Smack dab in the middle of the USA

Summer ends rainless yet hopeful

2011-08-13T09:39:00.008-05:00

Your mantra is tired
dragging itself
weary, dreamless
But it presses on like
my pedaling does
with sore knees
and a broken heart
And it does all of this
because of its truth
For nothing else
have I been more sorry

I drive over every creek
we ever floated on
and mark each log
with your laugh
your dance
your innocent fantasies
the ones I ran my canoe over
the ones I wish I could rebirth
celebrate, hold up in the firelight
with my own river rat praise song

Some views remind me of Taos
where I should have carried you
across the highest bridge
where a pueblo bedroom
turned into a war zone
where my guilt run began

All your love- a dried river bed
I dive head first and I am not afraid
of my inevitable.broken.neck.
There will be again a midnight swim
my weightless hands on your hips
my knee between your knees

I pour my drenched failure into thirsty sand bars
I give this year's drought the currents of my anger
I put my raft on your clear pure faith
And I wait to coast downstream
the way we were born to do

June

2011-05-31T21:55:00.006-05:00

The Katy Trail smells like honeysuckle at night
and every few miles, cannibas
I wonder if my heart will train as quickly
as my body
like when I picked up a bike
looked down at my feet
and said, pedal
Lonely is a whistle now
a humming windsong
and tonight this year's cicadas
There are natural disasters
to the south and grand ol' parties
organizing to the north
but here in the center there is
nothing but a river,
a boy with a red tongue
a girl who wakes up angry
a man with new stitches in his skin
and the bluest bird
lost and displaced
un-homed away from the sea

The sun looks like it might be god

2011-03-26T00:05:00.007-05:00

A child is learning African proverbs
A teenager is wearing a scarf like Tupac
and I have stopped making the bed

Nothing makes us change a poem like death
So that line about being glad you're gone,
today it is reborn as any icon should be

You pointed to the stars and all I saw was your hand
It's wrong for anyone to touch my scar without having seen the wound
and disposing of you while there is death here

That's the loneliest pot
crying out to one blackened kettle

When spring really arrives

2011-03-21T11:02:00.000-05:00

And I don't mean
these teases
but when the daffodils
are all bloomed
and spring
is shouting with
yellow and hope
I will hit snooze
and bear-sleep
through it
a confused
hybernation
saying no
to the "first day of my life"
the aftershock
of December's end
will bite harder
in sunshine and green
but when it slithers away
and the coffee cools
under my insomniac eyes
I will sit
in the middle of
7 am and 7 pm
and will celebrate
12 hours times 2 times 3
there will never be enough times
to celebrate
I am better
without you

The thing is

2011-03-20T11:05:00.000-05:00

I'd like to sit this dance out
my type A positive congruent with my OCD
waltzing, two-stepping, dipping
the O negative, with pigtails and unresolved
taking-it-from-behind issues

Truth is water, breast-stroking and
a mermaid with back arched
in a sketch of reds and taupes
her heart-shaped mouth chanting rhymes
of don't step on a crack, you'll break....

and left on the shoreline,
my blue brain calculating pi to the 100th degree
solving Miss America's world peace concerns
leaving the rest to the vampire in me
out for the taste of strong blood

Maybe this is legit

2011-02-03T13:15:00.007-06:00

I have reclaimed
the sadness for this place
left under your pillow
for me to grip on anger nights
I have it around my neck like
a boyfriend's ring
I begin to carry holy dirt
taken from pink places
handed to me by my son
just recently as if to say
maybe this will bring it back
It sits in my pocket
bringing nothing but this:

crosses with hanging rosaries
an art gallery with a baby grand
canyons with girls on the edge
a boy climbing indian ladders
the highest point I'd ever stood from
church and god himself
whispering in the oldest of wood
the words I ignored,
Bring on the kind love

Images to end things

2011-02-02T22:25:00.000-06:00

They are ropes
the lines between us
from eyes to necks
No, not like a noose
but a squarely tied
scout-knot
anchored by hope
seratonin
and orgasm
To swipe them
I choose a silver
blinding shine sword
cutting the last
and tiniest thread
of your rapunzel ladder
not with a hate motive
but because if I may
I'd like to breathe please

There is this pilgrimage fantasy

2011-01-17T09:23:00.006-06:00

Me
bringing you gifts you don't need
dragging microwaves across urban streets
spider-manning up stairways to your glass apartment
locking doors that ask to be opened wide
You
with your gray hair and cordless phone
your young lady friend on your lap
beer in your glass and that same sweet voice
saying ha, I knew you'd come, smug like
You
eyes at my chest, my pinky finger
no matter what my lips do, you don't see
I know apathy when it sits on a front stoop
beautiful and young, with skin and lashes
collared shirts, pullover sweaters
displaced from this town, hopeful
vengeful, empty

Sense of slip

2010-12-16T19:11:00.004-06:00

In eighth grade, after I was moved to the front,
but before we watched the shuttle separate in two,
there were lessons on New Madrid.
I'd imagine standing in my plaid uniform only to
find myself doing an Armageddon-type of split
looking down at flames and pitchfork yielding monsters
confirming the lesson of 5th hour Guilt 101.

One funny thing about classroom lessons is this:
I have never since heard such talk of earthquakes.

And when I think of young fright I realize this:
Unlike my children, I never knew the word terrorist
Unlike my father, I never feared the communists.

Things I no longer believe include:
Mine will be a death by earthquake.
There is a god who punishes.

I do not jolt upright at two a.m. thinking of the devil peering
into my open and bare private parts as I straddle a moving fault line,
girls do not do acrobats with the ground moving beneath them.
I will never look down at my hell-fate shouting
I should have known better and left Missouri!
I am not brave for staying here and this is not a danger zone.
There are much graver faults than those that lie
beneath my home state crust and my sense of steady and balance
has not been intact since long before 1986

Someone told me scars are beautiful too

2010-12-16T13:11:00.006-06:00

I prayed to baby jesus in that
sarcastic I really don't believe in you voice
a high pitched childlike faith-filled
sound I hardly recognize as it comes out
of my newly cut throat.
I ask for good doctor news in exchange
for gifts to a charity I later discover
is a christian right gay bashing hate machine
So I edit my plea just so
but I repeat my request for health.
And I do. not. mean. it.

Today I learned of a woman
curled up on a red couch, moving her hand
on white fur, whispering,
do you want me to end your fatigue in this life?
If you are finished with me walking you
and feeding you, and if you don't want to
hurt on those stairs up and down one more time,
I will take you to the nice doctor
and I will let you go.
And she does. not. mean. it.

Today I said I am okay and this is good news
I will pray to baby jesus more often,
I will even break out the big guns and
ask the heavenly father himself.
I said no that didn't really hurt,
I can drive just fine
I am happy to have the house all to myself.

And I start to wonder
when was the last time any of us
said something. we. actually. meant.

I don't like to do what I am told

2010-11-04T13:39:00.000-05:00

I have been told to welcome little me's into the room

The professor slash lawyer slash bill payer me

enters willingly, stays until

A clawing, owning, ruining

spotlight-stealing me

seeps into the cheap paneling

sprawls across the floor

sits centered, a mantle clock

a centerpiece too big for its

practical rectangular table

and none of you will be surprised at this
I am not surprised at this

the little tiniest me in baby blue

big bird bloomers

boycotts this me party

But wouldn't it be

like a Sunday morning drive

through sunflower farms
like a day of kite flying, a picnic of strawberries

like the day we brought the kids,

tanned our bodies, and splashed
like the smallest of all me's,
wouldn't it be like that day

if all of me's switched places

if centered things were placed

to the cold outside left and

baby blue bloomer wearers

sat cross legged on coffee tables

saying I do not care

that I was not invited.

It's asking a lot

2010-10-18T11:46:00.005-05:00

For us to drive by these rows of stone
some high and narrow, some low and slanted
for us to wonder who might have asked to be on a hilltop
or under a cherry tree for purposes of enjoying
pink pedals from the defrosting earth of March,
to make us say, "I prefer to be burned into ashes."
These things distract me with ache,
stronger from the my mini SUV drive-by

My preference - to sit chest high in endings

An old acquaintance, I hear, is dying
(and not in the way we all are dying)
and all I can think is how goddamn fortunate she is-
her with all this time to give directions
to lay in the breeze of her living room
choose songs for her own end
to direct the important things like
churches and plots and what kind of tree
and how her knowing is bitter and still craved

Sauce

2010-08-29T09:16:00.003-05:00

The clever new church sign on Main Street
reads, All's well that ends in Heaven
On this nearby wind-chiming porch

you can hear its Sunday bells
ringing too slowly for gravity to allow

All's well also has a beginning

marked with sounds natural and uncanned
of audible friction-created cries
and words tossed back and forth quickly
like apples falling from Newton's very own tree

All's well has a middle

between bedroom walls adorned
with purchased sayings hanging or stuck
Words about love and goodnights and kissing,

a room with familiar tables

the plastic whoosh of a fan

and a bed sprawling

All's well has a pull to the south,

while everyone knows heaven is north

and who can argue, with the bells ringing

and the sign preaching

but this Sunday all's well

will end like every other here

somewhere earthy and muddled

cored, skinned, and pummeled

To move me

2010-08-21T11:09:00.006-05:00

It takes so little these days
words mostly, of torches being passed
in degrees and fashions
or crystals hanging in the foyer
which in the old house hung
in eastern corners
to protect children and futures
back when I believed in something
like Asian decorative rituals
or that hard work did something
like pay off

But it's mostly words
brief and careless
like you are wonderful
we cannot fix this
high school is a disappointment
I decided to stop being myself
I'm not coming back
I would do anything
Please say at least there is hope

There were no storybook bedtimes

2010-08-17T20:11:00.007-05:00

But we often heard talk of bridges
and what if everyone
and jumping off
Some of us were told
happiness is a byproduct
of obedience to husbands
and good women waited
and waited

And now
in adult springs of cool water
it is not the pressure of a peer
that leads us in
or lets us
skim eachothers' bodies
with our calf or fingertip
it's just that it is actually our turn

As a boy turns twelve

2010-08-08T12:53:00.005-05:00

Maybe it's his hair like a cartoon boy
or the droop of his left eye
after a day time sleep
or the way one Saturday comes
and he decides to put y's on the ends of words
but I am rewound to when
I held things like babies
and stuffed rainbow elephants
when the tops of heads smelled like syrup
a running bath meant it was eight o'clock
and I could stomach a good
first-time-she-took-a-step-story
before the red of cynicism bled in
to this place, telling me it's all really
quite a tall tale of irony and white horses
before "fucking" preceded far too many nouns
spoken at the dinner table of people
disappointed and before I realized
the black haired boy would save my life

Untitled

2010-07-26T07:13:00.003-05:00

The dog will sit on command
but you will not ask him to save us
My cigarette smells like grief,
as all of them do since quitting
means I light them only on storm days
The best place I put myself today was
under the oak in this small town cemetery
where the beer tasted like addiction
and the nightingales sang out
go home

In this July

2010-07-12T20:38:00.006-05:00

I am with hope we can move on
but to where-
the place with the thrown out
never-to-be-had-baby
and the bath water
soapy and reused to wash my hair?
to the food origins of the greasy fingerprints
on the glass sitting half full on my tall dresser?
to the itching confines of my wrist
bound and immobolized, an innocent victim
of my battered elbow?
let's move on to the place
where there is no further analysis-
where we are like January,
where we are upright
to today's scrutiny.

This is not a prayer of course

2010-06-30T09:59:00.001-05:00

My son knows the name Jesus
only from green billboards along our
Midwest highway.

The Christ interstate headed west
is speckled with live naked girls
truck stops and pro-life pleadings

At the east Catholic end, where I was born,
my mother is taking my sister
to the theater with the velvet seats

When I heard this I started to cry
with the frantic truth I am too far away
the Lord highway can’t get me home before curtain

The closest we can get, they say,
is at that moment just before birth
before any of it had a Name

Housing Crash

2010-05-23T17:37:00.003-05:00

I remember looking at the house
picturing us in it
out of it
planting
mowing
sowing

The pink tiled bath
a city-home reminder
the corridor entry
a welcome of
one more time
the best time

But you said
the bedrooms are small
the heat won't heat
There is no garage
(but in your whole adult life
you'd never sheltered your car)

I loved this house for what
you taught me to love
I loved it for its footprint
its soil, its hostas
its kitchen brick
its nooks and hideaways

But then there was your voice
your reason
your trickery
of surprise.

I started
the stopping
I sprinted backwards
and you
all the while
thought I was in your pocket

Cry

2010-05-21T12:52:00.002-05:00

The first time the woman was sitting in my car
gripping the door handle
getting out,
staying in,
readying
to leap to my seat
her hair was her best thing,
that, and her pelvis
and her skin,
and her wrists
she had many best things
not one of them about her heart

The last time, the woman sat at my table
rocking in the torn-cushioned seat
staying put
letting it
welcoming
words as they come out
her mouth was her best thing,
that, and her tenderness
and her burns
and her hope
she had more best things,
even after I set fire to them all

While we continue wanting home to be somewhere else

2010-05-01T16:15:00.002-05:00

You look like you’re dangerous
fighting crime while ants creep in
making a home- here
in our ironic suburban bathroom

But in this place
we have conversations
they include words
some of these words are -these

wigwam
truce
queer
and they mean something

There is no irony in- this
the softness of the “w”
the volume of the “u”
the truth of the “e”

while the closest
you ever got to heartache is -here
in this safely dangerous
ant hill of a bathroom

It will be the next 20, if you ask my mom

2010-03-22T10:38:00.001-05:00

I check the windows now
in the front bedrooms where they sleep
with the lie of spring warmth and full moons
I fix the door with the tricky clasp
the one I’ve always known didn't lock,
but now I care
I smell his head like when he was born
and run my fingers along his coat
after he hangs it up
I make chicken noodle soup and pancakes
and stare at each brown of his eyes
darker in hurt, lightest in morning
There is now a witching hour in my house
between the 3:45 of the bus stop and the 5:00 of my dinners
During that time, I see clients, talk shop
and every once in a while speak sentences
with his name inserted where “doctor” or “yesterday” should be
This is my next stage, this is the next seven years.

Because I did know better

2010-02-15T10:58:00.004-06:00

Seeing as I didn't fight for you, I avoided the following:

Staring at the dirt under your nails
Seeing you as a trampler of green and spring
Saying, "you drink too much"
Turning my head away at the cigarette smell of your mouth
Avoiding the worst day where you'd raise your hand to me
and shout, "but I've loved you since I was 17"
as if our teenage groping was a kind of promise

I shrugged my shoulders at your dismissal
left myself with sweet smells of firsts
skipped the steps it took to break you
bypassed the anger dance and never
had to say "I should have known better"

I boxed you into a space filled with only
your eyes, squinty and brown
your mouth crooked, your voice newly deep
and your blows not yet thrown
And yes, I'd like to keep you there

Unplugged

2010-01-09T10:06:00.001-06:00

There is a girl hearing acoustic for the first time
quiet, tragic, heroined

It's not just that the music woke us,
spooned the desperate latchkey kid within us

But that silence, sleep, warmth
and rage, speed, frostbite
became one in the same
with a voice, a guitar, a melody

And words
the kind of words we don't write anymore

The kind we hear on winter sleepless nights
after dreams in technicolor

The kind we speak with our trembling limbs
or our fetal position cry

The kind we only wish we could record

Seeing that it is November

2009-11-23T19:47:00.002-06:00

People are grateful for this and that
people
god and jesus and mom and dad
nouns
laughter and sunshine, a good ticking heart
days
one without work, one with kisses from toddlers

In cyncisim and bitterness
i have not participated
but if i did

my thanks:

red wine at work on Tuesday
(and I am not an alcoholic)
cigarette smoke from the car in front of me
(and I have quit)
fuck me pumps
(and I have nice legs)
orgasm on Sunday
(and I have a skilled lover)
you are gone
(and I do not want you back)

Making meatloaf

2009-10-31T13:25:00.004-05:00

My mother would always remove her rings,
place them to shine on the window sill
to protect the princess cut stone and the
anniversary rows underneath from the
cooking of housewives, the corning bowls
she raked her hands through to mix
four pounds of beef, enough for the
six Catholic products of her marriage
I followed her in this, removed past bands
and watched them on the sill, thoughts of
her perfect hands, her table set
I opt now, to leave mine on
as if the band on my finger,
modest, a dash of sparkle caught
in the recently rare October sun
is not the kind for preservation
but belongs in the mix
of meat,egg, bread crumb, ketchup.
I am told someday baby I'll put the biggest
rock on your finger, and my response is silent
in knowing the arms that wrap around my waist
when I stand at the stove
the breath on the back of my neck
on late night porches
the whispers in my collarbone in
an early morning bed
belong like my hands, deep in the making
of things, in the prepartion of spice
the churning of flavor and the making of this life
slippery, raw, red, simmering, craved

The hands I have fallen in love with

2009-10-21T19:30:00.005-05:00

have been plentiful, varied
veined with autumn hiking trails
Scarred, leather-like
committed with gold bands
and resting on tables
sideways, crooked, aliened
They have touched pens and bifocals
corkscews, rubberbands,
and cigarettes
Like my mother's, pearled, diamoned
uncallused, undirtied, and sliding
through salt and peppered hair
aged and broken
curly, but soft still
Today's loved hands
scribbled on a yellow pad
attached to the body of the
lisping woman, crow footed
and aggressive
asking and asking

Mine would be a high risk pregnancy

2009-09-20T09:10:00.004-05:00

It is fifteen minutes past
the death of someone iconic
and still loved by a child.
The windows have been kept open
for weeks now, so sleep
has waltzed in and twirled us.
Newborns have been in my arms
far more often than usual and
I have touched their satin
foreheads like I did my own babies.
My mother-clock is half passed over,
my nights are uninterrupted,
and I am more necessary than ever.

Been Awhile

2009-09-08T09:23:00.002-05:00

I haven't been to the blog in awhile, I haven't written much in awhile. This past weekend I was on the West Coast, in a city that was beautiful, inspiring, and gifted plenty to move me to write. It also reminded me of the people, places, smells, sites that have inspired me. So, I'm back here, reading the comments of those who have been this fire lit for me, wondering if anyone looks here anymore. If you do, and if you are now, and if you are those someones who inspired me, thank you, and know I am thinking of you. And yes, I believe there is more writing to come.

A new kind of prayer

2009-02-05T13:02:00.000-06:00

I suspect out the window, or from the wrap-around porch
the winter grape vines will be barren and reaching
missing their green, their fruit, their future wine
My newest dawning year will be patted on the shoulder, and asked
how did you pursue that life for this long?

I'll go barefoot on stone, sit crossed legged with my back to a fire,
speak staccato then legato of acts of contrition, the blessed mother
and her blue veil matching the eyes of my grandmother
and I'll sing psalms as they were meant, speaking first
waiting, breathless for the reply, the reply

Especially at lunch time I loved you

2009-01-09T10:14:00.000-06:00

Watching you eat across a table
finger licking, mouth-full talking
hat cocked sideways
and your summertime arms
freckled, tanned, bare.
Today it's at noon
I walk downtown streets
eyes open for women in caps
venture into every lunch booth in town
fight the urge to walk by and let my hand
brush along every naked arm.

For my sister's wedding day toast

2008-11-26T20:22:00.000-06:00

I have had the pleasure of knowing
a girl named Julie,
a girl who grew up to embrace
nomadic travels,
exploration,
and inquisitive quests for more
Where along the way she
scooped up love and joy,
and a boy named Andres.
I know a girl who as a child
lived in bouncing curls of red,
in shades of pink lipstick (mupscup),
striped ski caps,
and cowboy boots
3 sizes too big.
A girl who’s toddler love
was not a brown teddy bear
but a yellow giraffe,
with orange spots
and a name
that ironically identified herself
and his name was Sassy.
This was a girl who heard the inspirations of
imaginary friends,
followed them,
walked to the percussion
of imagination, fantasy,
and taught us
to live out loud.
To Julie and Andres,
who both live out loud,
in color, in brazen
hues of laughter,
passion,
invention,
and with a love
we all crave,
who scooped each other up
in the warmth of Florida
and carried each other
to this autumn day
of sunbursts, oranges,
and the red we bask in today.

Look at it this way

2008-11-26T20:18:00.000-06:00

The spider crawling across the bed side table
it was walking away from you, not looking you
dead in the face cursing and black catting you
The spirit making its way into your room
it was guardian angeling you, not grim reapering
you while you slept on the red silk pillow
The girl with that line next to her mouth
you watch when she talks (you dream of it on yours)
you caught her, staring at your hands as you talked
Maybe that bedroom invading spirit gave you this gift
that let you saunter into her thoughts
as you talked with hand motions about Christmas
and heard her brain whisper
please let her unwrap me

more than opposable thumbs

2008-09-29T11:03:00.001-05:00

consider it a trade off
this knowing of end
or in the alternative
that in the last life
we were Egyptian
pyramid makers
with eyeliner of squid ink
monkey-loving and tail-envying
That we were painted
like Darwinian amphibian lovers
fitting and joining and surviving
this death thought
in return for orgasms
chest aches
back scratches
thigh bruises
and salt watered
hot spots reminding us
of ocean beginnings

Birch trees...at last

2008-08-05T20:17:00.000-05:00

The book is published, see for yourself

http://www.lulu.com/content/3351122

Lessons on Science

2008-06-24T07:09:00.001-05:00

in the sleeping saturday house
I red pen grade
naked faces- check
sushi- x

sweet piesporter wine- check plus
an orange polo over breasts
covered in a band-aid bra
(there is no wrong answer when we speak of breasts)

quiet parks after midnight
without an expected symphony
being on and on and on
leaving as an empty set

and this is what love feels like

2008-05-19T22:27:00.001-05:00

i like the way the wind blows
here in gusts
at home it comes steady
hot heavy
i cut irises for you today
the rushing gutter water
now sounds like
it's coming
busting in and
bowing the doors

why my address is still in missouri

2008-05-19T22:25:00.000-05:00

you turned the ceiling fan on
when you left the room
after you sat by me
watched me sweat guilt bullets
and seep shame tears
you told me I deflated your balloon
that you couldn't be the only
grown-up in a house of
howling cats and high kites
you stared out the window
eyes glossy and wet like the
marsh pond forming outside
where it's rained in nightmare time
for three hundred years
you walked out and cooled me
with the flip of a switch
still

Warm weather tease

2008-04-13T22:17:00.000-05:00

cover the pots, the crocuses
and the disco rubiks cube yard ball
April frost is coming like a summer cold
unwanted, unthwarted, uncomfortable

the trash man wouldn't take the yard waste
like you won't take me, back to the bayou
to the hot place sticky and mosquito ridden
to the flooded river city jazz town

but stick around, I'll saxaphone march
in a one woman parade, no matter
it's been raining for days

Untitled

2008-03-12T23:09:00.002-05:00

I would like to make this long story endless
to wrap it the distance of how much
I said I loved daughters and sons,
to the moon and back

It's the story of drives through fields
the discovery that rice grows beyond
those places home to cranes,
but not to the whooping kind.

East is the highway's other end-
home- a river city of silver
sculptures, bungalows, mothers
and women in dangly earrings

Somewhere there's that priest
counseling the young brother,
my god, man,
you don't have to marry the woman

There's have some cake, eat it too
fly in from California
show the mole that past lovers
search for on all new backs
then tear off the hippie string belt
from those curduroy striped hips

Still think about

2008-02-24T17:30:00.001-06:00

a Halloween dance in a red flapper dress
pearls dangling to knees, feather in my hair
fake lashes on mine already plenty long
ankles in fish nets and dancing up front
to “fly me into the moon”

a September afternoon in Jamaica, a sleeveless floral gown
of pinks and yellows like I belonged in pastels
walking down a path on a rainy beach
a gazebo, a slippery boardwalk
from which I wish I would have fallen

an August Sunday birthday picnic in a sundress
nodding to the suggestion, “don’t wear a bra”
newly appreciated freckles and yes, that one mole
the toddler with eyes like mine climbing onto laps I trusted
scooping up icing carefully painted on a puppy cake

a camouflage jacket, smelling of sweat and neglect
a police uniform, creased and ironed like boot camp
and bare skin, scarred, tattooed, Persian Gulf suntanned

Someone get a handkerchief

2008-02-24T17:05:00.001-06:00

She says my name is _____ and I’m a ______
and I look at her across the room
with ceilings too high, like 14 feet, no
probably 13, an odd number, bad luck
and the coffee table has a runner on it under the fake flowers
as if maybe fake water may spill on it
and I’m holding the biggest coffee mug ever made,
it’s cobalt with a lip too curved so every sip
of the godiva flavored joe spills down my chin
and the couch is too far from the runnered
table and I can’t set it down or wipe my mouth
because I’m stuck on _____
and her _______ ing.

Next to her, he starts talking-
he went to an ____anon meeting and I
picture him in his suit and socks
that I always envied. They don’t make
socks for women like his, the perfect
thickness-
he’s the kind of man that gets away
with crossing his legs like a woman
and he is dark and handsome
even today dressed “down” in his
Champion sweat suit
he’s not wearing anything I envy
and I’ve never seen him use something
as weak and thin and floaty as a tissue
and in this moment of talk of _________
I want to hold him as he tries to blow his nose
on a failing Kleenex.

Oldest of Six

2008-02-13T16:35:00.002-06:00

You’ve done a great job with those little people

considering

The iced trees will come back to life

trust me

Let me show you what I learned on the guitar

they’re called Rush

In my high school yearbook I used your quote-

the world is moving

You made an apology on Christmas

normal sibling cruelties

Forgiveness came like the storms of our Aprils

flooding drowning

You are the most photogenic of the family

like birch trees at the old house

She is not in my book

2008-01-31T11:58:00.000-06:00

these hands of mine, they tickle a back like she did mine,
slow and so light they’d send a chill through me

(the good kind of chill)

somehow writing about her makes her seem unalive
her hands, her touch, her voice, to write it kills her

but not him

there are volumes of him, speaking and holding
and living, walking through the kitchen door

into every damn thing I do

Maryland

2008-01-16T22:25:00.000-06:00

Yes, I should mind it
the watching
misconstruing
misunderstanding
mistaking
it should send me
to that place
the green tiled bathroom
where the light only went on
with the exhaust
howling and sucking
the air out of me
drowing out that dare
the sharp things in the room
mirrors, clippers
scissors, and knives
crystal doorknobs
and children's shows
singing on the other
side of the door
the visits
should place me there
with the same
heart rate
blood pressure
pre-seizure perspiration
but instead I sit
watching the watching
paying homage to beige
painted walls
quiet lights
brass knobs
never touched by
anyone but me

January Third

2008-01-03T22:34:00.000-06:00

you said we are always early
you and I
looking at your naked wrist
then up as if to say
you know I never wear a watch
but I don’t know that yet,
or I shouldn’t

what I do know now is that
highway five leads to you
past a town called Sleeper
stores of walnut bowls
and the kind of churches
that give our red state
a bad name

in your breakfast café
it's just like coming home
as I walk back to
eggs over easy
then lean in close to say
I want marks left to remember
you in between

as if I could arrange you
like I'm trying to
this new year’s life
telling myself I own it
when really it owns me
like that peace you left
right there next to my bruise

Wishing you

2007-12-13T22:17:00.000-06:00

sometimes, when I'm walking
from room to room
loving things
like the sewing machine
I found in the basement
of the house on Taft
the angel statue given to me
just last month
I have a flash of you
diving in the Pacific
looking into the eyes of a
Blue Doctorfish, the one that
changes colors with mood,
and it turns to blinding white
its sharp spine
cutting you, sense
penetrating your brain
carrying you
to the airport and onto
my door step, iced over
and slick, and you ring
my bell, stand in shades
of Joy to the World
just as I'm turning on
the Christmas lights

Winter Weather Advisory

2007-12-09T22:21:00.000-06:00

this afternoon you dug yourself
out of the weather and asked
do I understand the magnitude of this day
I know ice is weighing on the trees
power lines are dragging
cars are spun in wrong ways
there is a man with no heat
who tells me lies in white
sits close to a fire and longs
for the feel of a woman,
any woman, on his arm
while a young girl with Dirty South
tattooed across her breasts
sleeps in a leather jacket and black boots
on my purple couch which my sister says,
"has seen lots of action"
My son is sixty miles north
jumping on his father's lap
saying "yes you can too snow-board"
I know a woman is in my hometown
smiling into another's eyes,
her heart beating like summer love
while down the road you
pack and move, and roll
and tell me to know the finality of today
that you've let the memory of me freeze
like the pipes around the corner
and I sit shivering in my warmth
with the electric buzzing
my stove in working order
and still nobody had better
ask me for a hot meal

Red, orange, yellow

2007-11-20T21:52:00.000-06:00

Oh but it’s a rainbow here
yes here where they call the middle
the gray in-between the coasts
of the lay of this land
it’s not black, and little white
but the purple, the couch there
the one once written of in a fit of passion
and new love
that green there, the old sewing machine
mismatched in this room of coffee and maroon
where the African mask sits bold and green
yellowed with time while roses-are-red-rhymes
pale, crumble with fragrance
against the back drop of the aqua blue
Matisse, hanging here over the sunburned
orange of mahogany, and there a girl
with lips pink as the orchid in that painting
hanging over the tapestry chair
torn by the tortoise shell cat scratch paw
No, there is no gray here even now
as winter begs forward
outlining like the dying branches of a tree
a fallen compass

Something else I must have grown tired of

2007-11-15T23:29:00.000-06:00

the last letter I wrote, I mean
wrote with a pen, and on paper,
it said I admired your trueness
and I acknowledged it wasn’t a word,
that truth was more appropriate, but then
again so was sparkly which I found also
to not be a word, but the one for you
for the fervor and fever and green of your eyes
while your lips matched your other parts
as you spoke of theories of trains
and I asked if the rest, if they felt shaken,
beaten, uprooted when the woman next to them
got up and moved to another car

I've seen a few Novembers

2007-11-12T14:23:00.000-06:00

You say that every morning he whines
when I say My god look at that tree and that one
but he has only looked for nine years
not the thirty something falls of mine
The day I was proposed to on the banks
of a muddy river city just north of here
and the yellow of the pear tree in the front yard
mostly bare the day of heart attack number one
brushing the white truck as we pulled off
to the hospital, milk already staining my
not so sexy t-shirt, clinging to my post-baby belly
or the now brown leaf on the mantle
the size of a Guinness book palm, the one
he brought home from pre-k saying he just
knew it was the biggest in the whole wide world
or the green of this October, my coaxing it
to turn, to redden and explode like I did,
prematurely and hopelessly in a park
filled with just the two of us on a too hot
Saturday afternoon, my 35th free fall.

Still think about

2007-11-06T21:57:00.000-06:00

Salt Water

2007-10-28T10:49:00.000-05:00

I choose not to get a tissue
when the brackish drop slides around
the apostrophe curve of her nostril.

I maintain my body languange
from before her eyes started,
my arms crossed high-
covering cold, vulnerable nipples.

In moments like these I like to touch things-
fold, unfold napkins
crumple cough drop wrappers
strangle my fingertip with the bread tie.

In my head I keep score of spoken low blows
and wish my dining room had a chalk board
like the one in the basement by the pool table.
Many more games are played up here.

I once went to a kid-friendly restaurant,
sat at a black slate table on which toddlers
could scribble while they waited
for grilled cheese sandwiches.
I wish we had one in green.
With the water from her eyes
we could wipe it clean.

with an on-my-back smile

2007-10-23T20:33:00.001-05:00

like a school bus perched
on a warehouse roof
how did I get here
to climb on scaffolding
watch sunsets from castles
where stars line city sidewalks
I ride in elevators
dance for dollars
crush bottles on mosaic tile
cut my fingers on crooked
lipstick smeared mirrors
and stand at tops of hills
willing to throw myself down
tumble like Jill and break
my spinning top parts
I got here with clenched legs
crisscrossing over your heart
and I open them only
as if to say stay

And this is how we love

2007-10-10T23:18:00.000-05:00

Your transgressions
like stolen bibles,
blows to the abdomen
staccato words of what
you could have done
the purpling yellowing bruise
of your capabilities, your frailties
The boogie man, you are, in my closet
getting ready to quietly enter
where I lay on the neatly made bed
one hand over my eyes, legs dangling
and I with my double X chromosomes
want to castrate what lies under your beauty
Yet still like the rest of us
I reach out for that re-creation
of my first
with an attempt to embrace
that which deserves not my arms
or my hands or my tongue
speaking and thrashingand finally wetting you

Mammas

2007-10-10T23:17:00.000-05:00

Like a pendulum they could be,
on my hands and knees, me
begging for something to cherish
like the 8 day clock
now just a 4 day after years
ticking on grandma’s mantle
She said it’s time for you to have it,
moving into the home,
no need for chiming there
and I do, I cherish it,
check it every 4 days like I do you
assuring you I’m real and human
and even with the gravity
of saying yes when I mean no
all that pulls and sags me downward
is lifted when you wind me up
and cherish me like the 8 day clock

Sister

2007-10-07T19:37:00.000-05:00

It's not that I don't love her
or that I don't fondly recall her
with strawberry locks and pink cheeks
standing in cowboy boots and a red ski hat,
writing with lipstick on walls.
It's that there is no truth in her
that the markings adording her young skin,
the color and ink of punk rock illusions
cover and cloak her, and the thing
we have in common, this mystery of red,
hers is died and black now
while I stay auburn, burnt,
writing with lipstick all over myself.

Spun

2007-09-26T22:05:00.000-05:00

You can press rewind and replay and relive
slink back into a curtain-drawn room
sit down and declare a disdain for
mid-day meals
tumble about and hold on
hold on like you’ve found
the safest harbor in your whole dictionary
of banters and brazen brilliance
and say good night as an exclamation
not a good-bye
then a Tuesday will come a ‘howlin’
and you hope to be windblown
but your hair stays in place
your face is white with hunger
and with longing
and your legs they are strong and healed
and you loathe the west coast
skylines of silver and sparkling
majesty when you look to yours
a barren river-city
a low-lying siding ranch
of apprehension with curtains wide open
letting in the blinding sun

Truth TIme

2007-09-16T10:47:00.000-05:00

This is not a poem about the truth of you
or the black water depth of you
the shimmery glossy finish
over the jigsaw puzzle secrets that is you
how you are broken and in crooked pieces
you link like the red mosaic table top
how you shake the box in search of corners
before you fill in each block of pointless
cartoon color, simple and as two dimensional
as your take on love and forever and
can you say it?...family
and you think of me and bend over the pieces
hunched over and alone for the first time
binging and cutting and purging and lying

this is not about you, the voyeur reading me
and signing in on me and ready, set?
dodge this one - two - three - four,
this is a poem of last times, not one single time
just like the first time, there is not enough
poetry
paper
words
time

On December 6, 2005

2007-08-31T19:33:00.000-05:00

head in hands, palms in eyeballs
circular, dizzying thoughts
open eyes to a little hand
digging in the art drawer
it makes a card.
mari crissmes, it says.
Im giving you this now
becus I wont be here on crissmes
and Ill miss you

Upon moving up in the world

2007-08-31T19:31:00.000-05:00

there are some of us who worry what the neighbors think
when we pull in our driveways and the grass is brownish
greenish yellowish, the paint is chipping flaking dulling
like our skin and our serotonin-starved brain
that misfires mistakes misleads when we realize that
one of these garage doors has ever opened and it’s because
there is only one car, one opener, one grown-up
with two skate boards, two bikes, two passengers on this ride
to suburbia and sometimes you can only shake your head
that you are actually dressed, combed, cleaned, hemmed,
that there is a lawn at all instead of thigh-high carnivorous vines
swallowing up the opener, the bikes, that bitch next door

Spit, Swallow, Breathe, and Listen

2007-08-23T19:26:00.000-05:00

until now, these were words
for beds, or cars, even tables or countertops
whispered under sheets, perhaps shouted
in my head while I revitalized downtowns
but now…
now in your world
spit slowly glides off mouthpieces
into buckets
water is swallowed after sprayed
into bloody mouths
breaths are golden after
body shots and hooks
and listen, listen to the crowd, the children
and the old man with a voice like brandy,
shouting, “Whatcha waiting for”
and listen to the pound plan
as you sit under vertically written “RINGSIDE”
as you fall onto a stool and gather
your head and your ribs
and you say welcome to my world
welcome to my sweet science
go ahead, taste

Linen

2007-08-23T19:23:00.001-05:00

Woody interior rots,
eases the removal of flaxen fiber.
This retting the aroma of a rat’s death
behind the cupboard.
Women beat the ornery fannies of flax stalks.
Each child to far corners, wood versus fiber,
no harmony in the roughing.
How fine are you?
Stay with your own kind.
Parallel hackles, rough goes first
age before beauty.

They are easy when wet.

An orgy of women required
to keep this weaver weaving.
to spin, dress with sticky ooze,
thicken, strengthen before the toxin.
Bleach now, sun in days gone by.
Virgin white before more pummeling
to close every hole.

Across the pond she longs for sun.
In capris, craves crisp clean air.
In pedal pushers, ponders purity.
Shops for vests with lungs,
trousers with bronchi.
She fears Chlorox
and its suffocating ways.
A startling oxymoron
her poisoned pants
once pummeled and putrid
to her like women’s lips
on her cycling, climbing calves.

With cream and imitation sugar

2007-08-20T22:12:00.001-05:00

Someone brought me coffee in my dream
the color we painted the walls in our bedroom
with the sweetness of the bread pudding
I make on Thanksgiving.
I was curled up on a round chair
in thick white socks and pajamas
soft as the blanket we keep on the couch
for cold October nights.
This morning you told me
that in my sleep I said
don’t touch me, your hands are cold.
I think of the coffee cup and saucer
and wonder about them being put to my heart
like those paddles they use in surgery
the ones we watch on TV until
we turn our head away because of the blood
the truth of it, that our hearts need shock waves,
heat or coffee cups and saucers to hold them
warm and served by someone else.

For J

2007-08-20T21:58:00.001-05:00

He said I called in sick
so I could watch the birds
from the library’s third-floor
southwest wing overlooking
the courtyard of dogwoods
and now pedalless tulips

He says they’ve started
a sort of relationship,
that watching the newly
hatched eat from mothers’ mouths
brings him closer to the person
he wants to be
That he sits in the hard armed chair
and feels gentleness rising inside
him, a soft murmur

whispering

you can wake from nightmares
wanting your mother
you can miss your grandma’s hands
and you can listen to baby birds

Do you know...

2007-08-20T21:56:00.000-05:00

of the roads I walked
along barefoot or the vines
I swung from with weak arms
and a sunburnt face?
have you seen me
with my little knack,
point to north, south
east, west in a foreign town?
Have you thought of me wanting
to be good at you, enough to
never find the breaking point
that place where the red wine runs down
the wall after the glass shatters and the stem
lies quietly twinkling on white carpet
while there’s an ache in the stomach
like way back at the beginning when
you starved yourself to feel human
and celebrated your blood, your sweat
and every damn pain to know you were alive

Smack dab in the middle of the USA

2007-08-19T16:29:00.000-05:00

It’s now only 15 miles from my house to yours
past 2 water towers, 3 trailer parks,
and, for such a small town,
4 radio towers hell-bent on knocking
out the satellite radio turned
to the flannel channel, where the lyrics
“rape me” and “flies in the Vaseline”
send me back to undergrad
when my roommate locked herself
in her room for 3 days grieving
over a Seattle man’s death until her mom
came from St. Louis, busted in her door
they say she never was the same
like “all apologies” were meant for her,
not for you and I who say “sorry”
every time we voice one damn
need of our very own

Words

2007-08-19T16:09:00.001-05:00

You cannot disappoint anyone she whispered
in a midnight bed with fans humming
oh yes you can and a nightstand
cluttered with books of underlined poems
like the one that says, you can’t have it all
but you can have this
And so the list begins
of all that can be had, coveted,
possessed
then quietly lost,
all the intangibles
like success, satisfaction
all the adjectives not suited for poetry
And already poetic words like
sage, roly-poly, cocoon,they’ve gone.

untitled

2007-08-19T16:07:00.000-05:00

in the days of working nights
charcoal visions merged
with whites of sunshine through cheap blinds
while coffee only shook her and stirred
the baby boy sucking
at her breast

the pear tree in front of the house
-the one eventually foreclosed-
was full and blossoming
fat like leftover skin
flowering in the springtime she failed
to frolic in

her music, the high pitched voice
of daughter age 2, her drug the door slamming,
ignition turning, his exit and off to work

say those days are over, the midnight to six
the pear tree, the breast milk, the stretch marks
the sunglasses in bed

Having a drink at the corner bar

2007-08-19T15:59:00.000-05:00

It seemed funny at the time, after 3 cold ones
chatting and chatting and then saying,
no, this is just too, too...
scribbling the T-O-O on the table with my finger
with no adjective following
Extra words tumbled out of my mouth-
of the fake Van Gogh’s on the wall
the romantic suicide of Virginia Woolf
the last song played at my prom,
the smell of the boy I danced close with
who I eventually married, only to later
throw his things on the lawn in black Hefty bags,
how I was lucky because I rarely buy anything other
than the cheap white kitchen bags, that they
came in handy the night I put his Marine Corps coat
in one, then decided to keep it, and yes,
it’s still in the upstairs closet, and no,
I didn’t think I had to tell you this before
Then the story I told of throwing an ashtray at a lover
the one with talent and blue eyes actually, not green
like I wrote because green sounded better in poetry
Then all those efforts to explain poems and words
extra words, too many words

Flightless Bird

2007-08-19T15:56:00.000-05:00

Like a takahe wanting to take flight
flapping and flapping until breathless
it’s my jaws hoping you’ll be affected
by all I want to converse
words, and words,

maybe the table wine
or aioli served warm
with french bread
will remind you of the Renoi exhibit
and the lily I picked for you,
the royal lily in a desert of peyote
before my hands
decayed behind your waist
holding too tight dismantled
by your shivers

this flapping takahe jaw
it should hover over you

Things done I wish I could undo

2007-08-17T21:27:00.000-05:00

that we hadn’t gone to the market that morning for the butter nut squash
I was to cook with coconut and brown sugar or the watermelon,
small and seedless, your favorite, and those damn red delicious apples

that you hadn’t fixed the wobbly kitchen table my kids and I
abandoned months ago - when I’d cut their pork chops
I thought it would just collapse right there on the sleeping cat underneath

that I hadn’t bought you a toothbrush, the green one that stands diagnal
leaning up against mine, orange and worn because of my obsession
with teeth, yours sharp and noticeable, mine brushed countless times a day

that you hadn’t done that one load of laundry for me while I was at work
the one with the bathroom rugs that I should wash more often, the mint
green one that when freshly washed shows footprints by the shower
the one with your print, from the last time you were here

Drink

2007-08-17T21:25:00.000-05:00

at 90% water I am at low tide
sitting with my glass of amber
barley and hops drying my nucleus
hoping for a tickle of my brittle brain
you sip purity with a straw
with hopes that at 98%
you’ll hydrate into your own
private ocean
or evaporate from yourself
from me
when we hug my mouth is dry
and your eyes seem more aqua than hazel
I drive with thoughts of adult swim,
wet lakes where I can see the bottom
and you, poolside

Splitting the Assets

2007-08-17T21:23:00.000-05:00

The “Mom” coffee cup with a smiley-face sun
and fat apostrophe shaped sits
on this table while the highlighter
screeches across another page.

I once stood holding its edge
with a man at the other end,
saying, do you like it here
or here?

From it a toddler picked first Cheerios
with finger tips like salad tongs.
It later found home where it now serves
as desk in this attic office retreat.

I want to pat it, smooth the cherry wood,
to say I’m sorry I said
I’d cut you in half before I’d lose you
as I ran to the shed for a chainsaw.

Driving Thoughts

2007-08-17T21:21:00.000-05:00

I saw a movie where someone said to his lover
I can’t quit you
yeah you know the movie, all the hype
but the quitting you thing
sort of sucked a little molecule
in the left aorta
where I keep the dumb stuff
stuff that seeps into my brain when I’m driving
the shortcut through the park
and that one tree, a magnolia maybe
and the flow of quitting you thoughts
seems to make the damn magnolia
lonely especially
in February when it looks tired
and it wishes for May like I do
because I have to wear a ski cap
and I look manly in them because my hair is so short
but my earsthey’ll fall off if I don’t
and the flow from the aorta
to my brain at the red light
just past the tree
is that
I can’t quit you molecule
and there’s an image of me
standing next to the tree
saying I can’t quit you
and the treee
even in Mayas I say
quit
it looks like February

Scotland

2007-08-17T21:19:00.000-05:00

she said I lied when I said I had nothing to say
I had lots
but to hear you, just to hear you
while I sit in this room
with clothes strewn about,
the night before another holiday
of biking the beauty of places
you’ll never see
with those who only know that
falsetto voice
I think your Midwestern drawl
and deep loud laughter
will air my tires
or cushion
my head
pump potassium
into my
cramping calves
while I
cycle
spin
ache
coast

Beach Walk

2007-08-17T21:16:00.002-05:00

the first time I saw a beach of pebbles I thought of you
how sand sprawled into forever, the way my foot sinks into it,
it has no beauty compared to this sound of water
receeding over pebbles, the tree trunks humbled
by landing there on the beack of rock, so fortunate to be away
from gritty sand and those broken shells that stick into my tender arches
the way you stuck into me with sharp broken edges,
like a broken fossil, or the snail’s home
abandoned and broken by the raging waves,
how I hoped for smooth pebbles, dark and emerald
under Pacific waters and some pink like the parts I’d shown you
and standing on miles of smooth I laughed at my marginal self
wondering where you were and what jagged thing was
under your feet

For H

2007-08-17T21:16:00.001-05:00

You are the folds of Georgia O’Keefe.
While stretched canvas pleads
New Mexican canyons,
she strokes red canna
and calla lily
inspired by your pink layers,
a morning glory.

Right it Here

2007-08-17T21:14:00.000-05:00

School counselor callsc
ould you come up here right away
daughter
crying in class
can’t do her times tables
with these fears swirling in her 9 year old brain
Fourth graders lined up
she blends in with the others
except for the red puffy eyes
and the dimple on the left like yours
Amid black history month
colorings of MLK and Rosa Parks
it comes like the pangs of 19 hours of labor
your labor with her
for her
You cannot save her and
the cruel
ironyof your efforts
end here
You talk about this day
speak as fast as your head can
find the careless words
But to write it
to record it
to right it
Well then
it becomes your honesy
packaged under-your-skin
story

Soulspace

2007-08-17T21:08:00.000-05:00

it’s the Big Bird pajamas, the only memory before 5, the bottoms
of the matching set
and how toddler life is a little backside covered in baby blue
bloomers
with skinny legs popping out like a small bird, the irony

it’s railroad ties in the backyard, only five feet high when I visited
Gateswood Drive
as an adult and the deep laughter followed by tears when I
remembered them
as the Mount Everest only my male siblings could climb

the bicycle from 1982 on that warm Christmas when no one had
ever heard of testing out a bike-gift in December and the thought
that Jesus himself had blessed the blue 10-speed and each ride
around the block was another prayer of thanks

damn, if it isn’t the slumber party of 1986 after reading a Judy
Bloom book
and the novelty of whispering in a group of pre-teen Catholics, “I
masturbate,” and the silence that followed all the way until
morning and the cruelness of them, and well,

the fact that I really didn’t even know what it was but my desire to
make clever conversation from a book I read took over and
testing out a new word was more pleasureable than the activity I
would not discover until well into the 1990’s

and it’s The Scarlet Letter and Hester Pryne and To Kill a
Mockingbird and eventually Longfellow and Plath and that
professor from the community college who turns out, now that it’s
2006, I see was probably a guy just like me

the times I wake in the night and pull my car over and whisper
over and over to remember when I don’t have a pen and the
keyboard I think will need attention when I pound on it, the sound
of it better than the rain in the attic downing out lover’s moans

the Times New Roman or Arial depending on the disposition and
the moon and the flow of what needs to be purged to make room
for more-
the ache to share it but to hold it like babies in the wind

It didn't matter

2007-08-17T21:05:00.000-05:00

that I didn’t get stalked back,
as I was on a one way street
traveling into a vena cava
over and over or
marching into a dirt farm
on the sidewalk

that words I imagined mouthed
deeply, coarsely never blew
into my neck or my eyebrow
the I know, I know
never written, faxed,
IM’d, scribbled on my dirty car

that I was the boy
in the bubble using sign
language, fore-finger-thumbing
the “L”, the curved fist of “E”
the single finger “T”and continuing
“LET ME OUT”

it did not matter-
my non-reciprocated love

Hunger

2007-08-17T20:36:00.000-05:00

she said I’ve been laughing myself off

down to the bone, the pretty one
that collar bone that pokes out underc
ollared shirts, the Izods of 1984

snorting, giggling and guffawing
hand to mouth, head thrown back
then hunched over, hand to concave belly

until water comes out of each eye
cold tears not yet warmed by grief
or fear or even relief or beauty

and now what’s left is the ache
in the half moon tips of her mouth
in her throat
in her diaphragm
down herbending
scalloped back

On Being 34

2007-08-17T20:34:00.000-05:00

when I lie flat on my back
I tend to put my hand on my belly
sort of move it around and searchf
or those pelvic bones of pre-1996
before I ballooned in maternal
awe and willed my skin to accommodate
in my search there is this sense
nothing pre-1996 was of any importance
not even my young bones
that were once humped by
that one girl in college, the dark
one with eyes like sage and a voice
like honey, amber and slow
as she whispered that she couldn’t
help it, she just couldn’t help it

On the Way to Cooper's Landing

2007-08-17T20:33:00.000-05:00

I got it bad for a woman who can ride
just sit in the passenger seat and ride
while I drive down dirt roads repeating
is it this way or that
She says I don’t know babe, I’m just enjoying
you and this drive so take us baby
take us whichever way your hand
turns that wheel, just keep oner
ight there on my thigh while
I light this smoke and sit back
and imagine you and I riding just like this
in fifty years when I’m gray and your hands are crooked
when you’ve forgotten how broke you are now
or that your daughter is squirming away from you
and yes, I’m thinking of the day
when you’ve forgotten that time
you said you made me cry and I said
good

When she is nine

2007-08-17T20:31:00.000-05:00

I just started to see her as pieces.

Today I am waiting for 4:35
when I can stare
at her right eyebrow.

Yesterday it was her upper lip
that I stroked with my paintbrush eyes
and tomorrow I will start on
her left eye.

I have already glanced at it
and I know
it has lashes like mine
but is colored by the genes
of her deceased father.

I expect I will greet him there
with my forgiveness and old love.

Crash

2007-08-17T20:29:00.000-05:00

I wonder if I told you that today I am Howard Hughes,
that I am scrubbing and washing and counting
and repeating and repeating and rocking,
would you dry me and stop me and cradle me,
would you tell me that you will be my Catherine
or my Kate?
Would you tell me that I can call you whatever I want
even if today it’s airplane or rocket launcher or Mr. Senator,
Mr. Senator, Mr. Senator?

I wonder if you told me that today you don’t want insanity,
that today you are normal and grounded
and focused and present and healed,
would I stir you and tell you that your skin is softer
when you tremble, that I am quieted when we shake,
that I want you to be off the ground, to fly?

Stuffed Peppers

2007-08-17T20:28:00.000-05:00

I look forward to the skin
left in the garlic press.
I pull it out with a steak knife's tip
No other utensil is as justified and liberated.
I called in sick today
just to squeeze the cloves.
The house smells of clinging pans,
and steamand love
and tomato
and irresponsibility.
Nolan is grateful and forgets
I am neurotic.
I wear a t-shirt that clings to my fat parts,
the sides that want to roll over my jeans.
He stares as I clear plates,
he does not miss
memories of me
when I washis skinny mom.

March Summer

2007-08-17T20:27:00.000-05:00

The attic smells of sex,
outside wetness,
mold, winter’s ashes
and baby crocuses.
A window prefectly placed
under the point of the A of the ceiling
with those curtains I
bought on a whim
hoping you’d like them
and their elegance amid
our thriftstore furniture
and faux finish paint job,I
look through it
at the space between my car and
that jerk next door and at the grease stain
from your jeep on the street.
In bed tonight
on sheets changed
maybe last Sunday,I
will search alone foryour stains there.

Loverboy

2007-08-17T20:24:00.000-05:00

I shout I love you when you sing
"O My Darling Clementine"
in an incestuous moment
that reminds me of my father
while in a sanctuary of bass drumming
Savannah ritual your rat-a-tat
heartbeat makes my lips quiver,
your broken poetry sliding
like a tear down my thigh.

Meanwhile you write of a woman on traintracks.
I see the soul of the rope and its pain
as it's tied in knots by the river
before being criss crossed over her nipples.

Then there's the way you say baby like crystal
without bubbles and the plexiglass
between mine and yours melts
like it's laying in desert sun
where I drink you like dromedaries do-filling their humps.

I pierce you, my finger a bayonet
in your somnolent torso, weary like me,
hoping you pour out more for us to float on.

You the gondolier guiding me as I surround
your Venecian boat vessel.

Like Juliet

2007-08-17T20:23:00.001-05:00

give me a soliloquy to shed those water logged
words that creep through the hypothalmus
sometimes that even seep into the marrow of who

who it is that tortures the cells consisting of water,
nucleus and that in-between, it’s all that in-between
which separates, barricades like a city street arson show

show me the mirror you look into on Mondays that reflects
this drowning, wants-to-be-swimming tadpole
shimmering to the side of the baby food jar like it’s first grade

grade me on my speeches, they have been countless
these failed efforts at writing your language
struggling to speak Hooked on, Suffering, Hopelessness

Just another thing you will long for

2007-08-17T20:21:00.000-05:00

Told my daughter
yes my heart is pounding
though you can’t feel it
through these breasts of mine.
Yes, it is weird to put my hand up here
and not feel the rhythm
while I feel it inside,
feel the knot in my stomach
the shaking of my hands
with fingers long and narrow
like yours.
I never really thought of it
how I haven’t felt my heart
the same since I was about
your age.

Kitchen Table

2007-08-17T20:19:00.000-05:00

With six of us, it had benches on either side,
chairs at the head and foot.
We aligned three on each bench,
parents in each of the two thrones.
For weekly pork chops and lasagna
I always had elbows in my ribs,
butter from Julie’s bread
making its way onto my sleeve.

But when I could
I would sprawl on a bench,
cool in the summer A/C
on my bare scrawny legs.
They would remind me of the therapist
who said I stuff things.
Christy, you are being a clam, just talk to us.
With tears and convulsing shoulders, I’d repeat,
I just don’t know, I just don’t know.
At the end I would wind up
ear to my dad’s heartbeat.
He would pet my black hair and say Shhhh.

I was the producer of dramas,
the screenwriter and director.
To sit on the cool bench,
no shared DNA on either side of me,
no butter on my sleeve,
was the like having her uterus all to myself
with his hand on her belly as I kicked.

Nolie is 7 in 2006

2007-08-17T20:17:00.000-05:00

He is gap-toothed and lisping
and I want a time machine.
The digital snapshot/screensaver
is not enough.
The suffocating fear of computer crashes,
technology leap-frogging over my back,
grips me and tells me
the smile will crash
catch a virgus
get wormed.
But a box, magic like snow,
may take me in 10 years
to this moment
where he spits Fruit Loops
through a gap and says
Thee what I can do?

Lily Ann

2007-08-17T20:14:00.000-05:00

your hands are warm like spring

let me put my feeton yours
while you dance me
around the sun room
outsidethe daffodils are droopy
while the irise
sare only leafy
and I am waiting
for purple

Sonface

2007-08-17T20:11:00.000-05:00

he said I have morning hands
as he sat half kneeling on the floor
finger over finger over finger
under shoelace inside knots
looking up when he spoke
not down at the mess of hand shoe
string leg knee
dimples on both sides
but around one
four freckles
in a sort of squarea lean-to shanty square
that will fall off and dismantle
when he is grown or half grown
or maybe tomorrow when
he is a bit more grown than today
and I will scoop them up
the little brown dots
and smooth them back on his cheek

If you wonder what she is to you

2007-08-17T20:08:00.000-05:00

in the June stickiness, amid the stink of gloves
blood and mouse droppings behind the mats
where the radio shouts words of humpin’ and grindin’
the image that makes your mouth spread into
something like a smile when the big toothless
can collecting Broadway man asks,
whatcho thinkin ‘bout, fighter girl?
roadside, pulled over for some shut eye
at midnight, after starving all day and fighting
just for that high you get when you’ve beaten
an eatin’ kind of girl, when the eyelids
thank you for not being blackened
and curse you for not letting them close
the laugh you hear when you succomb
under a single sheet, used for comfort not warmth
on that couch you’ve been surfing on the last 4 days
shaking and teeth grinding as you cuss yourself
just before you jump up, grab the keys and go
into one a.m. to meet demons and make purchases
you lie about and mistake for errands, it’s
the voice you hear saying damn, love yourself
the way I do

He named her Leta

2007-08-17T20:03:00.000-05:00

I teach her to wash her face,
the white bumps nomads
across her freckly nose, she fears
she’ll never become a star,
never strut down a cat walk
or sing on a New York stage
I say hold your hands under,
cup them like a bowl
catch the water and bring it up,
it helps to blow out a bit,
yes make little bubbles,
like when I taught you to swim
in the plastic pool of star fish
and seahorses in the swampy yard
or at the lake where your dad
taught you how to put that slimy
thing on a hook
before we walked to Nanny’s grave
too soon, not yet situated in the earth
but still a mound your father
cried before, your 3 three year old hand
on his shoulder, with the purpleg
littered star barrettes in your curly hair
The photos of you are the same
just miniature you’s they are
my star child, my gift of May
with sage eyes and serious brow
like dad’s I’m afraid
He also dreamt of being a star,
the sores on his hands unhealing,
strumming a base and singing
“I’m so lonesome I could cry”
while he sat beside me, one of us
comforted, the other the lonely one
as we looked up at the little town
stars, he put his hand
on my then flat belly.