Day 30

Day 30. Here we are folks. See you again soon.  This poem is clumsy but it was important to me that I wrote it. Today's mood: https://youtu.be/RIZdjT1472Y

For Taeer

When I'm with you

My favorite thing is

To curl up in a ball in your sternum. 

Wrap the warmth of your beating heart

Around my shoulders and

Let your steady voice rock me to sleep.

Sometimes you aren't enough.

I couldn't make a bobsled team with me and you

Couldn't fill the spots on a pool tournament roster

But together we could play a hell of a game of bridge

Together we pedal a tandem like champs

I would like you to take me apart piece by piece

I would like you to build a Lincoln log cabin from my ribs

I would like you to devour my words like you've been fasting and I'm the first meal you've come across.

I would like you to tell me you love me in the same well worn words you've told me

one hundred, one thousand times before.

Just so I can say it back.

Day 29

Second to last day. Today's mood: https://youtu.be/JRWox-i6aAk

"Blue jeans, white shirt/ Walked into the room you know you made my eyes burn"-- Blue Jeans by Lana Del Rey

"Lana leaves a trail of flopping tongues. She picks one up, autographs it, throws it over her shoulder and walks to our gate."--Lana Del Rey Walks Through Airport Security Megan Falley

One foot presses against the ground, made anxious by the close proximity of her skin. The other lauches into her next step and the collective silence of the room wraps itself around her bare shoulders. The ground behind where she has walked looks darker, less complete without her.

Every time her eyelashes brush against the skin of her cheeks every nerve in every body in the room stands to attention in a militant declaration of loyalty. Her eyes are the atmosphere holding us to this earth, pushing down on our shoulders with pounds of pressure. Her eyes are the force of universal entropy, pulling every cell apart from every other cell into countless spinning pieces.

Every time she takes a step I want to capture that motion in a scent and breath it in every night before I go to sleep. Every time she takes a step I am sure I believe in god. Every time she takes a step I want to get her name tattooed in a universe on my skin. I know the universe will never capture the vastness of her.

Day 28

Today's mood is an owl city song. Pick 1, they all sound the same. https://youtu.be/psuRGfAaju4

A Spell for Survival

I would build myself a home in between my ribs
To be closer to the thunderstorm of my heart
And I would indulge my more voyeuristic impulses by visiting vertebrae
To see the lightning of my nerves.
Every month I would frolic in the monsoon of blood
From my uterus--a sacrifice to my still barren womb.
The earthquake of my thigh muscles ebbs and flows
But I delight in its destructive potential.

The magic, when it's always storming, is being willing to dance in the rain.

Day 27

Homestretch. Smile at someone today. Today's mood: https://youtu.be/FL3Id1pfRM4

Sonnet 18

I would compare you to nature but to
Be frank, that's trite and actually your
DNA is closer to a mushroom
Then a rose. Also, beauty standards are
Patriarchal and oppressive at best.

Day 26

Four! More! Days! And it's Friday! Today's mood: https://youtu.be/z9Uz1icjwrM

Today's prompt is repetition this poem is also a villanelle which means that it fits in a rigorous format and also I'm pretty bad at it. Still, it was an instructive exercise.

Rain on Roof

Today I drove and listened to the rain
Pattering patterns in big raindrops, wet
Noise, filling silence then noise again

I often use the radio when I drive
To school and let the music drown my thoughts, but
Today I drove and listened to the rain

All my drive was covered with the shade
Or rainy clouds, gath'ring raindrops going slap
Noise, filling silence then noise again.

When music plays it helps drown out pain
Sorrow, and shame, and the rest
Today I drove and listened to the rain

I felt so lonely only with my shame
Without a voice or song to soothe me
Noise, filling silence then noise again.

My drive was filled with long forgotten pain
I arrived and found that I was spent
Today I drove and listened to the rain
Noise, filling silence then noise again

Day 25

This week has been a long week. But next week will be better. And the next.

Today's mood: https://youtu.be/FTQbiNvZqaY

I'd rather be dancing
I am a painter with my feet
A poet with my toes
I make sentences with my finger tips
I would spell out the metaphor of a sunrise
When I swish my hips

To say that I am a poet of the body
Would be ostentatious at best
Intolerable at worst. I would
rather lead you
My hand steady on your shoulder blades
Your weight resting on my forearms
Around the room in a swing so smooth
You suspect you're floating.
I would like to move you.

Day 24

Wow. Wow wow wow. Wow. Today's mood: <https://youtu.be/xUNqsfFUwhY>. Take a minute today to consider that there is good in the world. Then get to work.

The task for today is ten ten-word stories that together make a poem. The idea is that each of these ten word long sentences create a self contained emotion and that also if I string them together they will make a story.

She dragged herself out of bed with a Herculean force.
Dresses meant she didn't have to match two different garments.
Her lipstick, like war paint, served to intimidate the enemy.
Morning sunshine was soft but the day was rock hard.
The radio played hard rock and she refused to cry.
She compulsively checked her phone but there no messages.
Despite skipping breakfast, she was late to microbiology class again.
Microbiology was meaningless in the context her own heartbreak
She was a good scientist but exhaustion weighed her bones
How could she grow bacteria when her heart felt dead?

Bonus poem

A bonus poem for today since once I start to do meter, I tend to get stuck.

We all have smoked our share of weed

We all have smoked our share of weed
We've all tripped acid twice
We all have gotten black out drunk
But getting buzzed is nice

Some of us smoke cigarettes
Cause we think it looks cool
When lipstick stains around the top
But some prefer to juul.

My friend Brett, he likes to brag
Of sex he's had on shrooms
His orgasm a galaxy
His body like a tomb

Easter keg hunt leads to a
Cascade of  broken ankles
And camppo doesnt put a stop
To drunken easter trouble.

We find ourselves lost in the woods
Stumbling, cold, and high
But we're always looking for
A party of some kind.

Day 23

Today's mood is fucking stressed. I dunno, go listen to nature sounds for ten minutes or something.


(For) my lungs were never meant for the sweet air
But rather gates of unrelenting steel
Pumping life through my body wrapped in fair
bright armor, a cold, but noble ordeal.

(Watch) My body cut a path through featureless
Fluid. Powerful tail, sensitive spine
Seems silly on the dirty earth. Useless
For terrestrial life. For fish it's fine.

(For) When I am broken, none can see me cry
Under the water, flowing from my eyes.

Day 22

Today's mood is the two of cups. I always sleep better next to you.

Today's poem is inspired by the mountain goats quote: "The most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway/ Is that it's you and that you are standing in the doorway"

Four Walls and a Ruf

And did you know I built this house up from the fertile earth?
And did you know when I laid every brick into the one below it I thought of the way
Your lips part just gently when you see something that makes you laugh?
And have you considered every curve in the doorway is a prefect compliment to your hips, your calves, your smile, your warped sense of humor
Everything in you curves like the grain of that dark oak wood
Or maybe cherry or ash or even sweeping brick and stone--
What do I know?
I know the sound if your laugh has carved deep groves into my memory.
I know that I will never tire of the way you say "Rum" instead of "Room"
"Ruf" instead of "Roof" "Pellow" instead of "Pillow"
Your rounded syllables sit in this doorway and I hear them resonate
In the very roots of this house and for a moment I want to call it home.

Day 21

Three weeks of this. I'm not sure if it feels longer or shorter. Today's mood is the ace of cups: may your life be overflowing with sweetness and may you know how beloved you are.

To the G Train Overlooking the Gowanus Canal
I still think of you when I'm lying awake at night and sleep has got lost on the way to my bed.
It's so dark here is Western Massachusetts but sometimes I pretend I can see the truck lights blazing through my window
Sometimes I pretend I can here the baritone of blaring horns instead of the soprano of peepers in the springtime.

Sweet G trains roll on through my dreams
And take the turns gently
Fold yourself around the twists and turns of my mind
And sink under my consciousness

Do you know what lurks in the subway tunnels of my mind?
What creeps though the soggy dark pathways and nibbles about the electric neurons dreaming
Of a city that held me in her wakeful rails?

Day 20

Chag sameach, friends. May you too escape your own Egypt on this day.


A Spell for Burial
"Bury me in the garden/ So that I can feed you"--Garden by Gregory Alan Isakov

When your father taught you to ride a bike,
He ran along behind you as you pedaled
You must learn to let go
Holding the back of your seat so that you wouldn't fall and skin your young knees
And you do not know, could never know
Putting down the heaviest things is always the hardest
The force it took for him to release his fingers
Unwrap them from that metal post and watch your young legs pedal
Nothing lasts forever, even you
Away from him and you did not, could not know
How much he missed you that day, as you petaled away
So when I die you must burry me in the garden
And brought a piece of his heart along with you
Because you remember that when you turned around and shouted "I did it"
And I will feed your winding beanstalk, your perennial thyme
He was wearing a huge smile and told you
"I'm so proud."
You do not need remember me.

Day 19

Spell for Restful Sleep
I had a dream last night that you and I were on a sailboat
And the sun was wrapping itsself around us
And the waves were rocking us in time with the bluegrass band
Sitting at the stern. A fiddler and a mandolin player
And my friend Jesse, playing the accordion and
Beating out the dance with his fee.
You and I were dancing and looking into each others'
Eyes. Drowning, you might say.

And as we held on to each other and swayed
And the wind kept greeting us as someone we knew
My friend Amelia from Albany
And your friend Isaac from Ithaca
And your friend Bob from Boston
My friend Nel from New York
And so the boat rocked and so we danced

And then I looked up from the rippling heart beat of your chest
From the bliss we held each other in
To see storm-dark
Clouds galloping from the horizon to the ship
Where we danced and I could see the lighting racing
From the night dark clouds to the tear dark river
And lighting the river up in a white lace lattice.

I looked urgently back at your watery eyes
Desperate to tell you
"Abandon ship!"
But you were across the ship from me now
So far away
And the wind swept away my voice.

Day 18

I'm writing this poem from inside a classroom and its rather dark in here.

Today's mood:

https://youtu.be/P_i1xk07o4g

Gambling for Lonely Girls

He bites my neck and I roll my eyes back in my head and think of Neil Gaiman's "vampire sestina" 

"It is a lonely game, the quest for blood"

His tongue paints a line from the pointing arrow of my collarbone

Up to the corner of my jaw and I shiver

My gut rolls some dice and they all come out snake eyes

So many ones staring at me as I shiver

And he gently draws the silky skin of my neck between his teeth again

An insistent tugging, wanting, desiring

His hand slides around the back of my neck and he pulls my head down

And for a moment his gaze catches mine

With both eyes I fell held in place

I struggle to breath air in the dark velvet emptiness of his pupils

I never could remember the rules to black jack

Just a simple game, the numbers adding to twenty-one

I always had a hard time laying my cards on the table

His hands palm the whole deck of me

And his clever fingers turn the spades of me

He will always be closer to twenty-one and I don't know if I should let him (w)in.

Day 17

This poem is kinda a part 2 to day 12. Also, I was thinking that if I ever write an anthology, this is what it will be called.

Today's mood: https://youtu.be/a5_QV97eYqM

A Grimoire for Sad Girls

This book looks like the lipstick smudges you left on the bathroom mirror to remind yourself how much you love you this book looks like a forsythia bush is full bloom all sunshine flowers and no leaves all beauty and impossibility and no way to sustain it this book looks like the bare back of your first love

There is a spell here that will teach you to forget your first love

This book sounds like the first bird song you hear in the morning it sounds like your favorite song being blasted from the car next to you at the red light it sounds like your name it sounds like call of a lonely coyote in the winter time

There is a spell here that will teach you to mastrubate

This book feels like lying down on sun warmed rock in the summer time this book feels like the warm mud holding your toes it feels like hot water pelting tired muscles it feels like a calloused hand running down your spine it feels like falling

There is a spell here that will teach you to fly

This book smells like walking into a greenhouse in the wintertime this book smells like salt and sweat and tears this book smells like pussy this book smells like lavender hyacinth and lilac it smells like frying butter and garlic it smells like your grandmother smelled it smells like mints and cough drops

This book will not take you home but it can teach you to find home where you are

Day 16

Half way! Half way! Half way! Today's mood:
https://youtu.be/PaYvlVR_BEc

A special thanks to my microbio teacher for the title phrase

Respiring on Iron
I've been fitting myself into corners for weeks now
Sliding sideways into the crevices between class and work
On the days when I don't have time to cook I snack on spare change
Munching metal, respiring on iron.
I puzzle piece fit myself around the jenga tower of commitments my life has become.
Sometimes I sand down my corners to make sure I fit
I miss my corners with an absence in my chest.
At night, in the instant before I fall asleep
I close my eyes and try to remember
What quiet sounded like.

Day 15

I'm tired, my friends. I'm overworked, underpaid, oversexed, under appreciated, over it, and out of clean underwear.

Nonetheless, day 15 is here and a writer I am still

This poem is dedicated to Taeer

To be or not to be

You wonder about Immanuel Kant.
You wonder if he was right
That he simply existed
A soul among many.
You wonder if he was right
And there is no shape to this tapestry of life
Woven around you.
You wonder if there are patterns in the vibrancy
Of these colors spun around you.
You wonder if you could tease the thread of your own life
Out of that vast tapestry
If you could line it up in neat rows
So that it tells you your own story
Beginning, middle, and end.
You wonder how your story could possibly have an end
When you are so young and your colors so bright.
You wonder if you could follow the thread
as it twists, see the places it crosses hundred,
Maybe thousands of other bright strings,
Where it runs parallel to others, here and there
Where it weaves solitary through new colors,
yet unnamed.
Where will your thread lead you?

Day 14

WEEK TWO WEEK TWO WEEK TWO
I just left a dance weekend and I miss my friends. Today's mood is:

https://youtu.be/FcSqI1KZiLI

A sex poem

The slick slip of her dexterous digits delights
excites
entwines me in this delicious
sensation, creation of ecstasy

Knuckles wrapped white around
Soft sheets
Toes curled in rapture
Cannot capture this feeling
To relish this sensation

Pulse pounding, legs flailing
Moans louder, moans harder
Voice wailing

Body bent about clever curled fingers
Feeling the deepest secrets slid softly
Inside for my satisfaction.

Day 13

Chooo chooo motherfucker! I've been dancing all weekend. I've slept 8 hours in the last two days. Today's mood:

https://youtu.be/FRSYQZdkTR8

I died today

The road murmured sweet nothings
In such a quiet and soothing voice
That my eyelashes grew weighty.
I could feel my breathing slow
Feel my chin sink to meet my chest
My hands loosen in the wheel--
Only to jerk myself out of the sweet seduction of unconsciousness to swerve out of the lane of an oncoming truck--Fuck.
I breathe adrenaline and relief.

Day 12

Hey folks! I've fallen a little behind but I can assure you we'll make it through this month together kicking, screaming, and biting.
Special thanks to Amanda Lovelace to her radically feminist masterpiece "The witch doesn't burn in this one" Go read it!

The Witch Burns in this One

With me I carry two things
One a black notebook, wrapped in leather and bound with desire
And the second a book of matches

The notebook contains secrets
The matches contain sulfur

The notebook has curves and graces
And words like rosemary and cobalt
And pictures of five pointed stars

The match box has little sticks
All alike
Lined up in rows

I carry these things into a meadow of tall grasses
A field of piercing blue sky and dandelion clouds watches
As I set the notebook down to rest on the soft earth

It flips open, scrolling through rainbows of color
A menagerie of words and pictures
Opening themselves to the world.
Entering my lungs one last time.

In mourning I see a woman
Tided to a pyre of driftwood and old fence posts
I smell smoke
I hear her final curses screamed defiantly into the wind.

I slide the rectangle of the matchbook
Apart from its top and drag the head
Across the textured side
The match catches.

Day 11

You and I, my love. We will make it screaming and kicking and clawing to the end of this month. We will make it and it will be glorious. Today's mood is "Friday I'm in love"

https://youtu.be/ucX9hVCQT_U

Origin Story

On my left hip I have tattooed "I am but dust and ashes"
On my right I have "God made the heaven and the earth for me"

I got these tattooed because I asked my friend Syd
Who I met orientation week of college
And immediately found our shared passion for bonfires and bones

And so he used his hallow needle and india ink
Pressed again and again into my hip
As I gripped the edge of his bed, white knuckled in a kind of quiet agony
Until the plain upper case letters spelled out a message to the universe.

I asked Syd for this tattoo instead of a dolphin or a flower or a semicolon
Because actually, this tattoo was my lover Taeer's idea
And she told me about it and also we both acknowledged
She would never get a tattoo
And so I asked Syd if he would give it to me instead.

Taeer told me the idea for her tattoo
Because met almost two years ago at the Ithica contra dance
In Cornell, where she was going to school
And I was living in Serycuse
And traveling around the state
And living in a tent

And she was charmed by Judaism and my anarchy
And I was charmed by her dancing.
And so the story begins

Day 10

Day 10! woot woot!

Have you considered the clouds today?

Have you considered the clouds today?
Have you considered the way they bluster in front of the sun
And dim her sunshine?

Have you considered whether the sun has any choice when the clouds
Blow her off?
That she cannot simply "shine brighter" if she doesn't want to end up
Overshadowed?

If April showers bring May flowers
After May has done all of the growing doesn't that just leave April a soggy mess?

Napo day 9

A List of Things I Can Climb

1) The beech tree on the hill on the south side of campus with smooth, wide branches that spiral upwards. In the top branches many students have carved their names framed by hearts in perpetuity. This love will spread disease and blight to the tree, an open would for sickness to seep in. 

2) The orange 5'9" at the climbing gym with the overhang and the one hold shaped like a brain and all the others shaped like melted bees wax. Actually, I can climb most of the 5'9"s in the gym. My next goal is that slanted yellow 5'10". I try to climb three times a week. It took me a month to master the 5'9"s but I suspect the 5'10"s will take longer.

3) 10, 11, 12 flights of stairs down and up from the subway every day. I make two or three transfers in one trip. Some day I will get where I am going, but the G train will not take me there.

4) Out the window frame of my childhood home onto my slanted black tar route, warmed by the long hours of the summer sun, even after the night has fallen like a blanket over the sleepy suburb of my parents' neighborhood.

5) The chain linked fence behind by my high school. Past the huddles of smoking teen who stood behind it cackling like hyenas and into the cool relief of the woods beyond.

6) Down the ravine behind my parents house and back up to the back yard of my childhood best friend. Both of us climbing together into the wilderness, stumbling and sliding. Using our hands and feet, elbows and knees. Any way we could cross the steep, fertile valley that lay between us.

Napo day 8

One week! Fuck! Yeah!
Thank you to Chloe for the phrase "touch base" and to Lori Moore for the idea of soil under skin

Touch Base
"Come by next week and we'll touch base"
"Come by next week and I'll touch every part of the soft skin at the base of your neck"
"Come by next week and I'll touch my fingers to the pale bone of your ankle"
"Come by next week and we'll get to second base."
"Come by next week and I'll pry open your ribs to touch to the rich loam living inside your chest"
"Come by next week and I'll plant chrysanthemum seeds along your spine and
Water them every day sing to them in the evenings
Until chrysanthemums spring from your throbbing body and
Twine around each other in unbridled ecstacy
Reaching in desperation for the sun that shines back
In brilliantly hot nuclear explosions of joy."
"Come by next week and we'll round the bases, run off the field,
Sprint through the bleachers, and jump off the top of the stadium."

Napo day 7

I'm a little behind but it's fine. Everything is on fire but it's fine. It's all fine. Totally fine. No biggie. Whatever.

Song of the day: https://youtu.be/dTzBXyxJE0w

A gift
I would give you springtime if I could
Wrapped up in pastel paper.
I would give you the warmth the sun has so long denied you
I would give you sugar spun violets
And warm raindrops in a green glass bottle

I would save every dance for you if I could
Every step in sync
I would give you the gift of my weight
In your arms
I would give you the gift of gravity
Swinging you in endless circles.

Napo day 6

If you're reading this and no one has ever dedicated a love poem to you
Now someone has.
This is for you.

The possibility of you

What if we had a whole evening just for us
Possibility sprawled before us on the couch
Wearing something skimpy but flattering

A swathe of time just for us
The sun would sink into the earth with
Comfortable ease
And we would dance every single slow song

What if we had a whole evening just for us
We would dress up together and paint the town red
You in your lipstick colored "man-killer"
And mine called "woods-fairy"

We would sip each other slowly
Like fine cocktails
Drink in the finery and the way the slanting golden light
Brushes under your eyelids
And wraps itself around your collar bones
Like I long to do with my lips

What if we had a whole evening just for us?
And I would write a homeric epic just to the curve of your hips
And you would spin sugar and yarn into something that tugs my heartstrings and
I would tangle myself in your laugh.

And the evening
We would remember it forever after
As ours.

Napowrimo day 5

The Frog Chorus ft Burbling Brook

Today the babble of the little stream
As it flows past the golden beach
Is both a greeting and a fond "adieu".
She is always going somewhere and still,
Inside her something pulls her heart downstream.

Today the birds are fighting,
Loudly for their own
Like teenage
Boys, all bluster
And no substance. "This
Tree is mine and she is the greatest!"

Or perhaps they are noisy weathermen
Loud newscasters of the obvious
"The sun came up! The
Sun is up!"

Today the frogs
Are humming in their
Temporary lonliness "Is anyone
There?" "Is anyone there who will love
Me?" "Just for the night." "Just for the night."

Napowrimo day 4

The prompt was emotional poem without emotional words

Picture the smile of the sunshine
In the springtime freely bouncing
Off the flowers flying towards
Your light eyes.

Listen to the bright cry
Of songbirds trying to find
Love or simply
Chiming in the springtime chorus.

Napowrimo day 3

Meandering poem

Evening prayer


Every night I say a prayer for my feet.
I start with the way the connect to the ground
I start with the way they push
Push their roots deep into the earth
To push the earth
Fast past my churning calves and bony ankles.

The next prayer is for my hands,
The way they shape
The way they hold
The way they tear down.
I give an extra prayer for the thick calluses
On the corners of my palm
A layer of armor between myself and the world.

When I pray I give thanks for each vertebrae in my spine
From my vestigial tail
Up thirty three hard bones
Interlaced with clever nerves
To the delicate formations holding my neck proud
And my chin high

I say a prayer for my skull
Protecting my mind
And my ribs,
Protecting my heart
And my heart
And my aorta
And my skin and my eyes and my ears and my tongue and my liver and my pancreas

The last prayer I say, I say for my spirt
Curled up tight in the blanket of body
I wish it good night make sure to whisper, before sleep
I love you.

Napowrimo day 2

The prompt today was to write a poem asking questions
This poem was entirely inspired by Lorie Moore's Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? which is a delightful but heartbreaking book.

Who will run the frog hospital?

Who will run the frog hospital?
When the lily-soft girls
Are gone from the swamp
Who will kiss the soft green heads?
Who will cradle the long green toes?

Why do you hear a great croak and think man?
Why do you see that slimy green skin and think prince?

Napowrimo day 1

The prompt for today was "instructional poem"

How to Survive Heartbreak:

Have you ever watched the sunrise in the wintertime?
Felt the cold leech into your bones as you shivered under the morning dawn
Did you notice how gray the sky was?
How gray the ground and the trees were?
The sun, she took so long
To creep
Above
The horizon
It’s just too much for her some days

And when she is up,
No matter how hot she shines
And how long you stare
Trying to burn her beauty into your eyes
She cannot reach you.