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.
