An open letter to the person who left the dishes in the kitchen sink

An open letter to the person who left the dishes in the kitchen sink

And I got out of bed and descended the stairs
Smiled, and kissed the gentle morning airs
Heard the birds singing their fond morning wishes
Went to the sink, and there . . . I saw dishes!

That sweet, dewey, sun-speckled, cloud-dappled morning
Came to a sharp sudden halt with no warning
My leisurely morning was pushed past the brink
The greatest of tragedies, dishes in the sink!

I wonder, dear friend, should these dishes I wash
For if I do then my skink will be spotless
And then if I don't they might sit here all day
And draw in fruit-flies and stink and just stay!

And please know that I'm sad and I'm not just nit-picky
When dishes are dirty I feel deeply icky
It's hard when they're dirty to feel like I'm home
And it's so deeply awful that I'm writing this poem. . .

From a place of real love, and good honest discourse
I know that it's hard to keep clean a shared resource
But just know it brings up some bad places I've lived
Where no one else cleaned, only I did.

I don't think this poem will convince you to clean
The dishes, or change this filthy, piled, fruit-fly'ed up scene
I don't know if this letter will force you to rethink
The way that you up and left dishes in the sink.

This letter's a plea, and a futile one
This letter's a jab, and it's made in good fun
But maybe the next time you'll pause and consider
Do you want to be the subject of another open lettter?

Underwater

Imagine being at the bottom of the ocean
Imagine a world of water above you
How heavy it is
How dark

Imagine crying at the bottom of the ocean
Only you're not sure if you're crying.
You're under water
And you're cold
And you're holding your breath.

It feels like you might be crying
Or maybe you're starting to forget what it was like to cry
On land. What did the air used to smell like?

Erotica

Consider sunlight dripping across your shoulders
And brushing your lips scarlet
I think about your tongue
I try not to.
I try not to think about your voice naked in the air
The way your husky "please" sounds
In my mind you taste like the bluest, sunshiny-ist day in fall
You taste like a fresh apples
Plucked straight off the tree
Dripping with ripe fruit
Bared of leaves
Branches writhing towards the sky.
Please

So what?

So what happens now?
I've woken up crumpled between your bedsheets
For the third time this month
And I look over and your sleeping shoulders
A world away on the other side of the bed.

An open letter to my Spanish teacher

An open letter to my Spanish professor 
And your concern that you forcefully “outed” me when we were doing a class dialogue
Wherein you chose me to fill the role of mujer on a date with an hombre
And at the end instead of saying (in Spanish) I was tired and goodbye
I looked that hombre straight in the eye and said me gusta mujer
Which is a ballsy move except that it’s pretty bad Spanish and so
When you asked me to stay after class to assuage your own guilt that you had forcibly outed me
I found it simultaneously laughable and punitive.
Professora, if you didn’t know I was gay at this point may I direct you to
Exhibit A: My eyebrow piercing
Exhibit B: My Jewish stick and poke tattoos
Exhibit C: My undercut
Exhibit D: My sparkly lip-print crop top
Exhibit E: My literal ring of keys I carry to class
Exhibit F: The rainbow pin on the front of my bag that reads “Not gay as in happy but queer as in fuck you”
I know it’s Spanish class but you can read English and I know everyone else can too
Professora, I have not been in the closet since before you knew what gay was
I know coming out is an ongoing process but it’s hard to imagine anyone anywhere considering me una heterosexual
And also, I had a bus to catch
And when you asked me to stay after and reassure you that my feelings hadn’t been hurt by my mid-class outburst of queerness
I was amused that you thought anything you had done had forced me out from between the cobwebbed coat hangers and moth-eaten fur coats and into the light and furthermore,
Professora, I have a bus to catch that doesn’t care about your guilt over being a bad feminist
And maybe you could take that guilt and include some queer-inclusive vocabulary so instead of saying me gusta mujer I could say yo soy una lesbiana and also
Have you considered that every example in the textbook is una mujer y un hombre and maybe also like including the genderneutral pronoun elle
Instead of holding me after class so that I could personally tell you that you shouldn’t feel guilty and
Don’t lose any sleep over it, professora, and don’t use this as a learning experience to change any of the curriculum and just maintain the status quo
No, I don’t mind missing my bus to soothe your ego, professora
But, as we learned to say in our job interview unit, gracias por la concideración.

Haikus on Climate Change

Leave it in the ground
It took billions of years
To get there. Leave it.

Leave it in the ground.
Good fuck! The science is clear!
You're killing us fast.

Leave it in the ground.
The sky weeps and the ground is
On fire and the seas rise.

Leave it in the ground.
No one else will save the world,
We must save ourselves.

https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/keep-it-in-the-ground/

A nursery tale

Nabokav's balls sit in a wooden box I keep on my beside table
One end is smooth sack and the other is jagged, like little roots
Or many bloody uvulas, flapping without sound perhaps
My best friend has the balls of Kerouac
My roommate claims to have one of the testicles that belonged to John Muir
But it's so pulverized it's genuinely hard to tell.
Please, tell me again what it is: literature?
Is it fantasy?
A lesson to be learned?
A radical political expression?
An original thought?
If you're curious
Nabokov's balls smell like little girl.