Countdown

Kiss me,
airport style.

Pretend our hearts
are breaking.

Make like
you and I
are a dance
of stars,
the fated breach
of gravity
and time.

Then say
goodbye.

The things you write in the dark, after drinking two margaritas

I get tangled in what
I want to say


Her poems were too
much like
the hair
left in a brush


The switch from first to third:
a writer's oldest trick

---

I want to write boldly, 
like the earthquake
and not
the seismograph 

I want to rattle
the cage,
Explode from 
the branch

I want to be the hair
coursing down the long
switch of her back

The fever,
agitating,
before a sweeter 
delirium

God, let me write
and not be constricted
by the what 
and even less
by any whom

Let me smash that dam
into atoms,
recycle it into
kindling 

Let me break myself, 
in perpetuity,
and free the awful flow

and carry it forward 
until I can't

and kiss the end
of the road

Waiting Game

December,
out at the lake,
and everything's the same
dispirited shade of

picnic-table brown 

except for the water,
whose Crayola hue is 
the slightly more colorful
dirty sock soup

But the pines
will maintain,
as stiff as saints

and the sky
still startles
to the provocation
of crows

and it's fine,
in its way

this waiting game

I'll take the crumbs
that fall my way

like a want
of horse flies
to chew up my legs

the promissory sun  
after a week of rain

and a few crusty leaves
that just refuse, 
by golly,
to budge 

Which is the kind of old lady
I hope to become

though that, too,
can wait 

Childish things

What if 
instead of his color

we saw first

the two arms,

the two legs,

the two eyes 

of a man

Or a kid
just like us

trying hard 

to be big,

trying not 
to show doubt

What if

the hardness of trying

became a defense
of what our families
had filled us with

What if

instead of his color

we saw our own fear
and alienness
reflected back
like a photo's negative 
held up to the light

What if the shock

made us throw up 
our hands:

caught,

chastened,

shot through
with pain, shame,
mercy

What if #blacklivesmatter 

were #whitepeoplesproblem

What if poems were cover

What if games of pretend

were the law

and empathy became 
policeman to all

Wassailing

(Photo by Paul Rockett)

Beneath the crust
of first December

I went yawning for
some inspiration

when I saw the ghost  
of Glenn Gould's hands

and felt the echo of
a reflection of Bach

run across the roof
of my mouth

to make of me
a church 

Out of Time

While cleaning recently, I came across an old cd case from my college years. Half the sleeves were filled with R.E.M. albums. It made me stop and realize something.

I rarely listen to R.E.M. anymore.

But I used to, obsessively. Michael Stipe was the one person in the world who seemed to understand the yearning that squirmed inside of me. And if that thought makes me smile in self-condescension now, it really shouldn't. His voice was my lifeline. 

Art is sometimes a lifeline. 

After college, I moved to Athens, Georgia for a year. Ostensibly for other reasons, but I wasn't fooling myself: I was there for the band, and the mystique conjured around their hometown. I was there because of the kudzu-choked cover on R.E.M.'s first LP, Murmur. I was there because I was searching blindly to know who I was, and what I wanted, and I followed the only thing that felt true to me. 

I wasn't any less lost in Athens, Georgia than I was in Athens, Ohio. In fact, I moved back home after 9 months. It was my first real-world experiment in trying to make a fantasy a reality, and I failed, miserably. 

But I don't regret the trying. 

I still love that music. It still blows me wide open. But I can't hear it now without also feeling trapped by who I was then. I remember an unhappiness so complete I didn't even know to call it unhappiness. I didn't know. All I knew was fear.

I'm not that girl anymore. 

Eventually, the band broke up.

But this blog owes its name to them. And that time in my life when the kudzu began to clear. 

Four corners

His hand
on her arm

the blood reacts

She is now other
than what she
appears to be 

A tree that's moved
from day to night

the moon 
quickening
through darkling 
veins

Foxfire,
she almost thinks,
breathing through
two paper legs

sipping her sips
of tonic water
with her radioactive 
lips

She hits the
target

his mask
slips

She sees ice
beneath

and likes it

While deeper
yet

darkness

Suffuse me
before you're gone

I am small and
winter is long

Words
running circles
around a rectangular
room

fall down in a flock
at the end of the day

Exhausted by what
they couldn't say

Used To

I used to wear pink. 
Now I wear red.

Like a leaf 
no longer hiding,

Like a silent 
solid yes.

I used to hang 
on others' ideas;

now I make 
my own. 

Deleted

October

You are an old soul masked
in an adolescent's body

ripping off the pages
of a recycled diary

and setting them 
to flame

Before tossing the ashes
in the eye of a lake

and whispering your psalms
through the pine-bitten dawn

That Time is a phoenix 
with unfathomable wings

and we are the chlorophyll
draining its veins