collapse
the days weight
is a bit much
the doorbell rings
I try to rise
I can't even open my eyes.

If you squint just right -
there’s a new star in the sky
tonight - shining bright
- shining a light on suicide.

You start with withered hands clasped,
shoulders hunched, knowing it all,
avoiding the highway in Indiana,
the telephone wire reminds you
of yellow birds (that remind you of her)
and the stars are that time on the soccer
field, july 4th is a flinching
kitten under a couch, and all
these pretty things make you close your eyes,
but imagine living sunset to sunrise. Back
to birds are birds, and this is sky,
fingers relaxed, every day growing down,
untying ties,
focus and simplify.

cold air is burning my face but the feeling is muffled, far away.
i look at you, stoic menace.
you are a block of ice and i am a flurry of snowflakes, raging, cold, soft.
you ask me what the heart speaks.
i do not know how to tell you what emotion is, just like i do not know how to explain to you what i am.

(things far too familiar are seldom easy to translate into a language someone might understand, a language that is not your own, a language you've forgotten the taste of)

mountains on my shoulders feel lighter than they should, and you take lightness to mean of less matter.
perhaps you think these mountains have a hollow center, are made of feathers.
you and i are two different forms of water.
i have known ice, and you have known snow, years before today.
i have known stagnance, you have known change, you took the word like an icicle to your chest, falling too far into your cave.
pull me out, you say, and i am frost lining your windowsill.
leave me be, you say, and you are a dull fog, whispering to glass.
through the glass, we interact.
you are trapped.

I was lying when I forgot about her dad's pickup truck

It's been over a year since I last got her lost behind the wheel. I can't believe she kept letting me navigate.
Loss of a memory isn't a lie unless it was everything.
My whole world was empty slushie cups on the floor of the passenger seat, a broken speedometer,
A river that is still carving its way up onto the trail with the new floods
A transformation is supposed to be a complete overhaul
A girl walks in, but a woman walks out
I'm lying to myself because I can't remember the sounds or the way her couch cushions felt
Her home smells different now
Her body is something I don't recognize
I can't tell if she has changed or I recorded over the tapes

When I am no longer a teenager, and she was just young love, and my old poems were just country songs on the radio that I sometimes recognize and sometimes don't,
When I am afraid to go outside here in fall because it's not the same
It's been over a year since I asked for familiar. My parents' house does not smell the same. My dog sings to different songs on the radio. I do not own a radio. I do not own a car, or hold a girl, or sing country music anymore. I don't get lost driving to rivers. I don't ride roller coasters or lay on rooftops to interrogate stars. I barely walk myself home at night.
It doesn't smell the same.

i don't write poetry anymore
i sit in my room, naked, feeling the curves of my body, searching for a sort of foreign peace within them
i study for exams, begin books i never finish, watch movies and stop halfway through, wear the same pants three days in a row, go a week without washing my hair
i lay down in the grass and watch the sky move
i laugh, i smile, i talk with friends
i feel alive driving in my car, letting the spring wind blow through my growing hair
i celebrate my mom's birthday, mother's day, memorial day
i go to baseball games and wear perfume
i play the only song i know on the piano when i should be practicing the flute
i stand in the shower and think too long and too hard
i pick fights with my dad because i can
i imagine my future, peering around the invisible bends in my path
(my apartment is beautiful, the one in my head, in case you were wondering)
i travel down 35W to see my family on their farms during harvest, the combines plowing through corn and leaving the fields bare for the snow to blanket in the winter
i sing loudly in church and pray only when i feel like there's something to pray about
i get lost in myself, trying to figure out who i am and where i'm going and what i want, the maze just never seems to end
i realize how much i'm starting to look like my mother-- my eyes, my cheeks, my nose are all bits and pieces that i got from her
i don't write poetry anymore
life has gotten too busy
life has gotten too hard