I flew today
my feet were wings and
I glided home
across the divide

while you were eating
cherry pie that sunday
after i reached for your
hand and your fingers
didn't curl around mine--

i took to the trees behind the cabin
and stayed the mossy grove buried
in this golden scratch
the neighbor's conversation downwind
about the mountain lion they'd spotted
and the spiritual sort of fear I felt with
my eyes closed, the mechanical click
of my own heartbeat, how things
used to flow and now they only
swarmed,
always
swallowed.

i was singing songs to call you out,
like you did the first time, when you
came up around the hillside and
followed me a ways out--
softly at first and then no more,
replaced by the force that came
upon me, where suddenly I was
uprooting trees, picking the most
desolate, gnarled aspens--unhinging
their roots to press my heel into their
soft bases, hulking forward and watching
them stretch out and out and out--

I found old yarn and tied
it for later, to find, to untie
to hope for second chances
I left the copse and you were


eating cherry pie on the porch
rummaging through coolers
oil sloshing through your bones
dragon fire in your blood
hard-headed over puerile matters
over your time, over the weeks
staunchly grounded into your own
wild western ways,

The duck's back, the bear's pelt
You've been roaming alone in the forests
As the beasts do, the lost, the frightened,
Admiring the darkness of your own shadow
The way it draws and casts away,
Doubly conflicted of your nature that
Mostly takes and takes and takes
Bears and
Men and
You.

Early morning before
anyone has ordered coffee
and I feel delicate in the dewy
sun with the heater on low
at my ankles, I reorganize
the drawer below the register
gingerly feeling at staples and
rubberbands, Caleb watches from
the corner on tea with raspberry
in doc martens and ***** trousers
I wonder if I seem as pretty as I
feel or if he feels the staples too and
the dust from gift cards, if my hair
flares out in the light, if I am a brilliant
solar eclipse.

I say something like
I want to know everything about you
and that's not me lying, just my genuine
curiosity out there in the open so when
people ask about you, your favorite
flavor of ice cream will fall right off
my tongue, a thousand little facts
about your truck or your garage
or things I picked up just listening to
the sound of your voice

I like to know people the way I know myself
but maybe i've been careless, maybe i've taken
hearts and made them cranes, taken their soft
rippled surfaces and flattened the corners,
maybe i've been too negligent in the art
of loving, in making sure i've not made
a home where there ought not to be
because i'm good at finding a place
to nest, in the rafters of their chests
and most don't mind birds but


girls aren't birds
girl's aren't birds
and don't have the right
to come in and say they have
all the answers

so i'm out on a county road and I'm saying something like
i'm sorry, please don't leave


I'm sorry, please don't leave.

There's a narrow speckled gate
here, that bakes in the afternoon,
sunlight streaks nakedly through
crimps in the iron, fortified metal
lips, curled like payot. Air thick
with lime, daisy, daisy, daisy
sometimes I stand under the
arch, reaching back and forth
between worlds.

it's coming.
it's coming.
my mom always
says it's coming,
a revelation, an
epiphany, on a
fast moving train
a note on the end
of a bullet, I'm
waiting, I'm
outside waiting
for a prophecy
to be dropped
into my hands
with a how-to
where-to, when-to
i'm here, I'm outside
I'm outside, I'm here
I'm here.
is it coming
is it coming



is it coming?

it's strange
where I stored away
all my loyalties, you
think you can bring
someone back with
courage or bravery
but you're only being
a child, really,

i threaded them
through each vertebrae
and stained every moment
with ink, every truck-ride
soaked in an alan jackson
song

I don't want to haunt you,
but at night if you are alone
or with a dead arm beneath
a pretty girl, deeply introspective
with the moon on your face
and you begin to tear into
yourself as if something
is lost or fading

all you'll find is a rung
of brass keys where I
told myself i could
where no other woman
has been, and she certainly
won't,

if storms are named after people
and every place is a concentrate
of you and me then
i have saturated the walls
in your peace and strength
with all my keys and loyalties
hung in the places you go
to find yourself.

I've learned that failure is subjective
as beauty in the eyes of the beholder
sometimes a hard fall or soft landing
a moth flight against the porch light
or a bruised knee, left on the cement

I should preface this by saying
that I have my good days, but

everything is in the wrong place
everything is in the wrong place

and I wish I could see in the mirror
what they have seen in me but instead

everything is disjointed and crushed
beneath offhanded comments, and
the overwhelming need to be pretty

I just want to be pretty
I just want to be pretty.

I tell myself often that if
they don't like me without makeup then
why should i care

wonder sometimes if he would compromise himself
for me because i wouldn't for him

chew gum compulsively and
carry perfume in my purse

wash colors first because they have the most
which makes me a little bit happy

put books in the bathroom and
i finish them faster

lately i've learned to sleep with the TV off
if the things that terrify me wanted to **** me, they
would have done it by now.