No one ever told me I was nothing,

but they sure tried to sing it and write it in trees
and the dirt with their sticks and stones and my own bones
and when the words didn't hit home they used  my. body.
and. my. hair.  and wrapped each sinew of my muscle in
knots and buried me beneath sixteen inches of myself
until I could no longer hear my own screams just a
faint whisper of a melody, tell me--how do you
help yourself when you can't even hear
your own pleas?



Nobody ever said I wasn't enough, but their questions
suffused me out, and each action undid a button (or a blouse)
took out these flimsy plaster walls and flooded the gates with
sordid tastes and feelings I never knew I had, broke off parts
of me like grapes and popped me from the stems to put on
plates, and you might even say they ate
me.

in fact there be people saying I'm **** perfect, talkin' about how
there's something different 'bout me and the way I approach things
like they ain't ever seen caution, how I'm the best thing that could have
happened to them but that's all dry corn stalk and maybe it's just my fault for trying--in a completely non-piteous sort of way, maybe I spent
too much time hoping or putting faith in dime slots instead of dimes--

I've come around to notice none of my habits are inherently me, that music is just a page out of a how-to pamphlet on Being Liked and Staying That Way, how to buy boots and hope material possessions make it better, how to search out a crowd and ruin Wednesdays for yourself, the 10-minute sequence on Staring Out Windows on the 25th Brick and how No One Even Looks Attractive after kissing him.

No one ever told me I was nothing, and I never thought I was, because I am not no thing at all or not one bit--A conglomeration of others
certainly does exist, but who are they, who am i, and where do I
come in?

I've been holding instead
of hugging, lately. And
I've found that everyone
feels like they're breaking--
thin pieces of plywood
that might snap if I squeeze
too hard--

there's nothing quite poetic
about the ways I miss you
in correlation to the lack
of time we spent getting
to know each other, but
i still feel the heat creep
up on my neck around
3am and I have dreams
that i'm chasing you
through tattered hallways
streaming with silk and felt
but never catching you, always
opening doors to more doors and
losing your heels around stapled
corners, and up plastic stairwells
I could have swore I was actually
up on Oak Creek Grade cleaning
mud out of my backseat, pulling
strips and strips of cotton from
the floors and nursing oily
shoulders--with someone
telling me take care of him,
take care of him--


it doesn't take much for me to realize when I'm still hoping for something.

Oh, i'm far too soft
in a warm beer kind
of way, won't burn
when I go down,
no heart-of-dixie
kind of wild, and I'd
only climb into your lap
when the truck's in park,
and only then just to tease
because my hips probably
do a thing or two--but I've
never had the chance to
let someone in on my
secrets, on the road map
to my thighs, and how I
hardly keep quiet--
but I got bible verses for
fingers although the holy
spirit won't seep through,
know lots of things about
the revival in Wales and not
much out of the log tucked into your
visor-- I'm not as scared as
I seem, just ***** easily, if you'd
just wait, if you'd just wait at the
bottom of the hill, I'll eventually
come down, I give everything
too much thought, but commit
100% when I've got the answers,
and sometimes I do, sometimes
i've got the answers, so the wind's
whipping up the dirt and pickin'
up my hair and i must look like
something crazy, but I'm not
I'm not,


I go down smooth.

what does it
feel like to have
someone take you
as you are? in all
the shades of carob
that I have become,
toasted almond,
cinnamon and
umber, wet
earth and
bear pelt
the oils
released
when the rain
falls, and I am
separated from
the usual loam
I am still learning
that brown is beautiful

too.

whenever I get to thinking
about what it is that you really
like, like if bourbon was your
vice then i'd be some simple
syrup, the kind my grandma
makes--with sugar and hot
water, and how you only
use a little, a little goes
a long way.

still got those words runnin'
through my head, you'd be better off
you'd be better off if you were
*you'd be better off if you were by yourself

I wrote a poem about a lie you told
but instead decided to commemorate
you in a better light, probably because of
Paul Harvey's God Made a Farmer,
rememberin' you hoist a bale up at least
three stacks, starin' off into the distance
as you curled baling wire together, looking
like some ****  painting
probably because I know that if you were
out in the woods up behind the hay shed,
I might've mistaken you for a  wounded buck,
all caught up in wire, struggling for whatever's
left of you, with your antlers speared
through clumps of spinney--what a sight.

that even though your heart's in a different place--
albeit a different country altogether, that you are
your own state and nationality, even when your
pride is the biggest plot of land from here to Oklahoma
City--

Your chest reminds me of the helm of a ship, and in my mind
you're still an old tree, gashed and notched with chopped roots
that cleave the earth and ripple above ground in grey knuckles
of european beech wood. You try an' grow into whatever you
can and whoever you can, marriage ain't ****, just as long as I'm happy carved into your branches that I tried to smooth over as
gentle as I could without comin' on too strong--but, darlin', you
never wanted a woman's touch anyway.

Still beautiful as ever--your smile still'd be enough to warm my hands
and I wasn't lying about the way you stand makin' me feel some sort of
way, clinging to your neck and losing feeling in my shoulder
biting your lip hard enough to make you chuckle and memorizing
the specifics of your spine--
so now at night I might be caught thinking about the way you'd feel
if I whispered your name--

but you said it yourself that actions mean more than words, that you probably wouldn't remember something you said two weeks ago so
what's the use in me callin' you a prepossessing man (see also: imposing), I could write more about just your forearms and continue
comparing you to trees and bucks but none of that really matters, I realize. To someone who wants kisses and thighs and just
the outsides, you're fascinated by my spirit sayin'
you ain't ever felt this way, and I wonder why.
Why?

You're not into that kind of thing, but I am that kind of thing.


so, say no to me again.
like you mean it.
keep sayin' it.
keep sayin' it.
you had the answer all along.

this girl came wanderin' in the shop
with slim hips and these summery
blue eyes, real nice, probably 23.

I've always wondered about that
study taken on by the University
of Copenhagen wherein they found
that blue-eyed people might very
well share the same ancestor--

how in the presence of this feathery girl
who looked like she might be hiding wings
beneath that brown leather jacket, I feel
like even the last man on earth would
rather dive into an inch-deep lake than five
feet of muck, only some people find pleasure
in wet earth

but lately i've felt as if even the men who
call me beautiful would much faster take
off for the sky if only just to leave the ground.

west of town they're these low
white clouds filled with frost
straddling the mountains like
a woman's thighs,

it's not cold enough to freeze
but bitter enough to bite through
the glass and needle into the cracks
small as pin-******,

Westcliffe's got the worst of it but I've
been thinking opposite of your whereabouts
ever since you told me I'd be better off alone
cut straight in with a bodkin, 'cept you had
no thread, just took any sharp object meant
for better things and delivered readily.

I hope that when Love comes into my life, he knocks.
That he is warm and smells like hay, like wet earth and roses, like my father.
that he is the same in every light, every angle, in black and white and color. That his daddy taught him how to fix things, and a Phillips looks good on him. When he says my name, I'll hear Texas, North Carolina and Oklahoma, long hot drives and a dust filled cab.
When he sees my shelves are crooked, he pulls nails
out of his pockets, he has pistols in his glove compartment, *****
jeans but cleans up nice, that when I say that I love Jesus he
reaches for my hair and says of course you do.

When Love comes, I hope he waits at the door because I take a while to get ready.  I've been perfecting my heart for ages, softening my
soul to room temperature, polishing the pottery and brushing my hair back. I've been searching for the perfect shade of lipstick, one that
reminds him of a dream, an old brick building where he once
found me, where we broke bread and communed and
when he woke up, he left this old life and
came in search of something new
someone, new, me.

That when love comes, he's neither relieved or overwhelmed. He might
breathe a sigh of joy over I didn't know when it was gonna happen, but here we are. And Everything we've done up until that point is
an instrumental, everyone else a backing vocalist singing
harmonies to the way we laugh. When Love comes he'll
probably know. We'll probably glow brighter.

we'll probably glow brighter.

my mom and I are walking through Big R
when I ask to leave, nervously crushing
my keys in my palm, the lady at the
front has this pleasant accent and talked
to me like I was a woman--I brush my fingers
across all the stacks of denim embroidered in
silver thread with gaudy buttons

we are in the parking lot and she says you didn't find anything?
and I think that all the carhartt hoodies looked like your chest and
all the jeans said you ruin everything down the seams, all I could see
was me swingin' around a hardwood floor that didn't exist--attached
to a hand that was fading away

but I say, no, nothin'.

oh, he came in the back door
in a rush of warm wind
without much entrance, like
when you pull a pan from the
oven--he slides across the rack
and sets up on the stove,  
sat at my table and delicately
touched my hands, not
much precedence for
falling in love, so I
wanted to tell him
everything. But
most of the time he'd
kick up on my knees
spread his calves out
on my thighs and let
Kate curl up in the
middle--I'd just
go silent with the
overwhelming urge
to rub his shins and
smile.


how much of me is the old me
how many girls still feel the hands
of other men? he says move on
and I want to tell him that every
blue ford makes my palms sweat
that I'm only waiting on God,
for his for sure, a divine yes
that even if it's no longer between
the three of us, and it's just him
and some girl named Savannah or Cassie-May
I'll wait as long as I need to for the blessed answer
because he thinks he's pointless and I think he's

beautiful.

I don't promise to drive away your doubts.


I don't promise to drive away your doubts as if
they were shadows and I am the sun rising up out
of your darkness, I cannot erase past lovers or touch
you the way they did because I have never loved someone
beneath the covers, in amber rooms that smell like vanilla and
chicory, I've never took hold of someone and felt there,  as
if the moment had been preluded by most everything in my life
we both and breathe and--

I would like to tell you that my love will be outspoken, but it will always be a whisper. A warm breeze that catches the hem of your
shirt and cools the sweat on your back, the soft remnants of a song--
the curious sounds that turn into music in the middle of the night
when the buzz of a hot summer sounds more like a choir, an undulating melody straying through the screen as if it never
meant to find you but it did, love did.

That I will not chase your fears to the absolute ends but approach them
slowly as wounded people, take their arthritic hands and speak softly to them, never recoiling from the faces of your past. Kiss your bruises and lay them out on the porch, every smattering of blue and moss green growing pansies in the garden--

  When you tell me  your secrets I will wrap them in lace and tell you mine, I will unbutton every layer of every girl i've ever been and show you the list of scars, the tick marks on these ribs where I once was captive in my own body,

I will not pick across your fields and uproot your flaws, I will sit beneath the trees you grew out of sheer anger and coax flowers to grow--Because your mistakes are not things to get rid of, only waxy residue I rub from the leaves with my thumbs, a better part of you that has always been there--that I'll move from the shelves and place on the dining room table, not for me to polish but for you to see--

That you are beautiful. That you refract the daylight just by shifting your head. That even when you are tearing into yourself in vicious rages, you will still be fringed in a splendid brilliance--

I will not take you by force, you are not an expedition, I am not a missionary. I will always ask, always from a distance. So hushed
and subdued,
for you.

Your voice always sounds
A little deeper across an hour and five minutes
Through wetmore and up hardscrabble
You say you've been trying a little less
That's okay, I think.  I'm so different to you and
You're so different to me, you say maybe I've never loved and I recall how weightless Chaz felt on top of me on his sheet-less mattress and
wondering if love would always feel this way--quick and dry, as if i
were a speedtrack and him a flippant driver burning rubber
and spilling his load on the side of the road.

you can always say no to me
What I meant is if you kissed another girl and
Started that long descent, falling for some irresistible wile--
I would know that you were finally touching someone who might know what she wants

If it's meant to be, it'll happen.
You're explaining something about the plant in Salida, chocolate chip cookies, Bulls. Your voice is gravelly and tired and about us--you begin, with a pause.

About us, about us.  

before you even hang up I'm considering
The dynamics of waiting and patience and changing,
have a good night, dakota. I say it twice, you've already
confronted my fear of losing you.

my favorite ****
color is the unwashed
indigo blue of your truck
with a muddy license plate

Parked off to the side
Beside the pines

When Chaz broke up with me I was
painting the old room on Hartford,--
this rich prussian blue--in the middle
of an indian summer, thick solvent fumes
shimmering outside the windows.  And the
sweat didn't leave your body, just dewed up
on your skin in a thousand glittering beads--

When he called, I walked to the playground and
began  to internalize the heat in anticipation--
the thick chunks of ochre tanbark and red-hot tar in the
playpit--sat on the edge of a scorching step and said things like
no, really, I'm okay.
of course not, I'm fine

When he hung up, i only remember the true indifference to the
mothers and their startled babies, in awe of the spectacle
of beings other than themselves crying--avoiding the strange
girl dissolving on the swings, a sweaty, positively remorseful thing,
baking in a pair of caked shorts.

When my parents come to find me a half-day later, I am a dried up husk, salty and shriveled from sunburn
--Sitting in the same place--
you vow this will never happen--that this pain, this hurt--will never touch you again.  It's too much to say that that day you broke, at most, you cracked down the side, a piece of drift wood hanging onto its branches
by a few sinewy fibers,
sewed yourself up with moss, with steel and rice paper--hoped no one
could see through you, enough holes for catacombs, fissures from here-to-there, across the state of i-never-thought-this-kind-of-heartbreak-was-possible--

at best, slightly used, worn once, okay condition. 19.99.

And you've been keeping your distance since you were fifteen,
where people deflect off a touch, bounce off your atmosphere--
so now, people come into your orbit and your gravity is thrown, when
he reaches for you all you see is the way it ends a year from now, a loss
you've already counted when his hands are threaded into your cerebellum--when he's beginning to push apart your ribs to know
you a little better, when your spine is not just a column of bones anymore but a grecian pillar, your body is not a cavity but a temple,
when he starts to wonder about what it might feel like to love you--

you only know a couple ways to keep men grounded,
maybe here, maybe there, maybe close.  You're so scared.

You're so scared.

and men don't like timid women
men don't like women that need time
he calls you cold and you say yeah, maybe. Yeah, Maybe.
How else should you be? How can you be warm?

I am trying to be less of a tomb, turn my insides out and
show you i am the warmest I have ever been, that if I am
to be pitted with holes then they are sweet and I am full of
honey--that where you were hurt I am hurt too--that I am
healing just the same, hoping for the best,

whispering


get to know me

get to know me.

i had a dream i was crushing jugs of buckwheat honey
beneath my palms, and the plastic fractured and crumbled
apart like wax, spilling across the wooden shelves, piling up at
the edge before sheeting down to my feet, ending in tawny spirals--

that i was fighting with God, who was at the top of the stairs, hidden by the turn in the hallway, doing laundry--and how I stood on the first step as the vision wobbled and knew I wouldn't make it in time--even if I took the steps by threes.

He was saying something, but i couldn't hear him.  Something about me, maybe, but the dream was ending. The dream was ending and God was in my house, doing my laundry--

I woke up from the soundest sleep I've had in years.

my hair is a wild mess and smells like gasoline,
like solvent and you--old spice and hay
you can't chicken out now you tell me
and though I can't see your eyes, your smile
is the whitest thing i've ever seen and makes
my shoulder blades ripple and pinch together
and my pulse unwinds and slows to a heavy
hum--picks up like a bush plane when you
start up your truck.

you throw an old jacket at me,
smirk when you see how i'm drowning in your coveralls
and tell me well, you shoulda worn something warmer
drown out my replies by gunning the engine and I have
no choice but to shut up and hang on--ask me if I had
anything else to do today but barely wait for my answer
you knew better through a grin that I have no problem hearing.

i think about how i've changed a lot in the past two months
how I feel like all of the little girls I used to be are growing up--
how you teach with your voice before your hands and are silent
during my expected bouts of self-doubt, don't shoot the bull, is all you say before I pull the trigger and my ears start ringing--so funny
how I'd trade dozens of other moments just to relive that one over
and over, hear you say i think you hit it, at  least twice more.

You're not smiling but there's sunshine
in your drawl that I can't help but taste,
there's 14 inches of snow outside your door
but you could melt it all blushed with those red flannel cheeks--
can't help but feel like your dog loves me a little more
even when I'm full of fears that you don't bother to coddle but certainly don't ignore--

how even though you're probably hurting
you still want to show me every last thing on this green earth
in your red heart, this stretch of land from here past your
grandma pat's house--
 raise welts--
and snap my thighs
with dish towels
throw snow in my hair but gingerly
pick it out once we're back inside
trash talk my aim but make sure my shirt gets dry
dislodge my sedan near the corral--but not before rolling me into one of
those side embraces, where you tuck me beneath a heavy arm and lift me off the ground, oh,
i never want to touch down
i never want to touch down

i drove an hour and thirty minutes
to drop a loaf of banana bread off at
your house and I walked up to the
door talking to myself like a mad-man
it's a  m i r a c l e  you didn't hear me--
saw your truck in the lot but didn't think
much of it, (you were supposed to be at work)

but then you were there--
with those eyes that can get so
wide as if I am the darkest thing
in the room and you need  a l l
the light you can get to take me in,
filling up the doorway with those
b  r  o  a  d  shoulders that sometimes
remind me of the horizon, like the whole
sky has settled across the slopes
of your body and branches
off to the sides, everything
goes on for miles like i'm seeing
something so far off--with that frame of yours
that always seems to pour itself into empty spaces--
you could be standing in the middle
of a whitewashed prairie and the fields
would still gently wrap around your
hands, fold you up in the dirt and
you'd still be the arrowhead i'd find--
and I just mutter jesus christ because you've made
me jump, but still. We haven't seen each other in two
weeks and all I can manage is a jesus christ, you scared me.

you disappear into your room and i'm thinking;
  "do     I     set     this     here     and     go?"  
so I take my time unwrapping the bread, crinkling the
bag between my fingers and stuffing the note beneath  
the sweet tea that I brought because it's been sitting in my fridge waiting for you--but you still haven't come back out so I head for the door, breathing slowly and chewing a hole through my lip.

you're already leaving? You've materialized on the couch with a rifle jammed between your knees, staring out at me past the rod you've got
poised at the muzzle.  I have the door open with the wind blowing in
these soft flakes that have started on a lazy drift, skittering in and collecting around my boots--I have one hand on the door **** and I can hear you running that tiny square of fabric through the chamber, fixated
on the barrel and briefly meeting my eyes.
Waiting for me to say something,
it's a split second--barely any time at all--
I think about how that navy blue shirt looks good on you,
looks like those cloudy ocean waves and you are the sand
riddled sea foam pulsing in and out--

I didn't know if you'd want me to stay, I whisper sheepishly. But I close the door and step back inside.

i start  losin' you but you bring
me back around without even
being here--

I wonder about all the blond-haired
green-eyed heroines with lean arms
and venus dimples, who stomp their
feet and shake pomegranates
from the sky, stretch lithely in between
the gates, between arms, who fit into
your side a little better than I do
who glide across the cattle
guards and look good in miss-mes
but then there's

me

and could I ever be so beautiful?

I feel a little out of place, if your heart was full
of daffodils i'd be the single cattail, a plank of
polished wood in a barn--out of keeping with the
regulars--can't dance, can't swim, can't dive--
but I sure want you to teach me
  I learned five albums of george strait
just so we could relate and made a mental note of all
the people you knew just so i could call them by name--

bought boot cut jeans just so you might think a little higher
folded my hair beneath a hat to let it grow out since you
you loved my long braids, (should have let them stay)--
you said we always do what you wanna do and my heart
raced out past the blocks, because I'm scared I'm
not
enough.

because God, I'm so quiet.
a songbird that doesn't sing, a girl that leaves no
trace on your pillow case, a book full of nouns,
pages and pages of soliloquies about peonies
a pen melted to my palm, pockets full of change
and spearmint gum, I don't want to be what you want
certainly not what you need-- I just want to be, to be
and if we're both steel, then I have hope--the plates that
shift beneath the earth have no where to go but up

and mountains can be moved as they say, the faith of a mustard
seed, it supposedly takes.

I want to tell him that I
love everything from a distance
but can cross oceans in seconds




that the people before him sopped
through my fingers like wet sand,
were ever flat and disarranged, empty
men with waterless words and exigent
appetites for my body--(that this is where
i learned the only way to please a man was
to give him myself)

I'm still undoing the knots, unraveling the little girls
coiled in lies, and taking mallets to the plaster molds
I built up around myself, mannequins for different men
and if there is anything I am confused
about it is him, his I-could-nevers, his frightening
absolutes, the ways in which he vows he can never change

you think you want me but at the back of your mind you want
something else

I don't want you--not like that. Not  as if
your worth was based on how quick you jump into the fray for my sake.  How many times you make me smile or say your name--however
you are soaked in rosemary and oil, folded up out of my notebook
into a thousand paper cranes--no, not even like that.

How do I tell you that I see your soul? Your threadbare spirits peeking out and the willowy fibers unraveled in your wake, that you are more than your mothers many marriages, more than the women you did not
want to have-- and deserving of a lasting love that transcends your mistakes and leaves your mirrors remarkably clean, did you know you can be clean?

How do I tell you that the broken do not fix the broken, how I cannot share the blueprint for healing but the burden if he asks--are we in the same book? The same chapter? I once heard that two people must grow in a similar direction at the same pace--are we on the same boat? The same road?  On the torrent seas, will you hold your own?

I realize I cannot come at you with such brazen artillery, that the paths I choose have no gates and are often unmarked, not even the grass gives way, nor the trees and twigs their secrets--and the journey is wholly faith, an expedition I have not fully taken but is presently on its way. When I tell you what falls first and where my priorities settle, I speak down the pike of the ways I hope to be and the woman that waits in whole.




So when he tells me I am confusing for the hundredth time and I sink somewhere off the Atlantic with the weight of my own thoughts, I am quiet.  His words are ever resounding but do not fill me up--just the glimmering hope that we will somehow

meet
in the



Middle

I'm riding my bike home repeating the
words you said about the branches
and the clear blue skies and how
the trees are blooming now with
these soft little leaves that give
depth to something that once
looked so tangled--

I've just spent the last hour
runnin' my house key through
the grooves of that old tree on the
river walk, pulling up your name
in my inbox and scrolling through
all the things you said last
it's not a waste of my time, but it is to you
I won't fight you if you think that's what you need to do for yourself.

On the way back from Pueblo, I vividly recalled the
shadow of your lips, the way you cupped your palm
around my neck, took hold of the ringlets at my
nape and stroked my hair the way I have to
tell people to.

i wonder about my penchant for dramatics
for the phrase distance makes the heart grow fonder
how I haven't wanted children but for a split second
I saw your face at the end of an aisle,
I think about if it's right, then don't worry
if it's meant to be, it'll happen
but I never asked you to wait
and I don't think I could--
what if I come out
on the other side
of the world?

you can tell when someone
has never stroked curly hair--
never pinched a sea wave between
their fingers, been gridlocked on
a Sunday, never been held in place
by a ringlet, blissfully stranded in a
net like a fish, wide-eyed and gasping
fully expectant of what's to Come.

Ah, Dakota,
did you know I see the
mountains when I say
your name? That when
you touched me I saw
no sparks but the entire
flame?

i would like to tell him
that i would not have
documented these things
if I had known it all would end so soon
I would not have kept track of the firsts
of his hands, or his movements or
the profile of his face with the Sangre De Cristos
rising up behind him, how I thought he must
be a part of the land.
of the steady
way I was p r o b a b l y
falling in love

we're whipping through the backroads
without seat belts, kicking up the dust--
the Sangre De Cristos looming with chalky
crowns above the hills, riddled with fence
posts and battered lean-tos, homes with
green shingles and matching john deere
tractors--the mountains, the mountains.

you go around every corner like it's a straightaway
I still see you smiling at me through locked doors
cradling me like a baby bird and hoping I might
throw caution out when all around your heart
there's these warning signs on big yellow placards
glinting in the night.

there are a dozen thoughts, all equally crippling--
staggered images of you squinting up at me on
the hill above the barn in that wrinkled white t-shirt,
a gray murdoch's hat pushed high up on your forehead,
hip cocked out with your hands twitching at your sides
rubbing brake fluid between your fingers

brooke, it is pointless to you. That's so obvious to me.
they tell you to stay down when shot, play dead when
in danger, but i've been seeking solace in your neck
trying to keep myself from telling you that  I love you, feeling
it at the back of my lips ready to spill over, overcome
by your gentleness, asking God why, why can't I just
love him?


it's so obvious to you? that i've spent a  month telling myself that it's okay, that you're right, that you're harmless, that things can work
out, so pointless goes on ringing in my ears, clattering down the
airways into my heart where i love you still hangs loosely by a
thread, or maybe a rope, maybe an industrial wire ready to bring
the house down with its weight, a marble for each day, a stone, a
boulder.

county road 255 seems a whole lot shorter,
I'm preoccupied with the dry shrubs the color of verdigris, the color
of your laugh,  how i can't see through the tangle of my own emotions, how i really do want you to be the one, the one person that just happens to be right--it's so obvious, you said.

so obvious.

I've been twisting apple
stems hoping to come up
on your name, but i've
seen it written every
where else.

you weave through the heifers with your arms out,
palms down, barely sweeping your fingers across their
hides as if you were gliding them along grains
of wheat or stalks of tall grass, with careful footsteps
as if only you know the way through the hay and straw
(the way you look at me says that there's a difference)

sometime at one or two am you are out walking among them
again, and they all rise with their burdened bodies, swishing
their tails and swaying from side to side with their engorged
bellies, softly groaning and parting. You are some sort of holy
man, they're smart, they know when to move, you say. But
I think differently, there's something in your body--a gentleness
that emanates softly, a warm light that cuts the denim coats and
steel-toed boots, you're hard but your voice comes out in this
southern sing-song that makes my chest ache, ears red and a
laugh as rare as normal midwest weather.

you don't mind, do you? and you fall into the recliner next to me
It doesn't feel the least bit wrong to sleep next to you, doesn't feel the
least bit right to let you do it because i can feel your heart swelling
through your carhartt, don't like to look at you when you're
leaning into the side door, because the sun does you some sort of
righteous justice, spilling into your irises--streaking through your
lips when you speak as if ending every sentence with I dunno is the gospel itself.


just let me know when you make up your mind
the inconsistency of it all doesn't fall on you, I realize,
once again choking on my own insufferable selfishness
not brave enough to make the right decisions (probably)
convincing myself that things can just work out as if
the most wrinkled material doesn't need an iron, needs some steam
needs more than that's just the way I am, this is just the way
you are, and here I am tortured by the thought of telling you
to shut up, how can you have pricked my heart and
still be
So far
Away

you gave me a list of everyone
you'd kissed, not arbitrarily--
I'd asked. The way you ask
where the bathroom is or
for a glass of water, but
you sent me a full directory
of names, a rolling file of
women I didn't know but
would rake through the
similarities and try to define
your tastes, blonde, blonde...
blonde

When I asked you how many
people you had slept with, I was
lying on the floor picking at the red
threads in my carpet while you rolled
your heavy palms into my shoulders.
you stilled for a moment, sliding down
to the base of my hips

I dunno...five? Or ten...
I laughed and you loosened.
Well, I mean...define sleeping with.


to me there are not many definitions for
one thing, there are synonyms for *** but
none of them you really need

Just four, then.

What happened to the other six? Were they only
kind-of-sort-of's? if you didn't really feel them, did they ever exist?
if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around hear it, did you really sleep with her?

Later on you would casually mention that you were worried that's how I really kissed as if a peck could dictate a whole eight years of
kissing--and I was kind of offended. But then there's that list, the list of
all the trees in the forest that fell and the six that went missing and i think about how I can count the number of people i've slept with on
my pointer finger and how perhaps that doesn't even apply, do you pump gas for twenty seconds before the girls at the counter start crying?

suddenly there are experiences that you
have stamped into your belt and none where i've pretended to be
full of lusts and talents and shortcomings
really I'm just a baby, a wisp of cotton
yellow, so yellow
and you're a full bag of burlap and wire

we are encouraged to be light
but I beseech you to be heavy--
with your skin and hair and every
bone, with your gossamery soul--
a soul that could sink ships,

be heavy, you are much.

maybe i got caught up in that rustic
devil-may-care way that you leaned
on any counter, how the hot oil from
your grandmother's pans shot up and
flecked across the posterior of your
hand and you didn't even flinch, just
sort of sighed through your teeth
and how I spent the few seconds after
that wishing I could press myself against
your back because you are so solid.
But I digress, because I've learned that
idolizing people is a mess of self-inflicted
palsies

Nevertheless, my affinity for compounding
problems manifests in my lack of willpower,
in your forearms that are like thick bristlecone pine
branches, dry and scarred with your
obstinance--

and when you would go to wash your
hands, you'd roll your sleeves in
this rough, intensely **** manner
with your hip pushed up against
the lip of my sink, working the
dirt out of your knuckles.
So as you kneaded your fingers
back and forth; your Venke's
pulsing, I found myself to
be too hungry for you,
for this

I've never been around so much
man,  so much cord and bark
i've never touched a person and
not felt like I was going to slip
through them like some spectral
being, like their spine would
give way before they bend in
two around my palm, barely
grounded by their own
body weight.
The difference is (was?) that
you feel so full, so stalwart
and



(I got to thinking; maybe I wasn't ready.
Because for all your worth, all your
redeemable qualities, I'd cashed in on
the way you made me feel when
I hadn't for so long and that's not
the way I want to,
Not the way I
Want to
Not the
Way )

how exhausting to
fall   in   love   with
e  v  e  r  y  o  n  e
to be wrenched in
fifths    and    sixths
to say you could but
know you c  a  n  '  t
and     rushout     the
way fools rush     in
your hair leaves a flick
in the door frame before
the house comes down
in your wake, and your
lungs catch the heat,
billow up on the cliff
side, giant sails that
bring you elsewhere
that take you far away
from the choices you
don't want to make.

underneath the nylon blanket I got the
impression that your hands were
these beautiful, shadowy, cecropia moths
reticent with their intentions, while they sat
idly on your ribcage before seeking out warmer
bases. My back, my thigh, my hipbone that wasn't
connected, you whispered.

You smell like cologne and beer; warm and perfumey,
faintly sweet.  I wonder if I'm still tipsy, that was over an hour ago,
over an hour ago when I had to focus on my words
to make sure they came out in pieces and not viscous liquids
thick and sugary. I imagined gems hanging from my lips,
gems hanging from my lips and letters bubbling past
them.

you keep pulling down my shirt like a curtain, derisive of your
own actions, only to find that you have yet to prove yourself
and rock my thigh into yours which was perhaps too zealous.
Too zealous, I think, nonetheless quickened by your thumb
brushing the underwire of my bra.  I laugh because we are far
too juvenile. Here I am protecting the sanctity found in patience
and yet you've evaded the rules.

all this touching and we haven't even kissed, I say, which wasn't really an invitation, but then we are and i am breathing all of you
in sweet staccato breaths, tugging at your skin and still doing the
guesswork, still trying to pin down your wings like a true lepidopterist
all the while knowing that butterflies on cork-boards are usually
dead.

Queen of the fallen tree and the gneiss ridden
shore, ruling over an empire of celadon
moss and early spring waters, you stand off
to the west (of me) and i see your breath shift
over your lip and dissipate in loose tendrils against
the evening sun

I catch him staring up at the trees arced over
our heads with a strange boyish grin,
this is sorta what I imagine my life to look like he says
all this **** in the way and then beyond that it's clear.
He wipes his hand across the sky as if to illustrate the
supposed clarity beyond the tangle of branches.  I am startled,
I meet his gaze briefly and nod because
if not a mess or entanglement, what better way to
describe the way I feel than to elude to the bracken
and brushwood ?

Out across a wire fence, deer gather quietly and stand
stock-still as we pass, aloof if not for their big inquiring eyes
watching us smirk and bump shoulders because
we don't know how else to be close (I already tried my tricks).
But he surprises me now and again with his gregariousness
with a determination to get to but an equal pleasure in
idling, in stillness, in gliding across my instep, performing
quick studies on my nails or briefly succumbing to the shadow
beneath my collarbone--

Quite arbitrarily, i ask for his pocket knife
but it's him that carves our initials into the
snarl at my feet, his hood pulled close
around his neck as he sets to work
Bis now with those hands that
have been kilned and slipped
with engobe, I am stirred
stirred
stirred
and
awake
awake
and
afraid.

we were laying on the floor talking
about your perpetually ***** hands,
stained from rusty machinery, and I got
to thinking that they looked an awful
lot like terra sigillata, or marmalade
or yams or tulip poplar honey--
waxy, with a glazed finish

you brush your left thumb down my pinky
and comment on the thinness of my skin
(unsurprisingly) I mean, look at my hands! you say
and I do and you're right, your hands
are like slabs of green wood--in fact
your whole body seems like some sort
of pliable tree trunk but I don't say this
because we've lapsed into a silence or
an otherwise conveniently synchronized
thought that has billowed up around our
hips until our arms are overlapped and
extended like a petiole of our bodies with
my palm cradled in yours like some aeriform body,
birdlike and gentle. You're tracing those lines like they
mean something.
Like they
mean something to you.

you have to understand that I am too often
inside myself, awash on a shore, grown into
the sand like a clam, experiencing solitude
through a shell, keeping at bay on the bay
sending prayers up like signal flares
pumped up into the sky, silent on
the horizon, loud from in here,
so when I tentatively thread my
fingers through your hair, know
that I do so in supreme intimacy
because words supposedly say
the most (depending on who
you're talking to) but my
hands are a different language
a different place, a different time
a company of dissarranged thoughts
and emotions, rippling and swelling
trying to make sense of being touched

so

softly

on the way to wetmore, I find myself
watching his hands, whose movements appear
sheltered but warm, tortoise-shelled and dipped
in metallic sod; look like the surface of a leather-hard
***,  mottled with molasses spots and inlaid with
the rivulets of earthen gold and chalk--


i can't find my heart here, on the truck bed
where my eyelashes cast too big of a shadow
on his face but i'm still savoring the fine lines,
the heat that builds where plates meet or craters
settle--we've collected here as though on slopes
(inclined to meet one another)

slid shoulder to shoulder, wound up in icy whispers
put under consideration by the stars, up for debate in
the heavens, already settled before the dawn of time
just waiting on the answers, holding reins on hearts
taking it slow


taking it slow






taking it slow

no one tells you what the strain is like
when you know you're waiting but the
when is questionable and the who is for certain
when you want to stay frozen because without
a leader you know not where the ice cracks
but just how to crack it--with your heavy feet
and sand-laden spirit, with a body drained
down to the dregs, so hopeless and inconsequential
an existence in the flesh.

I mean to say that nobody tells you what the strain
is like--to be plagued by the notion that your choices
put a spin on people, a timer on chances, a could-he-be
would-he-be play in a hundred acts in which girl
sleeps with his sweater while simultaneously
managing to hate herself because she can't actually
see herself with him, hugs him with a hand slid
meticulously over his chest as he turns away
scared to death of the inner monologues that
begin with "I will hurt you..." and end with

maybe
if i just
s  t  a  y
a w a y

When I read about the brachial plexus,
a spaghetti junction of nerves webbed
behind the clavicle, I am d  i  s  t  a  n  t
half awake and dreaming about lovers
caught up in the mystics of medulla,
gingerly pinching the tendons and
sinewy muscle--

I consider the thick arteries (perhaps not
so thick) (not like other trunks, cords and
red threads) and how easily I could die,
how swollen 'tunnels' and blocked interstate
highways seem not so far fetched according to
medical terminology and the number of things
that could go wrong ( will ) as Murphy warned.

yet here I am, alive and well, a celestial giant
housing stars and all a manner of great, lumbering
structures, pith, and blood.

there's a dale as you're entering
El Paso County where my fingers
feel heavy and my arms take on a
distant memory, a spirit dug into
the highway that radiates the way
the land does in Mailuu-Suu or Sellafield
because in this valley the rocks are coquelicot
and the trees gasp from snowy outcrops
in a tender, pleading kind of way--
so much so that I want to reach out
and thread through their weeds--a
demand so visceral that I feel the
pine brush on my palms and the
bark scrape skin from my forearms
but
then

the valley opens with it's shaved hills
and pulls back in the rear view mirrors
where its memories don't reach.

do your hair up all pretty like
for those of us that are sure the world
can see our fly-aways, just fly away
our cuticles aren't healed enough
from nights spent jamming our
hands in between the rough *****
and city junctions, telephone wires
hooked to our skin because we're
just fish to greater demons

but

when you hear your old selves
discuss their polarities and crack
the mirror with spiritual hits it's
best to talk them off the ledge
that faint precipice in the distance
where they linger and stare too
long at the other sides, the other wheres
otherwhys and othertheres
see the green grass in other hells
but you tell them that
there's no place like
the here and
now

the here
and now.

i feel like a medley of bloods
of non-favorites and choices
left undecided, all corners and
edges--a heart beating in sheets
of rain where the freshet of my spirit
has ravaged the banks and driven
bones from this ossuary.

that leaves something to be said
about the state of greater things--
of the things i've left frozen that
melt in torrents and wash away
this facade of placidity, this
supposed contingency plan
swept away in a deluge of
all-the-things-i-had-going-for-me
and the worst of it is that i have
not yet been drained, I am still
raging, still raw and
r a g    i    n g

he says he's an open
book but

why bother with
a heartbeat I can
hardly hear

i was beneath the bed
listening to the in-out
thinking about how we
all take the air differently
when josh came with the cold
outside and drunkenly mistook
me for Christina, found his unusual
place and passed out  in stiff shadows,
smelling faintly of fireball cinnamon whisky--

plenty of moments reserved for sinking
or abandoning ship, receding into that quiet
place, hungry for a will and a way

when matthias finds me ransacking the
kitchen cabinets, i am rattling the underground
Seattle with a clorox induced vengeance
because i only seem to find peace in leaving
an old place clean, running my fingers through
jello shots that have disintegrated sometime in
the 3 am when for a few minutes we must
have all been asleep.

( all            the             while              Adele   )
hums in the background--a languid Hello
solemnly stitching itself into my memory
something to later hold dear, some fragment
of an adolescence that was realized on this
night, when I was removed from the place
beneath the bed, stolen from the house
dreaming that I was found inside
the mouths of strangers that
passed alongside Boylston
with their misshapen bodies
coiled in streamers and
various liquors

so when i return at 7 am
still wide awake and waiting
I examine my ******* in the
foggy mirror of the bathroom
before taking what I would
endearingly refer to as the
dirtiest shower off my life---
how could such a thing
be so? I'm curious myself.

I've spent two weeks cleaning an old place.

ode to the flower next to belladonna
the trees on south-facing mountain slopes
silently musing into the nights and not
the avalanche's daughter whom the hills
sing praises and woes

her soul's a quiet unison, meno mosso
a choir and composer spun through
***** pipes, doors cracked and never
fully closed, (there's light beneath the
lids...) she'd like to think of herself as
the wind but she's content as still air
between prayer beads--

and if not the star dust--then who? why else
do we call pauses rests? Why then is there
beauty in fermattas? In crescendos that vibrate
the material of the immaterial--if such things
happened to be true for the unwild and untangled
the perpetually pianissimo, the leading and kerning--
because she would much rather be an empty vessel
or a plate without food, a seed or a grape on a vine
because neither go without lords or masters and

she is not her own.

today analeigh gave
a single fragile blink
before bursting into
tears--I've never seen
a child cry.


I've seen children cry.
but from a distance, across
the counter, in the aisle over.
I've seen hundreds of scrunched
faces and balled fists, dozens of
raised voices dismissed in popular
clutter but

when she dipped her head and fell
between the cracks, lost in between
vowels and performance orientation
before I could catch the things that
had been said and suddenly
i was aching, welling, raging
holding--tucking little strands
of wet hair behind blushing ears
and my voice was new and not
mine--soft and assuring
no, no, sweet girl

you are so smart
breaking a bit
for a baby
folded into
social constructs

she cried
and I broke
for her.

my inner thighs are
sewn with phosphorous
and I jump for men
I don't know.

conversations with paul are a one
way street, an play in a single act
between himself and a shadow (me):


in which Actor tells Actress he loves
her and then watches as her feet burn
holes into the stage and sink beneath
the floorboards, while he dons purple
prose and begins to blame your fire
for the forests he's burned with
his hot breaths and angry manuscripts

and the guilt he peddles is contagious
it wets through your layers to dillute
your kindness, your sorries, your innate
empathy for people in pain and when
he's not here, he's whetting his words
and staking them in your soft soil
in the middle of the night while
you lay unaware but dream
that a thief sweeps through
your garden and uproots
the best and most purposeful
foilage, unguarded even by
the moonlight because
such a thing could not
disguise a lack of a
a person.