I wanted to cry
over your head
and brush out
the life you've
been living, but
all I can do is
help you buy
shaving cream
and look at the
ingredients on
the back of shampoo
bottles, i almost
forgot we were
people for a
couple moments
as I watched the
hair disappear down
my sink but your
wrists brought me
back and my
hair pricked up
again in defense
he's changed
he's changed
he's changed


but i wanted to
cry over your
hair and the
brown parts
of your knuckles
the hair between
your brows and
every other part
of you that you've
let go but still lead
lives away from
home.

I blatantly tell
god I hate him
i really don't
want to be talking
to you right now
but I still cry over
scriptures from
Galatians.

all day i was thinking
about that letter I wrote
you and how it was in
Wetmore now, in Silvercliffe,
in Jim's green mailbox, finally.
how I didn't seal it in perfume
but thought about it, how I rewrote
it five times because there's only so
many ways to convey myself in a good
light after breaking all the bulbs

I was choosing words like I'd choose flowers
only baby blooms and strong stems,  ending with
sincerely, cordially, then just my name.  I miss you
replaced by I saw that post on Facebook about your niece
hoping prayer sifts through the ink, that he can feel my hair on
his cheeks, a letter that pleads, please don't hate me
but I don't think anyone ever has--and I certainly don't think he will


I don't know what's wrong with me. I tell my mom over breakfast, over dinner, on the way home,  and she smiles at me--says
goodness in the way she usually does, in the way that says her heart
sometimes beats for me

but that thought has permeated every action and every day, lain over me like a sunshower with the rain flecking through in drops of gold
I've never had these thoughts before I whisper, exasperated, throwing
my hands up and stuttering. All-abouts unsure of myself and wondering if while he's been away I've built an empire around what he
could be.

What am I doing? I ask, finally making eye contact.

we're standing at the corner of the
bar and for the first twenty minutes i'm
scared I didn't lock my car door.

I'm wondering why people are so fragile--
how some feel like staunch walls and others
bone china, how when you hold them, some
feel like they have been here and others like
they have been nowhere, as if you might
fall straight  through them because you
should know better than to lean on a shoji

When I touch people I feel their sadness--
bodies have shields but I've missed that
stair step, forgot there was a ledge there,
groped for the light switch and found                                air
he isn't a body, he's a hurt, a walking,
talking, immortalized pain.  


Sometimes I find myself desperately searching
for something witty, for a laugh, for an old topic
we've already discussed.   I ask did you get home safe?
by default because worry is the only place to go that's fair
territory, to care is to succeed, thrive in your propensity to brood

I'm still standing at the bar in a peach cardigan
the bartender squeezing in and out of the opening
and some biker with a gnarly gray beard buys us
shots of jameson which is pretty fitting but there's
still a full 4.30 worth of Redds in my hand that I
won't much touch--


Greetings from Inside My Head, a postcard I should
have sent out years ago, halls and halls of literature I've
written about each day, catalogued in scenarios, in fantasies
in trucks beds, events that lasted no longer than ten seconds
I've written monologues about people's fingers and how the
sunlight falls on different shoulders, every moment is a
stanza, every Alpha state a macrocosm, I'm in a room
full of well-oiled people and they're made up of tea
leaves, soot, black leather and molasses.

it's 11:33 and everyone's facing away from me for a moment
I keep telling Jessica she looks like she's crying, ironically, I didn't
know that's what happens when you're hammered.  I shake
someone's hand, my name is somewhere out there on the pool
table, knocked around and lost down a hole like a billiard ball
like with anything, comfort requires the right kind of place
with a specific time zone, the one that comes with certain
people and my clock keeps spinning,

spinning

spinning.

we are much different now, aren't we?

I had a dream last night
that you refused to talk
to me, and you stared
angrily at walls, burning
holes through bricks. You
walked straight into me and
your bitterness was a bulldozer
that i couldn't stop, couldn't
read the words ironed on
your shirt. So I started to
cry, tried your name on
my tongue but you wouldn't
hear me anymore. And at the
end i gave myself to you and
you pushed me off and walked
away, seething,

*that's what you get

Oh, you act like you still want to hurt me but
the truth is you're done, come on
admit that your life is going pretty well
you're a nice guy i'm sure, on the outside I guess
but we all know I've seen you naked and you don't disappoint
but that's not the point because your hands are still ashy from
all the bodies they've burned.

WHY'S YOUR DADDY GOT BLUE EYES?


it was never so much a question I heard
as much as one i thought, why's my daddy got blue eyes?

i used to peel this picture out
of the floral decopauge box
a sepia toned senior photo
of him in a varsity jacket
a wide spanish grin and
my full lips,
leonard scrawled on the
back, and why's your daddy got blue eyes?

I have always felt alone in this
body, a bit of my mother and none
of a father, have always
hated this brown
this skin filled with
shade, in the shadow
of girls with lean limbs
and long hair the color
of satin flower,
viridian eyes
that smile without tryin'
and long slender fingers
that'd be good for playin'
with children and kissing--

i have never
seen myself as anything else
than muddy water
always heavy, full
of sand, steaming earth
in the grasslands, dense
and bitter like orange rinds
too round, too full,
bubbling with all a manner
of pith and marrow
quick down in the mire
fixed into the silt

I have reached for the men
like the one in the photo,
dark and ethnic, pleading
for affirmation, that there
is beauty in brown, in
dusk, that I do not
have to be Rotomairewhenua
clear and effortless
that I can easily be
fresh and still
full of depth
and darker
hues.

why has my daddy got blue eyes, I wonder?

I love the way books cannot be
unread, cannot erase the sweet oils
and thumbprints like black oak tree rings
they are there for all the slivers
of sunlight and literary cafune
soft knuckles pressed into their
spines
they remind me that while I am not new
I can remain unknown, that though
opened by some I am neither novel lying in wait
or closed into his old bookshelves,
a thin draft in a library of what-ifs
he did not get to k e e p you
however you did, you did
found your
way into other hands, without much grace, albeit,
baltering from home to home
a solivigant prose--

this way, and that, small bind
paperback.

Almond Roca in the winter
the trees smell like sun and
the floors are heated, maybe
the swell of ******* under a
red plaid robe, we both have
tear dimpled faces but cider
the cider smells good in this
house, in these mugs on the
table, this morning is like

syrup

we the daughters of sliced sunbeams
and those who chase gales in between
the pasture gates and barbed fences behind
the silo--

who think there's nothing softer than the way
honey sounds drizzled on toast or daisy petals at the supermarket
the women of ferocious silences, standing before
dozens with trimmed smiles and deafening inner beauty

squeezing our fingers down barley stalks and sewing
the roots into our dresses, we've tried six ways to sunday
the rules, the book on being wanted, before realizing that anything
born out of self-indulgence wilts away
all the work we did to grow and plait our hair with vanilla,
dipped in sweet almond oil we had no idea
that pretending
could only get us
so


far.

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.

it was an incredibly
sad thought that hid
itself well, almost didn't
catch it--I wished I were
a boy when I love being
a girl, as if the amount of
self-loathing I expend would
disintegrate if I were a different
gender.

did you think i was a dream?


oh, how I tried to be.


thin and watery, made to


fit around you so that you


might say I were the crepuscular rays


sheafs of sunlight held up like


taut ropes tied to the ledge


of heaven.

i had this dream about you
and your brother, not the one
where you were a boy and I led
you out of the woods--

but we were down by the ocean
and i stood in your shack surrounded
by that thick, mustard yellow carpet from
the 70's and a pair of old workboots, I couldn't
drain the sink but that didn't matter because
i could hear you outside,
rustling around inside your pockets
your jeans were filled with condoms
what did you expect, brooke? you
ask me, palms out and up, I shake my head.

what?  in that carhartt and vest.
What? louder.
you start towards me and I realize
that this is a dream I can't wake up
from, the deck is disappearing, the
house disintegrates, your boots
sound hollow on ocean water
and the only thing I can see
are the minnows scattering
your hands out to your sides
yelling
*what
     di d  you e   x pe ct

we were out on the porch
on an abnormally warm december night
with little glow florence off to the west
and he hadn't said much of what was there
because when he says nothing he is, with
his words laid out beneath pearl snaps
scrawled down his stomach--I would know,
i've seen his the tyrades plow, resentment
run thick, angry words rampant in his veins--

so he says nothing, and I know.

often times he is an open door and
i am the wind, in billows or gasps, rattling
hinges, finding holes, peeling paint or gathering dust
a spool of thread wrapped around stonehenge to remember
curls of foilage, svelte figureheads on galleons, I tell him

that I want to be with him and he says nothing. won't even look at me,
he's somewhere far away, drawn into penrose like a soul sunk in the
dirt, I say it again, and he tells me we should go inside


so i want to ask if that is all i am,
if that is what this is, if i am only good
for one night or two hours, in bits and pieces
limbs and moisture, if as a whole i am too much
but still lacking, if the warmth of my hips is
all that's needed but the grand luminance of a soul is out of the question?


But I say none of that, just follow him inside.
A hundred questions trickling down my spine, gathering in my femur, my calves, gusting into my lungs, I don't know how to be more than this and less, I'm opening up the cavity of my chest and pleading this

this is all there is.
I am all that I can be

All of you
turning into devils
honey-tongued demons
swinging from trees
proclaiming their indecency to the world
irreverence clouding a sense of modesty
because if you say it out loud,
it makes it
not
as
bad...


right?

I have a hundred diary entries
that start with your name and a
hundred endings asking for help
a hundred theories on why your
response was so crass, a hundred
scenarios where I only say I'm sorry
I'm so, so sorry a repeated thought
where I despair over never being able
to talk cordially with you again, I don't
know why I care, why that photo struck
a lofty chord, why your beard bugs me so
much, see: June 2013.

pink moscato from
bottle shoppe liquor
the man at the counter
said is that all sweetie?
no, it isn't.

I pulled these thin blonde hairs
from his bedspread this morning
not even really thinking about it
just about how fair she must be
to have such delicate strands
and how mine somehow always
seem so coarse, like wire or cord
perpetuating the notion that I am
too dark, too brown, too much dirt
too much sweat, how do people
replace others or use them to
mask pain, lord, someone tell
me, is it a trade secret? someone
fill me in, let me know what it's
like to let someone else slip into
the role I was supposed to have
as she slides into my skin, shoulders
gliding through the air,
he looks past me at the ceiling
and I wonder about her blonde hair
throw mine over my shoulders
curls damp and black
damp and black
damp and black