or scaled the salty

streets of Jerusalem on horseback, or

tasted the leather tongue of Jesus, but I know

the inside of your mouth

better than my own," I say.

They gaze expectantly and That's all I have for now

is all I have for now. Brian in the wobbly chair

thinks it's obvious I've never traveled.

I tell him My lack of travel experience is

sort of the point of the poem, and then I'm

reminded that authors can't interject

in the critiquing process...Asian headscarf girl

thinks I'm making it up - the part about the boy and

the mouth, his mouth, presumably - but she misuses the word

"solipsism" at least three times in the next three minutes,

so I feel a little bit vindicated.

+

Now the February air is slightly less stifling

than June's classroom-breath, but I'm still worried

my song reads more like a you than a me.

I cried in your sweater. I drive by your house

on the weekends to see your mother reading

a magazine in the living room, your father cursing,

and your bedroom door. It looks lonely.

I bought you red Marlboros once, fingering a sweaty twenty-

dollar bill in my pocket as the cashier chuckled, called me

Sweetie, took my money.

I've never told that to anyone before.

Does this have to be about me?

I write about you with such ease.

I remember this morning back in the summer

because I was far more impressed

with the whitewashed sky than with any

pinkpeachapricotraspberry sunrise I'd come across.

No one up there felt creative that

morning in that

whitewashed sky.

I sat beneath a ginkgo tree that morning, G. Biloba,

and I'm not trying to make myself out to be

a living fossil or anything, but

maybe I'm covering myself in a layer of wax so thick

that it bubbles and burns and I can't help but leave

my imprint on something else. Do I fan out and engulf?

I exist in millions. It's only a matter of time before I take over.

They will study me in another million years, sitting

beneath the same gingko tree, deciphering my fossils.

+

Before we carved our pumpkins as children,

I watched in awe as my father swiftly cut through the top

and dug into the stewy center with a slotted spoon.

I washed my hands in it, the orange, stringy mess,

and next summer we ran outside barely wearing

anything at all and collected as many baby

grape tomatoes from the garden as could fit in our dirty

hands and threw them at each other, and we were wild and

without purpose.

Am I self-absorbed?

No. I'm not absorbed in all of myself yet.

I am your popcorn ceilings, your extra ninety miles,

your baby, your piece of ass, your transport

and transportation. I am somewhere between

Fort Worth and the harbor.

+

When we walk, you're there,

your mind is with the split-end branches

on the tallest tree. Your fingers don't

wrap around mine the way they used to.

We pretend to be laundry baskets,

to be candles, warm and blue,

we silently flicker forth. We pretended to be in love,

less warm and more blue than before.

I can't keep going on like this for very long,

so glaze me and open the kiln

and let me burn.

-

like molting consciences they sit

along the wall in back at dusk

a row of nodding priests at vespers

calling me to account.

every good thing to rust

who were you

before the who you are now?

did your fingers curl up and

extend the same way, like reddened

babies, colic-stricken, cuticles

gnawed?

surely you did not admire yourself

as you do now. surely you did not see

how those cigarettes are made to

revel in your purple kiss,

surely you did not congratulate

your sunken cheeks or the way the swollen

sunlight plays off your flattened hair,

or the second glances you

surely attract.

no, you must have noticed the way we

praise you, the envy we hastily conceal as we

steal glances at the goddess,

rapt in conversation with herself -

for what could please her more than the sound

of her own voice, the warmth of

her own gargled speech

puffing small clouds into the

undeserving night?

wintersong

we pretend to be laundry baskets,

to be candles, warm and blue,

we silently flicker forth.

we pretended to be in love,

less warm and more blue

than before.

carpetsong

if i could heal your bathwater

bruises, the orange peels on the bedside

table wouldn't stink so much like

an air freshener, and your

teeth not so much like stalactites,

plaquey on my ear;

your nibbles would be so much sweeter

i owe you an opening line

some time in a bed, naked,

fading between frenzied and almost unconscious.

not indoors or out, somewhere in limbo;

all i feel is/all that matters is

you are warm.

nothing is as it should be,

early morning, before sunrise,

frost, your leg draped over my

legs.

i am uncomfortable watching you sleep.

i do not love your morning breath or your tired bones.

i don't forgive your yellow teeth, your belly or your

sleep-smile.

all i feel is

all that matters is

you are warm.

pear poem

and no,

i am not an apple.

they float -

we sink.

pointers

the day i sat alone at lunch,

my apple had a curious crunch -

my cheeks burned bright, a fiery red,

but i quelled the flame inside instead

w. h. auden

The nightingales are sobbing in
The orchards of our mothers,
And hearts that we broke long ago
Have long been breaking others;
Tears are round, the sea is deep:
Roll them overboard and sleep.

tea time

your fingers:

forks. my cheeks

are spoons. we

clink on through

the afternoon.

accelerate

the standstill is only on the

windowsill, in the darkest kisses

or the underwater,

and the heart is the hardest part

to wax and freeze when it trickles down

through sobriety's fat fingertips.

so i wonder why we rise and fall

at all, to catch up to the last soul

who laughs at our sizzling fate -

there's no need to seek comfort from

the trembling sea when the only

one trembling is me.