Here, I do not need to coax the sound—
No more tremulous plucks, bated breath,
Muting my voice as it slips from my throat
Here,
It falls as a gift, freely given
Resonant as thunder in the mountains
Bold and beautiful.
How brightly I burn
When I do not have to ask
To be heard.
Aug 8, 2022
Aug 8, 2022 at 8:42 PM UTC
Longing is trammeled in my throat
Oh the honeyed years
Before I knew what to miss,
Untrusted, unspoken
I exhale its blue haze
Between the last note sung
And the first note heard.
You are the wonted dream—
The consoling ache
Wearing away at softened bones
With every wish
Unheard, unanswered
The stars are so beautiful and so cruel
Our untethered threads
Adrift in the firmament
Uncut
Yet untied.
Jul 25, 2022
Jul 25, 2022 at 2:57 PM UTC
The cliff’s monumental resolve
Plucks the sustained note of its rise
over the wayward valley,
Sound thick and heavy enough to chew,
A nameless taste of memory
calls to mind
Seven years ago
When a woman who shared my name
Threw herself from the cliff,
Into the snapped arms of trees below,
The act of falling, monumental resolve
The upward sweep of dark hair
Against the grey hand of the rock.
After,
my mother’s phone rang
with urgent voices
repeating my name as they’d heard it
On the evening news
Asking if it was me who had climbed
the bones of the mountain,
I who had stared down into the doldrum of trees,
watched them float in the captive air,
I who had murmured into the reticent sky
And still found no answer
That whispered “stay.”
I, who had scraped the soft skin of my foot across sandstone
With the last grounding pull
And still stepped into nothing.
And when she said I had not
That the name, though mine, was not mine,
I heard the relief in the notes of their voices
Collapsing into soft reprieve.
But I knew what it was
To wonder if the plummet was
like the upward flutter of coat in a draft or
The cold sweep of wind across a wet finger or
the warm, couching blast of a passing subway car.
And they don’t report on suicides for this reason
But everyone hoped it was an accident
Because accidents can be explained away
As the things that pluck us up and drop us into death,
But walking into death
With open eyes always led to too many questions.
Someday, she and I--
our name will be said for the last time
Edging on the ledge of wrinkled lips
Staring into the ground below—
And the syllables will hold themselves over the edge of the world
And jump.
Jul 15, 2022
Jul 15, 2022 at 9:43 AM UTC
Signposts
The signposts at the end of her life
Swam in watery fades
I don’t know if she had time
To forget how to read
But there were no books in her room
Just the echoing call of an uncertain bird
As we pointed the feathers out to her through the dusty blinds.
And later
When she was gone
I could not cry—
everything I knew of her
slipped beneath a frozen surface
Running like the sound of water
In underground caves
Unburst and unfelt.
I asked for a blood letting,
For him to stay with me
While I found something sorrowful enough
To bring the memories to the vein’s surface
And he held me while I sobbed
At a mother feeding her starving daughter
Trying to save her from herself.
I do not know
If my grief stays buried so deep
To keep the surface waters calm
Or if it had dried, and isn’t there at all
And I am digging a well
For an imagined thirst.
Jul 15, 2022
Jul 15, 2022 at 9:37 AM UTC
Tuesday: a squalling jolt of surprise sorrow
And I am holding a flood behind my lips
Mouth pressed to the leak,
While the sadness glides through me like a body under ice
Faceless, unnamed specter
Caressed in the current’s deadly beauty
While I stand voiceless, holding this sudden sorrow
Like a half-rotted memory.
Who is it for?
What tattered thread snapped
left a frayed chalk line
At the back of my neck.
Morbidly, I wonder if one of the men I’ve loved is dead
If this stranger grief
Is the last sinew of intimacy
torn asunder.
Jan 3, 2022
Jan 3, 2022 at 8:52 PM UTC
Beneath a banshee cloak fog
The dying year shifts in her harrowed sleep
tussock hair splayed across December
The ancient ash of her bones
particulate jewels
against the lingering eye of the sallow moon.
The languid turn of the world
Moves with her
the last song of solstice
Hummed a breath above a murmur.
In her brittle, oaken fingers
The last quiver of hope waits
for the ****** year’s spark.
Dec 25, 2021
Dec 25, 2021 at 5:03 PM UTC
I can only say I miss you in so many ways.
My syllables plunge like suicides
Into the space between us
the cold glaze of your wine-dark eyes
unmoved.
In my memory, they are still bright
Peeking around the old oak as we played tag like children
The scrape of bark across arms
The warm press of your waist in my hands
the sweet brightness of lemon and gardenia cascading from your hair.
Now when I reach for you
There is only the chasm of cool air
across our bed, the rise of your shoulder
the fractured points of ambient light
illuminating the Cassiopeia constellation of beauty marks
At the nape of your neck
I once kissed every night.
My lips still remember the feather touches of your hair,
The heat of your back against the curled sanctuary of my chest.
But now we are empty cloisters,
And when I hold my dreams before you
Like pairs of polished dimes
You tell me they,
and I
mean nothing.
You drive one, pink-nailed finger through the cavity of my loneliness
relishing in the slow soft flesh
That will always bend to you
Even when you turn away.
I am the sea
limbs bruised black
From the slamming of waves on levee
And I want nothing more
Than to flood you.
I am tired
Of reminding you that I miss him, too.
That every day
I feel his phantom weight in my arms
Wake in the night
To a changeling’s cry.
And I know it is the grief-bored holes
That drive us into cavernous waste,
Poison the well between us.
I see the wine bottles
You hide behind the washer,
the way you only clean his room when drunk,
Stumbling, teary-eyed, the way you always hit the mobile
When dusting the crib,
and its twinkling notes
Collapse around you.
I can only say I love you
In so many ways,
The folded laundry, sunflowers,
The lingering gaze on your still effortless grace, whispered “you’re beautifuls” across the night,
The favorite candy bar I find uneaten in the trash.
Can you hear
The scraping rift of each fissure
Running down my back
The spidered cracks
You only drive wider—
Are you only waiting
For the shatter?
Dec 21, 2021
Dec 21, 2021 at 3:37 PM UTC
In the night
Memories drift like the hair of a drowned man
The waves a callous lullaby
curling around the body of his sleeping wife
the unburdened curve of her hip against the moonlight
The drift of her breath in the dark
Coursing to match the sea wind
That sings across the lake’s dark mirror.
Her black hair spills across his hands
Ensnared, he pulls her in
To the harbor of his great shoulders—
It is the same
As it was on their first night
she is warm, small,
still smelling of the almond blossoms
she gathered in twilight.
But tonight, his impetuous heart is awake
Moving between the woman in his arms
And the messiah in the next room
the love he bears both
At once consuming
And unbinding,
his heart a stone
On which they both
rest.
Dec 5, 2021
Dec 5, 2021 at 11:17 AM UTC
His eyes were headlights at midnight
The unexpected dawning of a new world
Snatched away as suddenly as it came
Leaving in its wake,
The blinding stare of blue-black patches
Staining the asphalt like spilled paint.
Oh, my dear,
You flew, too fast, too high,
the reckless wantonness of youth
grasping through your wings,
The way her hands once ran through your hair,
what do you have left
But the drag of gravity,
The silver blade of the scream
Just before
The fall.
Dec 5, 2021
Dec 5, 2021 at 11:16 AM UTC