In passing, my brother says he meets
my father’s eyes
in the mirror every morning.
Asks me how you wake up from the kind of dream
where you’ve become the nightmare.
I don’t tell him I don’t know,
nor do I tell him what I do know -
that my face has become a collage
of our mother’s fear
and our father’s desperation,
his mother’s shame
and his father’s rage.
I see it in me.
I see it in the brother in my memories,
who sleeps in my bed with tears running fresh grooves
in his canvas cheeks,
clutching a pillow to his stomach as he snores
in soft, shallow whispers.
I will not join him.
Instead,
I spend the lifetimes of our childhood
perched in the dark at the top of the stairs
when the screaming becomes a weak echo.
My mother’s spine bends like a tree in a hurricane,
and in the dim light,
she shakes with sobs I can’t hear,
pulling glass from her feet.
I am told my father is a good man,
and so I say nothing,
not even when my mother flees in the
sweet violet hours of in-between,
taking the last of herself in the suitcase
she pulls behind her through the door.
For a month, she is gone.
Conjuring hope from air,
I transform into a magician,
weaving an illusion that
we are strong enough
to stand without her.
When she is gone,
I am also the skeptic,
searching anxiously for the trick
in her vanishing act.
The woman who returns to us
is a changeling with my mother’s hair and voice.
She is never quite the same -
the nesting doll with nothing left to give,
turning herself inside out looking
for lost selves
and past love.
And for the first time,
I stop praying to a god who chooses
not to hear me.
If there is a hell in this life,
then mine is in all the nights
I spent curled up on the bathroom floor
while my father became Kronos.
Ripped the laughter from my mother’s throat
and swallowed it,
only in this version,
there is no triumphant vengeance -
no reclaiming the parts of us that were
devoured so meaninglessly.
As I grow older,
I become a mockingbird girl,
defacing small kindnesses
with crude,
awkward mimicry
of what I know I ought to be.
I stumble over teeth and lips and open hands,
until I have learned to stay suspended
in the pain I’ve inherited.
When I am 18,
mother cries as we celebrate my birthday.
It is wordless - this understanding.
We both know that life is precious.
And fragile.
And fleeting.
And yet,
we would rather be matchstick women
burning bright and quickly.
Gone without ceremony.
Without lingering.
Breathing is the only anchor we know.
Our lungs are bound together
by these ribbons of history,
and they suffocate us equally as much
as they hold us together.
How do you unravel generations of hurt?
The knife is the heirloom they’ve left in my chest,
and I do not know if I will survive
if I pull it out and end this cycle myself.
Whose blood will be on my hands
when I sever these ties?
Sep 16, 2022
Sep 16, 2022 at 8:14 PM UTC
the girl at the table next to mine
lets the wolf across from her
feed her platitudes
leans forward
spine bending in a placating arch
when he tells her there is art in her tragedy
how could she not know beauty is pain
when it is the hunger that drives her
starving for pretty words
that will not fill the cavities in her chest
still she will devour them
with a desperation even the wolf
has not tasted before
folding them up for safekeeping
to take up the space
she will not allow herself to occupy
so that when she finally climbs
into the wolf’s mouth
pulls the jaws closed over her head
he will not know
that he has swallowed
a crossword corpse
a creature of syllabic bones
strung together by a vacant
brittle
once-was
Jun 4, 2022
Jun 4, 2022 at 7:30 PM UTC
on the phone he asks me if I’ve been seeing anyone lately
in a parallel universe where pride does not taste of cough syrup
and we are still paper dolls
weightless and so hopeful and short of breath
I would have painted murals on the backs of his eyelids
as an explanation
I would have admitted that I’ve been seeing ghosts
rise up from the cracks in the floorboards
and they have warm hands
familiar only in a dependable absence of familiarity
that I take solace in
because we are both here and not
both incidentally veiled in the irony of transparency
tell me all the things you couldn’t see then,
and I will show you now,
I would have said,
tell me how we continue to miss that which is
right in front of us
- is it but for a lack of recognition?
treacled words spilling out of cupped palms
running down our wrists
do you also wonder why we slip
through each other’s fingers?
Jan 15, 2022
Jan 15, 2022 at 5:30 PM UTC
some days I am more storyteller than poet / more argus than storyteller / what good are eyes if the path is always changing / can you still find home if you’ve never seen it / can you still find home if you’ve seen it a thousand times / what then is the significance / truth should still feel the same / I’ve been told / even if it is said in different words / the essence is incorruptible / substance-attribute / reduced to its simplest form and you’ll still recognize the elements / still recognize the sentiment / but I ask you / if you dissect a song / will it bleed the lyrics or the melody / when I am next to you in the passenger seat / whose name becomes your lyrics and whose name becomes mine / does it matter if the song leaves our lips in the same key / some days I am more melody than eyes / more loose pages than melody / a constant / an incessant / what should I be looking for / true or false / be patient / do you understand what I am trying to show you in patchwork myth / in these stories which might never bear any semblance / to the kind of truth you’ve been watching the skies for / listen / when you cannot / look / the question and the answer / are not / mutually exclusive / there is a bit of the corporeal in every fiction.
Dec 16, 2021
Dec 16, 2021 at 4:38 PM UTC
When I Ask:
Have you ever sung to birds in cages?
I Mean:
When will you learn to stop leaving breadcrumbs for the dead? When will you learn that they cannot follow you up from the grave, even if they wished to?
When I Ask:
When was the last time you felt remorse for a flower you plucked?
I Mean:
How many faces have you traded for daffodils and irises? Who taught you how to mime guillotines with empty gestures and soigné decorum, to become familiar with severing beauty from imperfection when you trample flower heads underfoot?
When I Ask:
Why do we light matches when roman candles burn brighter?
I Mean:
What about transience is so remarkable that we would trade eternity for the temporary? Why do we torture ourselves with legacies preserved in syntax and syllables, as if we could ever capture our photograph history in a single moment, in a single word?
When I Ask:
Have you ever torn out your tongue and salted it, so you can swallow it without choking?
I Mean:
What does regret taste like on the nights when the pillow is too warm, the sheets too cold? Who leaves the glass of water by the bedside when you’re feverish? Do you rehearse excuses to make conversation palatable?
When I Ask:
Do you leave the door unlocked intentionally, or just to provoke me?
I Mean:
Where did we begin pocketing pain like pebbles? Where were we when we first realized that skipping stones does not mean hurling them for target practice, when seas and crowds were at once interchangeable in sentences? Where will you be standing in the room when I present to you the mound I built of my apologies, when I show you that casting stones is not the only way to make our burdens lighter?
When I Ask:
How many different postcard stamps can you describe without closing your eyes?
I Mean:
Will you roll down the hill and lay beside me in the grass next summer like we used to do, before anger became the only language we were confident enough to articulate? Will you uproot every bitter misunderstanding and plant daffodils and irises there for us instead? Will a castle arise from your pebbles, a kingdom from my promises?
Dec 11, 2021
Dec 11, 2021 at 1:20 AM UTC
too kind for that
too good
kind
like these eyes do not weep
if you shut your own
like tears do not stain the ground
red
when you’re on your knees in Gethsemane
like kindness is no substitute for
good
is no substitute for bones
is no substitute for marrow
is no substitute for blood
is no substitute for breath
cannot stop a heart from
stopping as if we have any control
cannot iron out a spine
that has memorized
what a caving ceiling looks like
don’t be sorry
it’s only natural now.
Dec 4, 2021
Dec 4, 2021 at 5:04 PM UTC
it is too easy to fall in love with strangers,
too easy to offer my hand
instead of my heart,
because it is the only way I know how to say
hello.
the only way I know how to say
let me love you gently,
because I do not know
how to love myself
in such a manner.
the only way I know how to say
we cannot heal each other,
but I will carry your pain for you,
even if you do not ask me to.
the only way I know how to say
I will stay,
even if you send me away.
The only way I know how to say
when these words have lost their meaning,
will you take my hand, too?
Dec 1, 2021
Dec 1, 2021 at 9:19 PM UTC
earthquakes happen so frequently
in the snow-capped mountains of Anchorage
that the people living along the outskirts
like to believe that the reason why it always
snows after the ground breaks apart like warm
apple crumble is because it’s the only way Mother Nature
can offer God a tissue after He sneezes without
being too rude about it.
in the winters, it gets so dark during the day
that sometimes she forgets that there is a world
beyond the four walls of her bedroom,
and maybe she is okay with this,
because it mirrors the silence she’s grown comfortable with.
she’s also grown comfortable with sleeping with
one leg hanging over the side of the bed that she
spends most nights alone in, so that she can sprint
for cover when the ground yawns beneath her.
she never runs, not even when she hears glass shatter
in the kitchen and the dogs whining when the bookshelf
collapses in on itself from too many years of carrying
the spines of all the stories her daughter would have loved
to live if she’d still been here.
and Loma she realizes then that maybe skeletons
come in the guise of yellowed, bone-dry pages and leather covers, too.
you can learn to get used to watching the world
fall apart around you,
and yet some pain lingers like a ghost,
taking you by surprise every time you open your eyes to the night
when you’re expecting the sun.
in Anchorage, you can watch the sun rise and set
within the span of five hours.
light is so precious in december that she swears
every household invests in halogen lamps because it is easy
to lose yourself in a room full of people when the day fades.
sometimes, she thinks it’s better that way.
like now, when her bed is the rowboat threatening to capsize
from the waves of motion rocking her along to a place where
the sea meets a starless sky, but only for 19 hours.
the phone rings somewhere far off,
and it’s probably her husband calling.
she lets it ring,
lets the answering machine take responsibility
for all the things she’s put off saying to him,
and it’s only when she watches the photo of her daughter
slam face-first to the floor in a glittering, fractured spectacle
that she gets up, the covers tangling around her as she removes
the photo haphazardly from the destroyed frame.
she walks through the living room with it,
ignoring the swinging chandelier.
pushes open the front door,
waiting in the doorway with her free palm pressed
against the wooden frame as if searching for
a sign in the shuddering heartbeat of this house
that is fragile with the weight of time and loss and love.
foundations crumble too easily, she decides,
her bare feet sliding against the icy steps
as she makes her way out of her home.
And to anyone else, it should be a miracle
that she has made it out alive
But at that moment,
she’s not thinking about miracles,
the red beet stains she won’t be able to get out of the walls later,
or the china shards wedging themselves like
knives to punctuate her footsteps.
the snow is falling like powdered sugar laughter
and for once, she is grateful that the biting cold
numbs her ****** toes.
above her head, the sky is breathing again,
exhaling in short bursts of violet and molten copper,
and if everything around her
is hell-bent on shifting into new and unrecognizable forms,
determined to split along its seams and swallow her,
then it won’t be so bad,
because here God is -
blushing -
after receiving a tissue.
Nov 27, 2021
Nov 27, 2021 at 7:08 PM UTC
should I feel honored
by the way you’ve
romanticized
my tragedy?
profited from it
carved out my flaws
with steady resolve
painted over them
as if the brush and scalpel
were one in the same
how long will I bleed
for your entertainment?
divine inspiration does not
make you a god,
my love
you cannot kiss cold lips
and breathe life into them
do not deceive yourself
though they worship you
for your crime,
we both know it is I
who will live and die
a thousand deaths
by your hand
make me your art,
but do not act surprised
when they forget
you've trapped prometheus
in canvas
immortality was never
yours
to begin with
Nov 25, 2021
Nov 25, 2021 at 12:36 AM UTC
my mother tells me that I cannot be
everything for everyone.
she is, of course, right.
but I do not have an explanation scripted,
so I gape at her.
how can you be everything for everyone,
she repeats,
when you are barely enough for yourself?
these games you play,
don't you tire of them?
how long will you keep pretending
in this charade?
says it as if this is what I want,
as if insufficiency is what I desire,
when it was she who first
taught me to play.
I am jealous that she has
so quickly forgotten that
these games are all we’ve ever known.
what do you stand to gain?
she demands again,
and I am not imagining
the desperation echoing
my own unanswered pleas,
imitating the comfortable pretenses
of my own well-worn facade.
her voice is the gunshot in the marathon
I can’t remember if I’ve
started or finished,
and I wonder later if it is
clarity or confusion
she detects in my eyes when I respond,
what do we stand to lose?
Oct 30, 2021
Oct 30, 2021 at 12:21 AM UTC