it's abut 9pm and I decide I don't want to be alone



there was a car crash earlier that day up west towards Salida--
some Kansas man who was killed by a driver trying to pass
in the right lane, declared deceased on scene, another man
from Monument who was air-lifted to St. Thomas Moore,
no critical injuries.

I tend to ask God for these big signs, signs that I'll recognize. I tell him
that they need to be something I'll notice because you know me, sometimes I can't hear you. Anyway, signs, crashes. A Kansas man died.  It's 9pm and I pull on some jeans and leave the house.

I'm supposed to be at a rodeo dancing, but maybe I wasn't supposed to be there after all. I have this white dress in my closet that you can't even see, tucked between everything else because it's so thin, lays flat beneath the aztec smocks and cream cardigans. I take it out and brush it off, thread my fingers through the open lace--

10pm. When I breathe soft enough the stars look like they're hanging on strings, like I could reach up and snap them off,
they'd be no bigger than dew drops on a spider web
so light they'd drift up in the night breeze and
set up in my own natural atmosphere.

What good would it have done me to be there? I only ask
myself to assuage the warm fear i've been feeling since Friday
night, a lingering umbrage I did not think would stay--
I can see the white stitches in my jeans that look
like they're glowing,
smells like rain out here.
I wish I was out at Chaffey
for a quick moment, enveloping
someone else in this chanel perfume
makin' someone else envious of the
way another man got to spin me out--

I'm trying to be all these people at once, an  
audience of crowd pleasers piled into one body
It's so quiet, I'm so quiet up on the sideways knoll in
Florence, tired of letting people down easy off the sidewalk
curb and being tossed off the bridge over the state highway myself,
I can't help it, I want to say aloud.

I can't help that I am this way, collected.
calm in hearty hysterics, anxious to tell
you about how I've been fixed,
that warm fear growin' hotter
a coal for every man who suggested
I be less than who I am by pourin' more
into my cup,

I'm trying. I'm trying.

we're standing outside the grounds and
i notice how my forearms look remarkably
tan against the white bars, darker than the
loose wet sand out in the arena, a calf trots
by and darts off when a young boy flips a beer
cap at its head--

Ben looks out to the bleachers and goes so, I gotta ask
and I know what's comin' before it leaves his mouth,
know it's something about you, something that's probably
gonna sting a bit so I say, yeah? and I smile real nice like
I don't expect a bad thing--

and he peels a layer of skin from his knuckles and says that he went and asked Alan about me, about what kind of person I was--
that you up and told him I was real ****** churchy all full bore and what have you...so I go quiet and he looks over and gets this startled
expression, like I've gone pale. Which is funny, all things considered.
but he bumps my shoulder and says I won't bring it up again,
i just was curious

I shake my head because I know I'm good at hiding an
erratic heartbeat. I can see you leaned back somewhere with a
*** of copenhagen nestled into your front lip, real ****** churchy
comin' out of you sharp and smooth like a blade,
I imagine you might be hurt about it all,
what business have I got with a Rusher?
twice as crazy as you, probably.

I tell him I've got to go--gotta go because it's late,
because the rodeo is over, because pluto is 4.6 billion
miles from earth and I can feel its gravity--I gotta go.
While I'm driving home, I'm tapping out the syllables
and counting the letters, whisperin' real ******' churchy
to myself, incredulously, in agreement, partially because
I can't think of much else



I didn't expect that, really.
Not from you.

the boys will pick up sticks
down by the river bank and bury
themselves in swampy soil and inch
thick ***** mags from before they were
twinkles or considerations and their fathers
ignore their quick wits and charms--let their
curiousity coil around the garden stakes till
it chokes the tomatoes and lays itself across the
blushing rhubarb that mama worked so hard to
cultivate.

Papas, why didn't you chop down those trees or
tame the stinging nettle, the roof is riddled with
bullet holes and the rifle in the attic is still warm
still vibrating on the shelf, buried in moss, in
wisteria dropping in and growing up the sides--
she can make a man more beautiful but still hide a broken a home

you had a chance to guide your sons

you had a chance.

Travis stands outside the grounds
with me and listens while I recount
the past two months, several times he
sighs and knocks his ball cap up, takes
a rough palm and wipes it down his face,
holding his jaw briefly,

he's smaller in frame, my height, makes eye contact
and holds it, takes you in when he speaks. He's been
treated pretty rough from what i hear but still keeps the
back porch open for visitors and I guess I am one--
twisting the cap on and off a tube of lip gloss, we
talk quietly about his brother who is in and out of
the swinging doors, there are so many men with
blue plaid shirts in here and I can hardly keep track--

and when we head for the Dome, I maneuver through the
old carousers and dark drunks who lurk in plain view, men who
murmur of course, hermosa when I gingerly place my hands
on their shoulders and inch past the doorway, I am searching for
you, for your blue sleeve,
but instead find Travis' and we dance a slow song--

I think he understands how I'm feeling, might be the lack of a poker face, we two-step and I trip over his boots, and when we're done he
kisses my shoulder lightly.

If I wasn't so affected by the warmheartedness I'd tell you I'd barely
noticed, but I am, when people are good, they are much softer. Their
intentions are palpable and tender--
and maybe I find comfort in touching people which i don't do too
often--and for a moment that was all i needed was a hint of
kindness after being handed off
from man to man, from feeling
intensely right with your arms
looped around my waist
with my fingers loosely settled
in your palm--to stranded with a memory
too many times where
you walked off and
i still had so much
more to say, like,
I truly love you,
maybe.

all weekend i fed cucumber skins
and apple chunks to Minokie
and several times i thought the old
corpses of tree trunks were fallen calves
leant to and packed with damp soil, white
roots stretched out under the overcast sky
peeking out of the natural mulch and fern
soft and raw

If I walked past the rocks quick like, they
looked like shoulders or kneecaps, angel heads
that the earth washed out, pines keeled over with
their innards exposed, the sound of veins being ripped
from the bedrock still audible

I started thinking of things based on where you
could have been or would have been
with me--sleeping patterns we might have
discovered, the narrow places we find we fit,
the hollows too cold and mountains just right--
how the night flashed behind my eyelids
like a buoy in tumult and the rain sounded like the footsteps
of someone stopping at the edge of my tent over and over

I keep casually mentioning your name because
it still sounds right, but i'm cautious around the syllables
as if i've taken clay to fold around the ends, spoken secrets
into sego lily petals,
I'm a little more down in the earth as if
i've been too high up in the clouds, i've picked up
this strange way of speaking that the old folks are
drawn to--they touch my wrists and pray with me
over their anemic daughters and passed sons--

they hear me.


I keep thinkin' maybe we're meant to be or maybe
you were the catalyst to an end of a softer life i'd been
living, one without the smell of cow pats baking, the dense
grass giving off steam, uncomfortably humid but it makes your
sweat kind of sweet, and the bees think we're honeysuckle, foxglove
jim hill mustard, soaked up in truck exhaust at 5 am,
a dry cold that advances on your lungs--
almost hurts the way it unabashedly fills you up,
doesn't feel sheltered, feels saturated and heavy with
possibility. Feels like the amber grass, newborns, cold tin roofs,
stars in the back of your throat.

tell me, was that in your blood? and when i dug splinters out of your
palm, when you were staring around my earlobes, did it spread? Did the birds pick you up and scatter you like wildflower seeds? it jumped river, through our mouths or elsewhere

we're not talkin but you're still here
we're not talking but I'm still there.

i'm doing that thing--
that thing where you only
remember the good things,
the good things are saving me
from the bad things which were
so few and far between, which in fact,
weren't many at all,

I was trying to distract myself, really
if it's a question of whether I could have
loved you regardless of our differences then
the answer is yes, yes, I can.  

but the proper analogy for what we had probably
looks something like two indians on opposite sides of
the river, or maybe you were in the middle, maybe I
was knee deep in the shore, toes between the stones
with an outstretched hand, maybe it wasn't a river,
maybe it was the rapids---was I yelling?

When I said I was done, what I really meant was, i'm done
hoping that you'll cross the river. Because you're pretty stubborn,
like you're on this rotating pedestal, and you pick up where you please
but I'm rooted, dug in, cemented to a lifestyle.


I dunno. I couldn't ask you to change.

I'm doing that thing--
that thing where I remember all the good things.
wondering if God has you or someone else,
it's funny how much I miss you.

I recently unearthed old photos of me
with a mop of scraggly black hair and
a ***** smile on my face, the kind of
smile I used to give before sinking into
myself, twisting my face up to disappear
and reassess my insides, how was that heart
workin' out for you, sweetheart?

And years later I still feel the familiar jolt,
manage to think that I am too sloppy for
loving, I've always been a pallet of nudes
a swarthy child waiting to be as blue as
the sky, holding myself to a standard
physically impossible, people tell me
I'm beautiful and I still wonder why
if this is as easy as loving myself then
I want to know how,  I say thank you
with a hand over my heart to hold in
the little girls, who still wait in the middle
of empty classrooms for a partner, who still
envy the women that grew fox-glove petals
in the golden hour while I crouched in the
curly willow branches, semi-dormant
perpetually brown with too much skin
standing off the side because I was too
afraid to touch others,

too afraid of an olive complexion. Too afraid of being in this body.


When someone loves you, how will you know?
what will they do when they see my scars, the ones that only
show at certain times in certain ways? Under hot water and at
noonday? when will I be okay with a broken heritage, with a mexican
daddy who cut the ropes back to the village where I was supposed to
return to? And why do I feel like the winds and hot sands when boys hold my hands? Like I am burning up the rivers or smoldering beneath
the dry autumn brush in San Isabel, where only beetles and lizards congregate, a backboard baby with
an overprotective mother, carrying the strings I've tried to tie to others--

direct me home, sir.
direct me home, ma'am.

Tell me who I am.
tell me who i am