over the last few months
you couldn't put a number
to how many times i've thought
about you Matt,

how many angry drives I've sped
through the twisted wind channels
of brush hollow and stood at the
outcrop looking towards the dam--

the ungodly mornings spent staring
at my right arm stretched across the pillow
not even thinking about you but also him

this translucent idea of a man that
might exist, thin as a wafer and
constantly fading

how often i pulled up your name
and stared at the trees in my yard
or the sunsets or the moon that
was gratingly beautiful and was
just ******

but the amount of time it
takes my soul to ease into it is
shortening now, and all the
things I missed back then
the traits and bits that
flew silently beneath
the radar are all coming to
light

and I am realizing how blind
it all was, how constructed
the lies were, how I was
never the perfect girl for you
i just tried so desperately to be--

and the strangest people are
speaking into my life at
the most unexpected moments
I don't think i've got you  nailed down--
could it be that it's because you don't
quite know yourself either?

How funny,
how true
maybe all that this was
and all that you were--
a catalyst on the way
to figuring it out
but I shouldn't give too
much thought to the potter
or the ***

you were a blessing either way.

blake said something
interesting, prefaced by
i told you i'm not educated
as if he's begun every sentence
with that since he could believe
himself--

i just thought ya'll had
to be in the same book, maybe
not on the same page--

and he laid his hands out on his
lap as if he were tryin' to read himself

and ya'll are just different books
and i figured
maybe that was so
maybe we were two
fictions in the wrong
section--maybe I was
paperback, maybe I am
prose, maybe I am an anthology
of asides, of footnotes and maybe
you weren't even a book
just a slip of sheet music
to mark my chapter--


dunno, I say, laughing.
but I should go home now.




I should go home now.

there is more to it all
than running away,
which i have always
and never done

i used to cap my
bones in steel
wash them over with
milk, stand at the river's
edge and feel myself sink
in the pierce,
without ever wading
out,
you could call it a somatic
symptom, as if blowing away
were a disorder--
and yet feeling heavy
enough to sink a thousand
ships but they
should know i'm
no Helen.

people only knock

for the warmth, outstay

their welcome,

i've never wanted to

love quickly

i want to lay each

brick, caulk every corner

and be

*sure

that old song by
eric church still
makes me hurt

anything that
moves, the green
grass and the trees
turnin' colors, I'm
sittin out on the porch
beggin' them leaves
not to fall,

I'm not ready
I tell them, what new
girl's soul have you settled
in, made your nest in the
rafters like I did in your ribs--
you remember,
girls like me

girls like me.

this must be the place


my father put bread inside
the ceramic jar filled with
muscovado in the kitchen,
where my tiny hands splayed
out and stuck to the counters

it'll soften it, he says

for his lack of affection
I took what I could get
i must have soaked in
Darjeeling for years
an unrefined sugar cube
too bonded to dissolve
like all children that
want from their fathers--

I suppose.

a little girl peeking
over the tile, wondering
what other types of things
bread could make soft--
her
maybe.

it is nice until you decide to come back



i thought it was the evening
in the trees but the
leaves really are yellow
much like myself and
you
were we ever really
green? this coastline
is lonely but I feel
myself for the first time
scrolls of soft skin
and black hair--all
the wrong i've ever
done in boxes, manifesting
in headaches, i am *sad
a faint hint of optimism
on the rocks
in the sea, breaking
against the cliffs
the waves come
together but I
haven't
been.