luxary
i wear a silk nightgown and bare feet in bed even though you laughed at me once and said i looked like a woman far beyond my time. i lounge. i drink white wine out of beer steins and eat sunflower seeds after brushing my teeth. i’m breaking all the rules.
i paint my toenails at the airport. i stretch out on the navy blue plasticy seats deeply ridden with other peoples’ anxiety about going through security. nobody cares. i read the new york times flipping past the business section. i do the crossword in pen. i hum every so often as i do the crossword with my nails painted the color of the tea kettle my mother owns. i hum to make sure i am still here.
i lounge in existential crises and think i need you. i am wrong. i’ve moved to sleeping in the middle of my wide bed. i light candles and smoke cigarettes out the window and tap ash into the radiator. i read and read. i read descartes and malebranche and berkely. three of the six modern philosophers. i underline. i draw giant question marks through sentences. i yearn for you sometimes.
this summer was a mindfuck. in the fall i laid in the dying sun long after it was warm enough to be outside. winter didn’t happen. it is almost summer again. i hate you and love you with so much of myself. i think i will probably buy myself a coffee and sip it in the cafe and think how happy i am to be there alone.
-e
done loving
ever since i put orange sheets on my bed i feel lighter. i feel better. there are six empty glass jars on the windowsill. i am reminded of my sister and the curved green glass bottle she broke the one our cat ate. we have lost four cats. they follow flies into the woods behind our house into the deep creek with the thorns and then coyotes find them.
it is a horrible way to die. i am wondering if emily dickinson and i would be friends if she still lived in her house which is on my street. when i bike by i silently bow gratefulness to her the same gratefulness i give when i fall into my orange sheets with someone new. this morning the brightest sun poured out of a dragonfly’s mouth right outside my window. i blinked at the dragonfly it blinked back at me. our eyes were different colors. it is cliche to imagine a dragonfly with green eyes, it is judgmental but that is the truth. i discovered this new form of colbalt, too, that one day will probably eat the world, scooping out continents like melon balls, juice dripping. so much has happened this morning.
-e
copyright infringement probably
hey little angel my sweet little dove
what does love even mean to you what has it ever meant
besides long drives
so we can curl around one another
in my childhood bed in my childhood home
with my childhood cat nuzzling your big toe so your lips part and giggle pressed
against
my own and i swear i feel like the luckiest being but what else besides that besides
copying the poetry of mary oliver onto yellow lined
paper neatly but quickly so i can put it in the mail so it can get to you
three thousand miles away lengthwise
standing at opposite poles but never equal
what does it mean besides me holding you
truly madly deeply in love with your every bone your every part
even when you wept hey lady pull your sorrows in
i will pull your tangles out like i always do
what does it mean besides lying with you in a dive motel in the tucson desert what
does it mean besides
waking up to your hopeful smile asking what are we gonna do today
the choices were endless our lives spread out before us
and we had each other and so suddenly did not
and so i ask you again what is love to you
is it uniquely ours stored safely away somewhere else because
remember you’ve got to learn to live with what you cant rise above
(i think, forever, our love)
-e
burst
yesterday i threw up the last of my teenage angst which was
itself very angsty because i was knelt prayer-like
on cracked tile and the bile stung my eyes wet with sour tears.
i wretched days and months and years out of me,
atoning for my less-fine moments.
among them:
whining in the backseat every single fucking day (i’m sure of it)
biting my sister’s elbow deep enough to draw blood (more than once)
accidently killing my first two pet birds and three cats (my mother says it’s not my fault we just lived in the woods with coyotes in the backyard and i said i know i hear them howling all the time—-
i asked forgiveness anyway).
i threw up the deep loss i felt when my walkman was stepped on at summer camp, age twelve
it split cleanly in two plastic halves and later i felt this same remorse when i lost my first love
knowing i should have left neither my walkmen nor my bursting little heart
out on the floor where anyone could break it.
and when i was done ridding myself
of all my stupid little sins
i slumped against the bathroom wall and squinted at the dusty sunlight
tasting drunk sweet sickness on my tongue—
i felt exhausted but nonetheless lighter
and i discovered some newfound inspiration to
stand up
gargle some tap water
run my fingers through my hair
and get over it.
-e
story
they ask me was it hard for you
what is your story my story is
only one of sweet salvation and pressing
my hipbones further over to one side because
my sister and i are both off balance
when i pushed, soft fingers hard bone never moving
i wept the tears of some broken animal but
still i felt whole. i felt whole like the night
in the basement green light your rough hands
the first time the first time the first time
we slept to be close to one another
and my parents held me my mother cried
“i will love you always”
jesus it’s so clear to me
my story is of floating
it is soft whispering the tip of my tongue it is forcing itself out
through my hardened teeth.
-e
Every Girl I’ve Loved
I walked in the pouring black rain
And soon discovered I was trapped
In a parking lot
In the fucking parking lot
Of a funeral home
A fucking funeral home
With drawn curtains
And a large wide garage door
I assume for hearse exit.
Jesus Christ.
I was lost and
The place I ended up was
A funeral home parking lot.
And
I longed for you
And our walks.
And you, too,
Your bright kitchen
Acidic wine
And your brother
When he went out to smoke a cigarette in the rain
I felt your ribs, your collarbone,
I fit my chin within you
You were mine.
I spread my fingers wide and later,
Fucked you softly so as not to wake your family,
And tucked myself around you,
And safely I slept.
I longed for the days by the pond
Where we sat.
Oily skin and summer sun,
My ribs dividing, your fingers in mine
The secret night
Our knees touched in the backseat.
I loved you, and you, and YOU
So much that I cannot fathom
It.
And I am reminded of our love
In empty parking lots
On empty shores.
-e
A Bridge
Everyone I’ve ever loved has also loved a bridge.
II.
I found you in the springtime
Both of us disasters with fizzy resolutions, pixellated skin,
Threatening to dissolve at any second.
So when we held one another
I was holding you together
And you were holding me together
So we would never fall apart.
It sounds easy enough, this escape against your chest
And the sunny grass of the commons and the picking of your banjo.
And the walking through the woods
And the meeting halfway
And the lying down on the pavement of Summer Street
And the twig scratches on the backs of our knees
And the promises and reassurance.
And what we have is easy
When you’re sitting across from me scratching your name over and over
upside down in my notebook
So days later I find those robot letters even when you’re far away.
It is easy to stand in the pouring rain with you and then convince you
To come back and lie with me
In rainy sunlight slanting through the windows
And it is easy to feel sad
When I cannot walk beside you
Crossing the bridge as the sun rises
And I cannot reach for you
And I cannot do anything
But stand over the black roiling water
The black royal water
That calls you home.
tunnel
Hot cement outside an airport terminal, I saw you running through my mind.
I thought about you and wearing your clothes and your frame sitting next to me not speaking,
you really do have a handsome face. I thought about how I used to chew on leaves and spread my toes into damp earth, and I thought of everything I thought I would get to show you. And share with you. Like little moments, like how sometimes when Im lying in bed I take all my clothes off and suck my ribs in and lie directly under the skylight so the moon makes weird shadows on my bone curves. Just cause it looks cool. And I want to show you, still. And I wonder if my mother will ever forgive us and let you come over and roast you some chicken or make you a salt scrub to take home to your mom. Mom to mom gifts which I think would mean a lot.
I think about driving to New Hampshire and drinking too much coffee and tucking myself in the huge granite face of the mountain and dripping sweat and calling you because I still thought you were easy to see and understand and run my fingers over, and you made me feel safe. Like you’d lived a thousand times before and knew everything but at the same time, I held you so many times when you were silent. And you knew nothing.
-e
absolute/infinite
together weren’t we absolute?
though our lives laid out before us infinitely
so even when i took your wild eyes in the crumbing subway and called you back to me,
my finite love, i felt such hope.
tell me like you told me once about coming home to me, dusted with the first brooklyn snow and weary from the day and tell me again how we shall live: our little lives laced with one another, window seats and a typewriter, love poems, songs on a battered guitar—you clutch my ribs, my shoulder blade wings, but i’m looking towards the sky.
-e
