Like a pink house

 Poem inspired by All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews

I want to love you like a pink house where we eat dinner with all our friends and family every night. 

I want to love you like my body is celery so I can be the very fiber of your being.

I want to love you like a manifesto, believing in the power of the universe to change.

I want to love you like the moon, always round, even when I can always see a sliver.

I want to love you like a dandelion in the wintertime, weak and lopsided and painfully colorful.

I want to love you like my very life depends on it. Because it does. 

The seven sisters 2

 We love a series...

The Holyoke mountain range is a giant

Lying east-west so one side of her is always

Too cold and one side too hot. 

She lives in the edge of discomfort and remembers 

There used to be giant beavers in this valley

And glaciers and moose and once long ago

She was the ocean.

Can you imagine

The electricity of being shaded on one side in the cool damp

Of hemlocks and sweeping mossy carpets

And on the other the smooth, hot shivering trunks

Of birches, beech, and goldenrod? 

Can you imagine containing multitudes--

The beavers, the moose, 

The hemlock, the beech, 

And the ocean? 

The seven sisters

The peaks of Norwatuk and Bear flush pink 

In the slanting sunlight, mirroring your cheeks

The Metacomet-Monadnock trail

Lies across the ridge of the Holyoke

Mountain range. I want to tread each step

Of that path until I know its every 

Evergreen. Every moss and princess pine

And quaking aspen. (Is it clear that the 

Mountains are a metaphor for you?)

The whole damn moon

 I'm not embarrassed by the ladder I built

Swaying and soaring into the sky

And the way I climbed hand-over-hand

Until my palms were as tender as my heart

And then the way I reached for her broad face

And stretched and still didn't wrap my arms around her

She was gray and radiant and I'm not embarrassed

That I lay her at your feet because I thought 

She might bring you joy. 

I'm not embarrassed by the butterflies

Preforming ariels in my guts

I'm not embarrassed that I want to spilt belly

And spill my lepidopteran insides across the the glass table of your gaze

And let you judge them, moths and monarchs both.

The princess bride and other cliches

 Filled with the bubbles of champagne

And the memory of your lips

If you want I could fly

Here I am, flaying my heart open--

Begging to rend my ribcage so you can see the tender color 

Of scarlet that is my blood

What is life but the rejoicing in 

The opportunity

To be broken again?

Winter's nearly here

 Winter is nearly here. So you know it's time for....

More poems abut Orion!

Orion my first love is always high

When the days stoop short and crooked. When night

Paints itself in deepest blue across the sky

I look to the south for his three twinkling lights.

Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,

But the only rage left in me is soft

And shivering. Braced against the growing cold

Until star boy reminds me: not all is lost.

He is the utterly gut-wrenching feeling

Of my first love. He is the emptiness

Of the after. He's the captive appeal 

Of my love's lips before we never kiss

I look south past the horizon to find

Three gleaming stars and all I've left behind

It's been an elliptical time

 CW: sickness, covid

I measure my time with covid in cups of tea. 

Not food, for I have no appetite. 

When a body is used to biking sixty miles

To hiking mountains and wrestling trees 

And it finally finds itsself stilled--food seems uninteresting 

(my body is uninterested)

And not with sleep--the fickle friend

I stay up long hours into the night, thrashing and sweaty under the covers

And nap fitfully throughout the day time

My sleep losing the careful meter I have come to enjoy

A broken metronome swinging wildly and without reason

I work the same: in fits and starts, sloppy unedited emails from my phone

Maybe in the afternoon, maybe at 2am

(I have nothing else to do)

But I carefully measure out the tea--I know my body needs the liquid

Hot and minty, or sometimes green

I boil the whole kettle and slowly drip it into myself

My body takes it more easily on some days then others

And like this, as the tea disappears and becomes me

I know some time has passed. 

Fuck your septum ring

Fuck your septum piercing and your rattlesnake tattoo

Fuck the essays you read about object/subject metaphor

Fuck your hair and fuck your eyes, especially when they sparkle blue

Fuck that I'm just "not exactly that which you've been searching for"

Fuck that you think you're still straight even though you dated me

Fuck when you get angry over losing simple games

Fuck that road trip we took through Rhode Island to "gaze at the sea"

Fuck that all your friends never learned how to say my name

Fuck that I was only ever ends to your self-realized means

Fuck that time you stood me up at the movie Encanto

Fuck the way I felt in my chest when you said you're leaving

Fuck the way these tears rained down to soil far below

The fall ground is soaked and cold rain flows and drips below the tree roots

 The sky at sunset is painted a glowing scarlet rose

The trees shed their all leaves and I think that I must follow suit

Naked and washed clean, my branches bare, my heart exposed

 

Summer turns to autumn and I know my form belongs 

Among the trees (I hate that you rejoice in metaphor)

Fuck that I still think of your approval etched across this song

Maybe when the season turns I'll think of you no more. 

To the scarecrow

[inspired by howl's moving castle]

I found you in a hedgerow, looking mighty tattered

I found you in a hedgerow looking tired and worn

Turnip head was wilted, straw filthy and matted

Wooden spine was broken, burlap clothing torn

I set you right as best I could and let you know I loved you

I set you right as best I could before I walked away

You stood a little straighter in the slanting autumn sunshine

A shaggy, battered figure on a chilly, sunny day.

I think of you just sometimes while down these roads I ramble

Ambulating leisurely, not keeping any time

I took your memory, the color of your eyes, your crooked smile

I think of that just when I stop to look at what's behind

The power of the rib cage

 "I'll take you to New York." He said.

"Don't make promises you can't keep." I said.

"I won't." He promised. 

And I let myself believe him. 

I'm not mad at him, I just

feel like he cracked open his ribs, offered up the marrow in his chest and said

"Eat."

And I didn't even know I was hungry;

When I was eighteen, I was friends with a girl named Danielle and she was always falling in love and having her heart broken.

When I was nineteen, I listened to a podcast that suggested vulnerability could be a form of power

It has taken me twenty-five years of my life to figure out how to unlock the hard cage of my ribs and let the rare bird of my heart out

When I was eighteen I watched Danielle lay herself open to her lovers, spread herself out on the table and say "I am a full damn meal."

She would have heard him say "I will take you to New York." and believed him without a second thought.

I don't think she ever made it to New York but she always thought she might be on her way.

I was made of weaker stuff. 

I depended on the wall of my rib cage to keep out the wolves. 

I was never the meal for others until I had fed myself first.

I took myself to New York.

There was nothing wrong with this.

It happened so slowly, the change in my chest

At first just eggs, robin blue, barely more then a little oblong toy

Then tiny birds, gasping for breath. Crying out for their mother.

The day they learned to fly, I was so scared for them. I had never seen such

Delicate things take on the air.

Tiny, perfect fighters of gravity. 

And so I taught myself to put the key in the lock and open the cage and let the birds fly away.

I taught myself to lay bare and sit still and let others enjoy the meal of me. 

I learned to let someone else take me to New York.

He wasn't the first. (He was among the first.)

I won't let him be the last. 

A study in breaking up

 "I'll take you to New York." He said.

"Don't make promises you can't keep." I said.

"I won't." He promised. 

And I let myself believe him. 

The earth tilts for me

 The earth tilts for me to make the days just

A few moments longer and brighter

So you and I can laze in golden sun 

As it dips and just flirts with horizon

The edge of the world seems too close

And too far--my calves grow fat with the seeking

 Of light that glows true--there are no shadows here

And no secrets we tell just for keeping

The sun whispers stories of light just for me

The summer hangs ripe with their promise

I'll lay butterfly kisses along your soft cheeks

And the days just get longer and longer

Luminescence

 I'm a human glow stick

I didn't know it was dark and then you cracked me open

Or no, I'm the fireflies under the trees in the evening, 

Wanting love so dearly I radiate light

I'm also the fireworks springing apart in the open sky

The very act of your eyes on me is an explosion

You are the stars 

And I will crack and yearn and explode underneath you. 

Heart on your sleeve

This morning I woke up and I could barely fit on the pillow beside the enormous heart 

You wear on your sleeve.

I keep falling in love and writing new love poems

Only really its the same love over and over again.

The same dance steps, the same sunsets and every time I forget the constellations that rise

But the stars are always there glittering inside me. 

I'm not mad at you, I just

feel like you cracked open your ribs, offered up the marrow in your chest and said

"Eat."

And I didn't even know I was hungry;

We are porcelain. We are the thin plastic trash can by my desk 

Made brittle with age and whenever I drop something in it another 

Little bit snaps off and I don't know how we're still standing

With all that breaking and imperfections.

We are fumbling towards each other with cold numbed fingers and fire hot mouths.

I'll lick strips of you away like melting ice cream and 

You'll drip all over my fingers and turn me sticky with all your softness.

I'm not mad but but you should probably do something

About all these butterflies where my heart should be.

Rock Quarry

 I walk slower because of you--

Reminded to find the lichen

Wrinkled along the rock, ubiquitous

And varied, I think of the true

Colors of the rock. Tripe,

Really, my pretty words, my useless

Pleads. What is poetry, rife

With symbiotic metaphor, less

Substance than a single syllable

Laid from your lips with exquisite 

Care? Each of your words is like this:

A gift given so that I may treasure it.

Three stars on his belt

He sits on city roofs and longs to see 

The stars and something twists in his gut, pulls.

Tells him it should be different. Part of him 

Remembers what it was like to chase bears 

And sleigh dragons. When a star dies it goes 

Out in a blaze of glory. 

A gas giant, nebula, galaxy 

Of gas and light and destruction.

But here he sits on a city roof. He can't 

See the stars and part of him that burns 

Flickers in the vast darkness of space.

Star boy. You'll never know how I love you.