joe always
asked why
I didn't just
decide to be
with you and
the answer was
always the same
always something
he couldn't grasp

it's not as easy as you think.
but he always
said

[                                ]

bit by bit we begin
to disassemble the
life we have made
here and the material
things leave cushion by
cushion, I always feel
this little ache when
saying
goodbye
to things that provided
a seat, a pillow, a drink
for so long.

bye-bye
says
the little
girl.

people are not
to be saved and
they say girls are
best wild and free
or wild and reckless
but I was always the
cabin with an open
door, an inviting
bed, a warm
hearth, I
stayed
put and
did my life
by the books
still wanted to
s a v e y o u f r o m
something, yourself?
other people? the world?
I see pictures of you and
feel a sense of failure,
or loss or grief or
frustration but
you were
never mine to
save, never a thing
to be saved, never wanted
to be saved, never asked to be
saved and letting you go was akin
to releasing the leash on wild, wild beast.

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.

i miss
your
feet
your
bad
breath
your
sweat
and
your
voice
that
shook
me
from
my
tree

sometimes
the smallest
things can
shoot me
out of the








sky.

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

filled with salt
my cuticles sting
my lungs compressed
between tatami mats
and I slosh in bed,
back and forth in
a warm, viscous mud
my skin tingles with
dewy sweat.

ah, but
light skitters
in her wake as
if her feet were
matches

loving you is being naked
except  m y  transgressions
are written into the sinews
in my muscle, braided into
my hair and mingling with
my blood. For that, loving
you is a vacuum, loving
you is a room filled with
widening spaces until I
am nothing more than
a wick burning from
both                   ends,
l o v i n g   y o u
is a tragedy in parts,
alone in a wheat field,
alone in a school hall
alone in a coffee shop
loving you is being
alone.

More than once
I have said never
again, so maybe
i'm stronger than
I think, stronger
than i

feel

Here's to hoping i'm beautiful
because I can't see what others do
words are a faulty part, a non-adhesive
trying to glue with water, today is the
day. today is the day but I'm just
screaming at God, well if today is
the day, then why I am at work?
why is there no time to think?
why are these people in this
bitter little town allowed to
exist?

Here's to hoping I'm beautiful
because I can't see what others do.

it makes it harder to forgive
when the person apologizing
isn't sincere.

I had a dream that my thoughts were
sifted out of my head into a bowl, they
were grains, a million dahlia beads that
surfaced on a cerise reef, split from top to
bottom, I didn't mind so much, to be
honest

was not love
the desire to
fight for the
person you
wanted to
hold?

My mom likes to ask
the serious questions
that I try to avoid,
What if this, brooke
what if that, brooke
I have answers for
all of them, thoughts
for later, everything
for later, I really fight
over those answers
later.

I always relented when
you tried to put cayenne
pepper in the dishes you
made for me. Spicy things
open up the taste-buds you
lectured. And no matter how
much I'd poke your shoulders
you always managed to put
a pinch in. I claimed to hate it.

This morning I poured hot salsa
onto my breakfast and ate it without a

problem.

I am so very naive
sometimes it really
gets under my skin

each person
is a
crowd

do you look
at her in awe
is she speckled
with the stars
the way the
blinds make
light, pinstriped,
her lips are candied
her clothes are chiffon
wrappers and her elbows
make you sing to the high, high

heavens.

It's okay if
no one reaches
for me.

Akimbo in the parking lot
braids swept in a maelstrom
your hands never left tattoos

I'm so lost
and I love
him, but I
but I, but,
i
i
i

I peeled a cucumber
today, I thought that
you might be proud
I am not so scared of
knives even when you
are not around

i pulled away and
you sighed as if my
lips were only poetry.

for once I choose
to dip us (then) in
honey, steep us in
jasmine, I am not
sugar-coating, just
preserving, just for
once forgetting that
bad happens, that
good can stay if you
let
it.

i thought i saw you at the
coffee shop today, it even
looked like you from behind
calves placed flatly on the
stool bars, hunched shoulders
in a faded blue t-shirt and tan
khakis, this person wouldn't
look at me, turned his head
so far left, and let his hat do
the talking, I can't be sure it
wasn't you, i'm playing it
off as a joke, but my lungs
are in my stomach, my heart
clear down in my knees, if
that was you, why wouldn't
you say anything to me?

I have lost
you to the
world.

Little souls
are not lost
in tragedy

I set your glasses
upside down over
my nose, tried to
see the world the
way you do, but
I could not, and I
am

sorry

i am afraid of my own
of myself, of the things
my dad dreams, of no
answers, of asking
questions to my
pillow at 2 am
out loud and
my voice
sounds
so soft
and mistaken
like it really shouldn't
be there.

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.