The garbage truck sends noise crashing through the air
A plane adds to the din overhead and there-
A helicopter, hear it?
Thwup-thwup-thwup of the rotors
For a moment, there is no lockdown
There is not even a college or a crew team
Just me on the back porch in the mountains, looking up
Time bending full-circle.
I am eight and eighteen, looking up
The helicopter passes and so does the plane until all that’s left is the garbage truck and me on the back porch and my college professor begging the class to please, please pay attention over scratchy video feed.

Body politics
Is this my flesh or yours?
Hard to tell, since I never loved you
I just wanted to be you

It’s not your shoes at all, actually.
It’s the way you tie them: firmly, decisively

You have good, strong hands:
Van Gogh’s starry night,
Michaelangelo’s David,
and your hands.
You have a very specific way of holding onto things
all at once or not at all
The mountain ridges of your knuckles.

But how could I explain a thing like that?
Instead, I say: “I saw someone with your shoes,
the purple new balance 360s,
and it made me miss you.”

But what it is,
what it really is,

is I saw those shoes and I saw hands that were not yours tying them.

That’s the truth of it, isn’t it?
Scuttling and sliding down
trajectories of our own making-
easier to go down than up.

Here it is: fear in the face of courage
Legends hanging upside down by their ankles.
Are they smiling or frowning?

Turn yourself upside down to see and suddenly you’re the one who’s trussed by your feet
Hands reaching out and grasping at grass, at straws.
You will see, then, why Atlas shrugged
why angels fall.
It’s right in front of your face, reflected in the eyes of an unassuming rabbit
looking up at you looking down:

Alice through the looking glass, indeed.

Beg for forgiveness where there's none to be found

He says: do not ask me for mercy, I am no god

yet he certainly bleeds like one

Red and red and red
all over his bruised knuckles;
the price of freedom
the riot in patriot.

Cracked mirrors on a Sunday
cracked bones on a Monday
will Tuesday be cracked teeth
or is that his off-day?
Do gods take off-days?

He's on his knees, now,  
offering up squinted-eye smiles
I am no god
He promises, parting the sea of peace, anyway

Perhaps gods never set out to be divine
perhaps they do not know who they even are
since peace and war mean nothing to them

It's the human condition, to hurt.
He hurts all the time, you can see it in his shoulders
in the way he bleeds

Red and red and red
just like a god.

Come, faith
Steady my doing
And bless these thine crooked paths
That they may never lead to ruin
And if they do, that ruin be as breathtaking as the walls of Jericho before Joshua
Or Bathsheba’s smile

And if we be but mortals
Take my hand, anyway, dear one
And we will walk the path together.

The air feels like poppy seeds
ominous and warm
clouds heavy with yellow-green thunderstorms waiting to drop.

True love is a woman's color-
haven't you ever wondered why all God's angels are men?
Boys with wings that come and go and go and go
Ephemeral, fleeting

Yet mother earth continues to turn,
hiding her children in the folds of her skirt
a dance as old as time
older than the sun

And a weather girl laughs up at the sky
twirls in the image of her mother
pulls up the flowers

True love is not red
the sun is red

it is brown like the earth
like women
and it belongs to them more than it ever belonged to Gabriel.