the baby squirrel must have fallen from.
it’s too small yet to have fur, only skin
fuzzy like a pencil smudge, paws frozen
in that umbilical clutch, its brain spilled
in a fat raindrop of pink honey, a pillow
of egg white. a few paces before this
we saw what it could have become –
a big fellow, reified and bushy,
colored like toast – and I asked
if you had ever touched one. I longed
to reach to the pavement, open my palm
and let it claw its way up my exposed flesh,
and you said you hadn’t. but now
we are moving this barely born thing
into the grass so it might rest, I with my leaf and you
with your stick, and you’re saying
'I guess now I have.' this is how things feel
with you. secret glances, uncanny and delicious
coincidences, scary but easy. a long drive, strange
and twilit, all right turns. we should not
be holding hands, but we are. in my head
I am naming the little corpse. this, like many things,
I will never tell you.
Oct 19, 2025
Oct 19, 2025 at 1:15 PM UTC
my class is learning to read clocks. I am not
so good at elapsed time yet, but I am trying, practicing
here in abby’s sunchoked room, counting until I can pull my clothes back on, my yellow thursday underwear that has lodged in the slats of her bed.
what is happening
is not the worst part. the clock and I survive
because of each other. what I hate is that her earrings snag my hair,
that she smells like vanilla, that there is green apple
chapstick on my stomach, that she
is a girl. that she is me.
Oct 19, 2025
Oct 19, 2025 at 1:15 PM UTC
when can I go home?
I’m reduced here, on a chair
full of sand, crying to my dad
and pushing the ***** receiver
into my wet cheek. it’s thanksgiving
and he told everyone
I have the flu, an easy lie
I try to believe, anything but this,
curled fetal in the yellow hall
fluorescent strangers staring holes
in my paper clothes.
I may as well be naked
because there are no mirrors,
no sharp objects or soft ones;
I’m too dangerous for moisturizer
curl cream, chapstick, contact solution
who knows what I might do
they try to get me
on lithium. they draw blood,
call me noncompliant;
really I’m just nineteen
at a loss so I write a letter
in crayon to my mom:
I love you. I can never
see you again. maybe one day
I will need you how I am supposed to.
Oct 19, 2025
Oct 19, 2025 at 1:14 PM UTC
those precious years before my hair turned curly,
I sat on my carpet before bed and waited
for daddy to come in. he was young too, I know now,
his knees still good enough for crisscross applesauce
so we sat that way while he untangled my hair,
still shiny in the way of children, and called it
brushing out the day.
now I’m toweling off my head and can’t remember last time
I brushed my hair, and anyway now I’m wearing it too short
to brush at all, and I wonder if maybe the day is getting
stuck in there, if maybe this has something
to do with everything.
Oct 19, 2025
Oct 19, 2025 at 1:13 PM UTC
I want you underneath and
I want you, underneath.
you don't stand at the gates of
me
flying a white flag;
you are the minotaur inside,
unraveling my maze and
making it into silk sashes
that I can tie in my hair.
Oct 13, 2021
Oct 13, 2021 at 3:48 PM UTC
you are (nothing if) not a fool
I didn't win you working wet-necked tricks that I
invented for boys -
un-sacred boys
I bore you my soul in a jar -
soaking in jasmine tea,
no perfume,
disintegrating in thick devotion
you set it in the sun
and told me it deserved more than that.
Oct 13, 2021
Oct 13, 2021 at 3:47 PM UTC
after all these years
will you ask for
my hand,
or just take it?
melting fingerprints into my palm
what sehnsucht will remain when
we are dust?
if I marry you
in the church,
can I be your angel forever?
Oct 13, 2021
Oct 13, 2021 at 3:44 PM UTC
time is pouring out - it's all over the sidewalk,
it's making me old
i'm too old now, but too young to do anything about it:
too cowardly to abandon things that tip the pitcher
too poor to refill it myself.
Oct 13, 2021
Oct 13, 2021 at 3:43 PM UTC
there is love brewed into the calluses of my coffee;
a hard-bodied steadfastness with the diligence to build me a humble home,
a playful sensuousness that can laugh after it ***** me but
in my tea i find the missing tenderness, a delicate jasmine translucency that remembers the curve of my lips around the cup
perhaps i find a mirror, in which i might discover a work of art
swaths of oil paint that earnestly create a woman, asking by their very existence to be forgiven for their impiety because she cannot be captured on a canvas
i want to love you in this way, the way women are loved;
i want to lift your jaw in my palm and kiss you gently,
to write aching letters to you,
to hold your head to my chest and finger your flaxen hair,
to rest my mouth on the nape of your neck and tell you about the home i’ll make for you
when we get out of here.
Aug 3, 2021
Aug 3, 2021 at 3:05 AM UTC