If I am only ever a poem to you, I will be satisfied. A poem you heard someone read once, but you can’t remember the title, and only a few lines stick out. Snatches of speech still hang in a dusty closet of memory. Aired out by similar voices, phrases, overheard on the subway or at the supermarket. Somewhere in song lyrics you find a line, half a line, speak it softly to yourself. You may be aware of how your tongue bends to the words, notice how it brushes the roof of your mouth, and feel the edges of your lips come together— you might not.

It will not be constant. I will not be the belabored sonnet, the endless chant, the mantra you repeat day after day. I will be the fleeting thought, epiphany of memory, the light ache of a barely recalled past. Easily lost, in life, in noise, lost in the millions of words and notes swimming in your brain, fallen between synapses and currents. Half remembered, half lost— eternally. The half life reminder of a woman, a girl, in love with language, and lost in thought.

If I am never anything but a poem to you, I am satisfied.

Maybe
Love is nothing
but a rib spreader.

Green is my favorite color.
But I hate that shade of it.
Because it will always remind me of
The green scrubs you wore,
haunting cold barren rooms,
Where they took your bootlaces
so you couldn’t choke the dreams out of yourself.

I wore blue that day because it was your favorite color.
You probably didn’t notice.
You felt hollow when I embraced you
All strength within seemed gone.
Your eyes, my favorite shade of green, were frighteningly distant.
You were there, but it wasn’t you.
Who were you? Who are you? Who should you have been if…?
You kissed me goodbye in front of the nurses,
And I saw tears in the corners of their eyes.  
Even my mother seemed touched.

I walked in a haze across the hospital yard,
It was a bright day.
I wanted it to storm.
The garish sun seemed to mock me
As I curled in the backseat of my father’s car,
Staring at the food I couldn’t eat.
I hadn’t known
“Sick with worry” to be literal.
I haven’t known it since.
I hate that shade of green.

Things fall apart.
my mother will be the first to go.
Stretched between school, a stubborn husband,
distance, and a daughter she believes is dying,
and the ever present thought
that she will never be good enough.
Taught as drum leather, she shudders,
Wracked and rent by memories of lost children
and protruding ribs.
I awoke to her crying in the next room this morning.
She greeted me with feigned happiness, but
red eyes stared truthfully back.
"I'm okay," she murmured.
"*******," I said softly.
She clung to me.
I felt the burden shift on her shoulders.
crushing her,
her over sized heart beat to pulp,
it's ****** remnants clinging to her dripping sleeve.
The people she tried to hold together,
slipping through her fingers
like sand-- as her brittle bones break.
Things fall apart.
And I wish I knew how
to put them together again.

I am queen of afterthoughts,
rarely of fore.
Especially not in matters of hearts.
I am dry heaving sighs,
with leaden guilt
and what ifs.
**** them.
**** me.

599

There is a pain—so utter—
It swallows substance up—
Then covers the Abyss with Trance—
So Memory can step
Around—across—upon it—
As one within a Swoon—
Goes safely—where an open eye—
Would drop Him—Bone by Bone.

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine