the sunset
and it’s fury beating-
stretching across your face
restricting, conforming
thin plastic over space

this city dies every night
born again each morning to fresh laundry
and hot trash
steaming in the beaten streets

this city is beating
thousands of hearts clapping
at our own demise
muffled, behind closed doors
hidden, like the heart of our one, true
glorified,
dead God

in church halls and train station platforms
he sings at sunset and again each dawn
at every note his hand
reaching out to you
across impossible time

the wheels of shopping carts all screeching his name
his message, his orchestra

but our struggle, our bleeding
just for this love-
stifled and fleeting,
but
still beating in our stolen,
swollen hearts

pull myself out of a sewer drain
try and shake off
such heaviness is condemnation
but it has seeped into my clothes

I reek
walking down crowded, sunny streets
tears in my eyes and
little girls staring up at me

I started to eat the mailbox,
could not bear to hear from the outside world

I slept in every morning, to put off going out

just imagined you reading my writing
with cruise control on
and a contagious smile spreading

I started to **** the house plants
and dress more promiscuously than ever before

even a glimpse of eye contact might qualm
this rage or
fill the well
which has grown here

can you hear me?
from across this abysmal pond,
it sickens me,
so swift and crashing below

can you see me?
dancing in your living room,
all of eight years old

well, I’m a woman now

and I still need you

each New England home you’ve moved into
and out of
creaks the same
under my changing weight.

the porch sags,
sporting chipped paint
from years of cigarette breaks
spent shuffling, feet dug into wood

flimsy locks and screeching mailboxes,
the basement granite walls
and clunks of the laundry machine,
speak to me in familial hums
as if to sing,
stay away.

the same centipedes
scurry by my feet
as water falls deafeningly
I’m frozen in time.

staring empty-eyed into these brimming closets,
my vision strains.
florescent light
gleams across shut picture books of
treasures lost.
nothing left but old habits

found, as tools to our escape.

even I’m still slipping up,
and into the courting beds of lost men
mothers looking to me longingly
bearing sad smiles and gifts, as they lock the liquor away.
every son’s depression tugs the same short leash

knowing this much,
calms me.

home is a sad that
hangs dry in the cool thick air,
a sad that feels like November
like drenched rain coats, muggy with our heat
and after school how we
sailed paper boats
just to watch them drown in storm-sewer drains

home rings like
the bell of every summer heartbreak,
which coddled me to sleep
then too, shook me sharply.
only to find myself deserted

a ship at sea,
my heart buried in sand, again.

home is
the heavy drought before the rain
it stands on our heads
it dances past our eyes
it lives in our reflections
teasing us,
as if to say
we’re not allowed to cry.

is across the room
welling in her eyes
as she thinks of her country so far away and burning
to the ground
every night

grief seeps in and
under our skin
burrows tunnels in our bed sheets
mapping the places we tried to forget

grief
he lives on the tip of my tongue
a language I can’t speak, but mindlessly hum

grief is the anchor in my grandfather’s ocean
the sky and the sand,
the captain to his call

grief,
spreads like vines
a yawn across the bus
stitching together our string-thin lives

grief has touched us all.