(a reply to Siren Song by Margaret Atwood)
If I could fill
Each of your desires
And have you want
For nothing
Today you drove at the sunset and the clouds were pink
And you turned Taylor Swift as loud as she would shout
"Shake it off/shake, shake it off" blasted across Front Street
And you pulled into Aliyah's Ice Cream Place, tires screeching
And bought yourself a small chocolate cone
I would have
Bought thousands
Of ice cream cones
If only you would ask
Inspired by Amanda Palmer's Melody Dean
Today I fucked him but I wanted it to be you
And I thought about how you told me babies forget how to make their own heart beat
Without the heartbeat of a parent to keep track for them
Sometimes I think my heart is forgetting to beat
And I'm forgetting to breathe
Sometimes I come home at the end of the day and I realize my jaw is clenched tight
But I don't know how long it's been like this and I worry my face will get stuck
And I miss you like a house on fire
And I don't know what to save
So in the confusion and the burning rubble
And the family photos floating in ashes through the air
I fucked him
But I wanted to fuck you
This song is so simple
A child could learn it
They already do
You do too: listen
Listen to the drum beat of your heart
While it strives to harmonize with the beats around it
Should I tell you?
You already know
You want to be wanted
Watch out for the rocks below,
I hear they're pointed
(a reply to Siren Song by Margaret Atwood)
I'm not stupid. I know what you think
Of me
About to leap onto sharp rocks to save her
I know that love should not be so pointed
And no man has ever gone
Where I go now and lived to tell
What would you have me do?
Sit safe and dry aboard this ship
And steel my heart and look past her cry
For help and on towards the fuzzy horizon
I know I will leap like I know the sun
Will rise in the morning and maybe this time
It will not rise on another
Shattered set of bones sprawled across the rocks
(a reply to Siren Song by Margaret Atwood)
There is nothing I would like more
Then to splinter my bones on the sharp rocks
If it will save you
If you need help,
I can be--no I must be
The one who can save you
Even if the proof of the failure of every man before me
Lays skewered on the sharp rocks below me
I know in my heart
I will be the one to save you.
Hear each voice
As above so below
The barons forget what the workers know
Each of our voices is raised in a call
Do not forget why your islands don't fall
Even the mountain grinds down to dust
You can't control that all iron rusts
These chains will snap and some day we
Will breathe together then we'll be free
To my Yevette
I'll never forget the first time I saw violet, never knew the color truly until I saw it in your eyes, I will not lie, they light up my night and I just wish the first time that we kissed I could freeze time, I'd never leave you behind and don't you mind the future or the past and we both know this won't last and I have to laugh but I would rather watch a zeplin crash then admit it but I can't quit you and violets are still my favorite.
Your lips are clouds and now I don't ever want sunshine again
I wish I were a cat
Or a mouse
Or a creature who can curl up in a warm place and just absorb
Like a sponge, this feeling
Instead of feeling like my stomach is being wrung out.
I want to make this profane,
Or sacred,
Or trussed up in metaphors and colors and other useless things
But the truth has never been more lovely
I want to shout it from the rooftops
And whisper it into the rustling grasses of the meadow where I sleep
In my den of soft hay and sweet acorns
And hide from myself the cat
And fall so deeply into this feeling that I drown
In truth
What do you do with a BA in environmental education?
(Inspired by Amanda Lovelace)
Use it to love each robin like a lost child
Treat each child like a song
And discover treasure at the base of every tree
Use it to scream into the void about the broken world
We live in. Tear at power structures like
They are merely crepe paper wrappers and not
The foundations of a rotting world
Use it to believe in something
The light in the darkness
Because all these lost children
And fat robins
Must be worth fighting for
Playful paw falls rush across the living room
Now the kitchen, now the bath, little black cat zoom
Mews when she's hungry or she wants attention too
Loves to watch kitty TV, loves to cuddle you
Sometimes loving you is untying knots in fraying twine
And sometimes it's seeing in the dark without a moon
But I like it best when loving you is simple
Fight me with clipped claws
And wooden swords
Let's play-joust like six year olds
Fight me with the kindest insults you can conjure
Fight me with honey wine
And sunshine on pillowed grass
Fight me in graceful steps and
We'll call it dancing
My gender is being able to name twenty-three flowers
In the order they come out as the spring turns to summer
But not knowing how to open a bank account.
My gender is the color of the eyes of the first girl I was even in love with
And forgetting her name
My gender is the act of plunging into a clear lake in the rain
And feeling the cool raindrops fall from the sky
And the warm water as it surrounds me, warmer then the air
Daffodil:
Bend your golden head and fall in love
Sing just to hear your own sweet voice ring out
Stop and stare at each sunlit reflection
Love water even though you know no drought.
When life gives gifts, don't ask if you're deserving
Take the abundance as it is: a prayer
To you and life and your still beating heart
The glory of your skin laid sunshine bare
The glory of each sunset is a tribute
To the way you smile in the mirror
Each sunrise is a reverent remembering
Of yellow flowers, later disappeared
Only winter says springtime is a sin
Your reflection is a celebration.
My favorite hiking trail is unmarked and
Unmapped. You are my favorite hiking trail.
Or no, I am the trail and you are a
Person treading footsteps along the whole
Of me, from beginning to end. I know
Each bend and each curve and where the summer
Blackberries grow, sweet and rare. You tell me
About the fox that lives to the side of
Me and its kits and how they sound like small
People. They are small people. Do you know
Humans share ninety-seven percent of
Our DNA with bananas? But how else
Might we be close to all the trail, when we
Take the well-trod turns and know just where to
Look to find the trout lilies in the spring
Or the last lingering goldenrod of fall?
For Erryn
Imagine a jar of honey with the comb still
Sitting sticking in that golden light
Imagine the sunshine striking the honey:
Shining through
Golden light on table feels like home.
Imagine an orange cat who owns the place
No one can sprawl quite like cat can
Cat's muscles are relaxed,
She drapes herself
Anywhere she pleases and we love her.
Imagine a back yard lit with strings
Of lights that flicker and music underneath
Played by unsteady voices, accompanied
By neighbor on drums
While we drink Elderberry libations.
Monet's water lilies are the John Mulaney of art
Unobjectionable and bland and appealing to the lowest common denominator.
If a man tells you Monet is his favorite artist
His favorite food is also probably buttered pasta or plain rice
Also, anyone who tells you Van Gough ate paint probably makes more then seventy-five grand a year
You're not a shitty person because you're from a class of people who like Monet
(or so I tell myself)
You're a shitty person because you never bothered to google
Kent Monkman or Wangechi Mutu or Keith Haring
The other day my friend advised me to invest in a retirement account
I advised him that not only would I never have that much money as a teacher but also
That Boston and New York city will be destroyed by rising sea levels in the next 30 years
And also that I didn't think Monet was "ahead of his time"
Which was probably confusing given that we were talking about the stock market.
When the world is ending and the nastiest thing you can say about your Nazi rapist (former) president is that he's
"like a horse"
Can you explain to me why that's funny?
I like to bake soft pretzels
The precision of two teaspoons
Of yeast, two cups flower, one cup
Warm water. And then let it sit.
It pleases me to cook like this
It's a shame you're not a pretzel.
Force of habit:
I learned from my mother how to jump subway turn styles
Not that the fair was beyond her, just that she didn't believe
Children shorter then turn styles shouldn't bother swiping
The canary yellow of a subway card happens to match
The daffodil sitting on my shoulder blade. Even after
I left the city I kept the subway card tucked in my wallet
Because I always held, tucked behind my ear,
The idea that I might one day return. Forever is a word
That rubs me the wrong way, sand paper on skin kind of panic
Leaving is the relief of a fan in a third story window in the heat
Of summer. But the idea of never
never
Returning is the power shorting out
And the apartment getting hotter and smaller and feeling the sweat on my forehead
portrait of a lady on fire
She likes to set fires; she doesn't wait for sparks
Bridges: aflame, passions: ablaze, barns: burning
She loves the flames's brilliance; she's scared of the dark
She's scared of the way the earth can't stop turning
Her chest is a war zone her heart just won't leave
Her ribs are sideways toy soldiers
Her mouth is dry with her own fire's heat
She can feel her lungs start to smolder
She forgets how to love, but she knows this is wrong
She knows the sunset shouldn't feel like an ending
But the sun has gone out, and the night is too long
The dark is engulfing, the moon is ascending
She puts the lie in believe, she puts her tongue in her cheek
Her warnings unheeded. She never regrets and frays at the seams
Her ends refuse to justify her means
She always remembers her dreams but never the meaning.
She's start dust and grit from the road and she can't stand being told
What to do. She's a show-and-tell story with old-school
Guts and glory and she refuses to step forward if it means two back
And maybe that makes her a fool but the terms are her own.
She spins tales like yarn and there's baleful truth
In her face as she trades in stories, fancies, and prayers
Nothing to her name but cup of tea and an open flame
And when she takes to the trail, nothing but ashes remain.
Juliet's Reply
You advise I look before I leap
But what is heaven but a dozen missed
Steps? To stumble and fall is ecstasy.
How will I learn the path if I don't stray?
Maybe he's a fuck boy: he's a toxic,
No good son of a bitch and the only
Good he ever did was throw me half a
Flirting smile. Then the next time I will
More clearly measure my own worth against
His. The next time I will be not swayed with
such ease. I will not fall but learn instead
To fly.
From Isolde to Juliet
Think not of love my dear for it will lead
Without question to your own sweet demise
To love is grand, to be sure but instead
Consider the springtime blooming vibrant
About you. The flowers bursting forth from
The earth and the birds' sharp songs in the air.
Take all this in and think of him and then
Remember: this is not worth dying for.
You are the song my roommate and I play
Late in the night, windows open, volume
Turned up as high as it will go, we know
Every word. You make the night time brighter.
You are my favorite striped pajama pants
Such a kind creation, and so stylish
And comforting after the day I've had.
You are the gracious act of coming home.
You are the smell of popcorn in the air
And the noise it makes from the stove
Carried on springtime air from the kitchen
To where I lounge upon my bed, hungry.
You are the smile playing across my lips
When I see you again, you are springtime.
Press ear to earth
And hear the pounding of your heartbeat
Does your mouth ever feel dry
In away that reflect the oncoming climate cataclysm
Are you tired of staring every line in your poem with "I"?
The soles of your feet touch the linoleum floor
But your knees sense the concrete below.
Blood
You put the gay in stargaze
The big dipper is flipping
On its handle come springtime I don't remember
If it's to the north or south
The corners of your mouth and your tender
Smile and I know that I've already
Told you about the stars and they shine and planets twinkle
--Mars is in the western sky but fuck me if I can find it.
In the winter Orion drew me home
Each night but now that spring's come
My inner compass is swinging without
A magnet to draw it north but of course
I'm lost without you and in the daytime there's no stars
And in the springtime I should be in love but
Here we are. Lost and alone.
An ode to Channel
(a poem about things left unsaid in the Fibonacci sequence)
1. Dog
1. Knows
2. How to
3. Swim, but that
5. Doesn't mean she should
8. Be in the pool unsupervised
1. She
1. Won't
2. Drown but
3. That doesn't
5. Mean she won't eat the
8. Pool noodles and chew the filter
This spring I envy the robins
And the way they talk such joy in eating worms
It makes me think of pasta at my father's favorite Italian restaurant
They eat worms like they're claiming springtime
As something that belongs to them
I have a red button down I wear when I want to remember what it's like to be in love
But it's not aerodynamic enough that I can fly in it
And when hawks fly overhead and my friends hide in the bushes
And call their two-toned danger alarm
I leave my red chest and my worm behind
And hide and know that this wait will be over soon.
I've been thinking a lot about how storm troopers die
When the Pharaoh's army drowned in the red sea, god asked my ancestors
How they could rejoice while his children died
I don't understand why blood never stains those white suits red.
Maybe death can be a sterile thing
Like chicken thighs pressed tight against saran wrap in the supermarket cold aisle.
I cannot make the perfect tiktok video
And this fact brings me grave agony
Because I wish to cram everything I am into 60 seconds
And then post it on the internet for strangers to see and approve of
When I broke up with my third partner
They accused me of being afraid of intimacy
But fear is only to approach the true feeling as I would I skittish animal
I would not lie down next to a restless horse and say
"Know me"
Every line of my third partner's fingers are etched into my memory
But if I say this on tiktok for each work I say about
Their knuckles and the dips between their veins
There are ten, a hundred more about the fingers of my second love (now broken up)
And my fourth and fifth (currently ongoing).
If only I could pull my self out of my skull like a sword out of a stone
And gradually grind it down
And sharpen it to
60 seconds and then I could five it back to my third love and say
"There! These people who have never met me
They know me and they love me"
And I lay down next to the skittish horse that is my fear of being known and
It stood up and walked on two legs and
I filmed it and edited it and put it on my tiktok and
The strangers, they liked that too.
Ode to Persphone
Today I taught the myth of Narcissus to eight eight year olds
Sixteen round eyes staring down at the daffodils unfolded on brown earth
Considering a similar fate:
To be so bewitched by yellow blossoms and sun gold flesh
That your roots dip into the ground and pull water from between rich, dark globules of soil
I did not tell those eight children and sixteen eyes and sixteen ears
About the daffodil that lies tattooed in ink against my right shoulder blade
In part, because I do not want them to know me with eight young brains so acutely
As one who has fallen in love with their own reflection
And sunk their own roots into the spring-wet ground for the sake of my own beauty
And in part because at that moment Nina spotted a fat gray toad
And it quickly became the most compelling thing any of us had ever seen.
The groves on the pavement on the side of I-90 whisper my name
Just accelerate around the tight turn of an on-ramp
Stepping on gas and leaning into the pull of your own body
Want to go forward, want to turn, desires pushing you, pulling you
What is gravity but all the built-up sexual tension of the universe?
Faster, against the odds
More, against all forces moving towards entropy
My orgasm is an act of defiance against the eventual heat death of the universe
When I drive into the sunset the world stops turning, just for me.
I fight dirty
So I never win clean
I learned to tie the highwayman's cutaway knot
A tangle of threads that cuts loose with a single tug
And it never takes me longer then three seconds to get on the road
The voices in my head stopped scolding me long ago
They had so many voices outside to do it for them and
It's hard to hear anyone else when
"Survive" is tattooed across the inside of your eyelids and
Echoed in the beating of your crooked heart
Sometimes I see the girl I once loved
In clouds but then I always turn my collar up and prepare for the rain
She taught me that
When life is a battle where you need every ounce behind your fist,
You never learn to pull your punches
And really, what's a few black lies for the open road?
What's a bruised ego for a horizon that stretches so wide and empty
You loose sight of the ground?
[so this is a series now]
His hat cast shadows down his jaw
His fingers were tombstones or feathers
He taught me to fly with his breath in my lungs
But didn't say falling was being untethered
And at the end, all that was left
Was the sun and the rain and the sweet remains of the memories of a boy I once loved in the west
His laughs were a song in a language
No one had ever taught me to sing
I never hoped for a second
To keep him, I wanted simpler things
And at the end, all that was left
Was the sun and the rain and the sweet remains of the memories of a boy I once loved in the west
He left like an out of tune banjo
His steps were the strings out of tune
He left like a poem about leaving
I wish I could say he returned like the moon
And at the end, all that was left
Was the sun and the rain and the sweet remains of the memories of a boy I once loved in the west
The taste of your skin was a sin that my preacher had never prepared me for, I adored
Your hips and the taste of your lips like moonshine and your hair I swear so fine
I could run my hands through it like water, I ought to have left you that first night
You fell right like a weight in my ribs and I hate to admit but once I let you in
I was a dead man walking, my old life shed skin like the snakes
I loved to hold, they were cold like I thought I could be, you helped me see
And I held you like your bite just might be the death of me anyway
I stayed pinned by your hands on my wrists, understanding a language
That I had never heard, not a single word and all that was left
Was the sun and the rain and the sweet remains of the memories of a boy I once loved in the west
Ghosts
The ghosts of my old lovers hide in the way I touch my bottom lip with my thumb
They whisper from dark corners at me to put the toilet seat down
I see flickers in the corner of my eye whenever I change the oil on my car
Or when I drive past exit 18 on the highway
My lovers' ghosts slip into my speech sometime
When I pull a long "ah" across my tongue just to remember how it tastes
When I slip on the word home, like one of them left it tattooed on my spine
What am I if not a cobbled together house of learned habits
And steps taken in carefully mimicked time?
Nailed together quirky ways to say hello and goodbye
The puns we liked to make about eggs draped across the gaps in the shoddy ceiling
Sometimes I remember the instant I looked at the way
She tilted her head and decided to borrow the gesture: to take it inside and make it my own
And sometimes I just know that my love for the smell of the rain
Was an idea someone else had, whispered to me beneath sheets
Of indeterminate color
They taught me how to make pretzels and I copied the swish of their hips
With the detail and attention of a Sofar
And we called it love and for a while
That was enough
If only I could remember the shape of the house that used to keep me warm
The walls that blocked the cold and the roof
Which asked the stars, "Could you pipe down and let them sleep?"
If only I could remember the way we lay in piles of blankets and body heat
Fingers on my skin
One window facing east, reminding me of the day to come
One west to remind me of the night still ahead
And one south so the moon could wink at me
As only she knew how we loved within those walls.
