Us and all our lonely ghosts
shells, empty,
trying to fill the gaps in
with lover's flesh and ink.
Whiskey to warm our ribs,
seal us air-tight,
and drown the monsters
we can't write out of us.
Suffocate the **** things
before they learn how to swim.
Haunted, but not horrified,
we've seen ashes before.
We only wait for the March winds
to blow them away
and light
just
one
     last
          spark.

Hair holds scent like memory.

The fall evenings spent by campfires,          
coming home to the empty house, washing the sensory reminder of fellowship and pine down the drain,
but the smell stayed on pillows
for weeks.

Remember smelling formaldehyde in its strands
after anatomy class
and holding the heart of the 17 year old boy
who crashed his motorcycle.
And wondering how many children
the hands of the ancient old woman
held before they stilled.
They were perfect, marble, the nails elegantly long.

I remember how my hair trapped his scent with me.
It smelled like his hands,
like his mouth.
Tobacco and smoke
cool night air and January stars.

I haven't cut it since.

Daughter,
you are a cathedral.
Your ribs rise in vaulted grace,
the nave of your mouth stands open,
and cloister arms,
extend.
Your skin's stretch marks
are etched like stained glass,
Flame light flickers in your eyes.
Wonder of time and art,
made by divine hands,
You are more beautiful than Notre Dame
and all her souls.

When the men come to pray,
Do not let them
desecrate this house.
Stand unshaken,
as the bombs burst around you.
You will tremble.
But you will not fall.

Enfold the weary pilgrim
who comes to you by night.
Sanctuary
he will say.
And find it, in you.

Beauty is pain.
It draws them in like flies.
They have caught their legs
in my flypaper hair.
And rip them off, one by one.
They fall like eyelashes into my palm.
They love, they love.
I cannot.

I determine to die loved.
Even if it is only
by myself.

I am of a strange alchemy.
Iron and tarnished silver,
with porcelain hands.
The rest feels like glass.
Fragile.
Vulnerable.
As though the smallest tremor
could send me falling
to shatter.

The night was moist
the sea-winds blew salt
to the trembling lips
which formed half words
and quiet whispers.
The air tasted of memory
and long lost souls.
"What keeps you alive?"
the mad girl asked the sea.
"Or are you dead and still moving?
My father killed a snake.
and it's body moved like waves,
though he held its head in his hand.
It twitched. It twitched," she muttered.
Her laugh broke across the water,
the gulls shuddered, clouds gathering,
and the waves resounded to the hidden stars.
She screamed to the wind as it snagged her hair,
it screamed back
over the breakers.
She laughed
and laughed
and laughed
again.

With moonlight between the earth and her feet
she wanders, shining soul,
the dark of the night
no match for her eyes.

The moon wonders down
at the bright creature,
melds her beams to stairs,
ascend, ascend,
Oh, brightest star.
Ascend to night's embrace.

Nostalgia: It sounds like a disease
And it has infected me.
Worming its way through veins and valves.
I caught it
from robbing the graves of memories.
Trying to gather
the silver linings from long dead moments
dusty laughs
that crumbled in my fingers,
moulding smiles that left spots on my hands
that burned.
out, out **** spot*
I lay down in the fresh earth,
cold, how cold it is.

My sister's friend broke his back
when he wrecked his car.
The night of, I met her, coming in from work late,
she was fumbling across the gravel to her car in the dark,
murmured a few words,
when I asked her where she was going.
Mum told me someone had called.
I remembered
Dad meeting me in the kitchen
murmuring a few words,
Making a few phone calls, late.

The next day
I went with her.
Walking along all to familiar hospital halls.
I remembered playing Amazing Grace
as a woman died,
her friend's eyes, glass.
And the man who told me my
Catgut and horsehair
sounded like angel's singing.
I thought it sounded hollow,
empty, cold,
like the corridors.

The ICU hummed quietly with beeps and whispers.  
His mother thanked us for coming
she embraced us, pressing her soft body against our ribs.
He lay there honest, disheveled.
The morphine loosened his tongue.
He told my sister he loved her,
over and over again.
"Your sister is great. Don't you just love her? I love her."
he told me.
She held his hand, blushing.
I remembered your voice
on the other end of the phone line,
scattered, your tongue loose and
saying anything that fell into your mouth
half-formed thoughts
mis-pronounced words,
and a thousand impotent
"Don't worry"s.

He healed.
Left hospital after a few weeks.
My sister had to tell him
she didn't love him like that.
and he hated her for it.
You left a few weeks after,
said you loved to easily.
I couldn't hate you.
But I also couldn't love you
like that.

She chose all the battles
she knew she couldn’t win.

I don't want to be more.
I want to be less.
So much less that I disappear
shrink, fold
rendered
to the tiniest sliver
indiscoverable.
So minuscule,
my hands are rendered too small
to do any more damage.

She would have given anything
if she could have stopped their pain
with hers.

He offered her forbidden fruit.
She took it.
No questions asked, only glances given.
She sank her teeth into it as if it were a Georgia peach.
It was sweet, but
one taste,
and she knew why God had told her
never to touch it.
She tried to hand it back
and he started to take it,
then threw it back at her,
saying,
she had ruined it.

Don't kiss me.
My lips are rough-- pure scar tissue.
Torn,
from coughing up self-truths,
regrets, sobs, misunderstanding
and formal apologies--
I choke.
Gasp
   retch
      retch
         retch
They are always a lovely shade of red
swollen, bee-stung, sometimes bleeding,
I blot the stains,
but their shadowy ghosts remain,
haunting aches, and throbs.

Don't meet my eyes.
They are wells
one might fall into and break a leg.
They will take him out like a dying horse
and shoot him behind the barn
and bury him,
in the dank soil.
And I will come later, sorry, and put dying roses
in his dead hands.
But what for?
Company?
The dead are happy,
only misery wants company.

Don't reach for my hands.
I will hold it fast, at first,
soft anchor, and the fingers will hook into my skin,
but I, in uncertainty,
put my claws in
and then retract them, drawing blood
I never wanted on my hands.
I should have thought of this before.
I am sorry I did not.

Do not fall in love with me.

I will miss Autumn here.
The crisp days of October, startling the remnants of summer
into hiding.
The homely smell of hearth burned pine and smoked meat
drifting from chimneys built
by long-dead grandfathers.
The battle fields will be beautiful.
Bathed in maples,
harmless blood of leaves, though the earth
still bears streaks
of death.
The grasses, drying, dying, in the cooling air
will whisper to the sojourners passing through,
seeking sites of ancestors
whose voices they never knew.
I will not be here
to slip the fallen leaves
between phone-book pages or
paste and sew them
to handmade paper.
My mother will stare at the tangled thread,
the blank sheets,
left untouched on my desk,
and ask my father
where the time went.

If I am only ever a poem to you, I will be satisfied. A poem you heard someone read once, but you can’t remember the title, and only a few lines stick out. Snatches of speech still hang in a dusty closet of memory. Aired out by similar voices, phrases, overheard on the subway or at the supermarket. Somewhere in song lyrics you find a line, half a line, speak it softly to yourself. You may be aware of how your tongue bends to the words, notice how it brushes the roof of your mouth, and feel the edges of your lips come together— you might not.

It will not be constant. I will not be the belabored sonnet, the endless chant, the mantra you repeat day after day. I will be the fleeting thought, epiphany of memory, the light ache of a barely recalled past. Easily lost, in life, in noise, lost in the millions of words and notes swimming in your brain, fallen between synapses and currents. Half remembered, half lost— eternally. The half life reminder of a woman, a girl, in love with language, and lost in thought.

If I am never anything but a poem to you, I am satisfied.

Maybe
Love is nothing
but a rib spreader.

Green is my favorite color.
But I hate that shade of it.
Because it will always remind me of
The green scrubs you wore,
haunting cold barren rooms,
Where they took your bootlaces
so you couldn’t choke the dreams out of yourself.

I wore blue that day because it was your favorite color.
You probably didn’t notice.
You felt hollow when I embraced you
All strength within seemed gone.
Your eyes, my favorite shade of green, were frighteningly distant.
You were there, but it wasn’t you.
Who were you? Who are you? Who should you have been if…?
You kissed me goodbye in front of the nurses,
And I saw tears in the corners of their eyes.  
Even my mother seemed touched.

I walked in a haze across the hospital yard,
It was a bright day.
I wanted it to storm.
The garish sun seemed to mock me
As I curled in the backseat of my father’s car,
Staring at the food I couldn’t eat.
I hadn’t known
“Sick with worry” to be literal.
I haven’t known it since.
I hate that shade of green.

Things fall apart.
my mother will be the first to go.
Stretched between school, a stubborn husband,
distance, and a daughter she believes is dying,
and the ever present thought
that she will never be good enough.
Taught as drum leather, she shudders,
Wracked and rent by memories of lost children
and protruding ribs.
I awoke to her crying in the next room this morning.
She greeted me with feigned happiness, but
red eyes stared truthfully back.
"I'm okay," she murmured.
"*******," I said softly.
She clung to me.
I felt the burden shift on her shoulders.
crushing her,
her over sized heart beat to pulp,
it's ****** remnants clinging to her dripping sleeve.
The people she tried to hold together,
slipping through her fingers
like sand-- as her brittle bones break.
Things fall apart.
And I wish I knew how
to put them together again.

I am queen of afterthoughts,
rarely of fore.
Especially not in matters of hearts.
I am dry heaving sighs,
with leaden guilt
and what ifs.
**** them.
**** me.

My eyes feel heavy enough
to fall shut
and never open,
eyelids clanging like a tin box lid
with cheap hinges.

My hands feel heavy enough
to fall down
to permanent attention
and never rise,
frozen like the tin soldier
who was lost in the ashes.

My feet feel heavy enough
to fall once more
and never lift again,
bolted, like a tin sign
to a rotting telephone pole.

The definition of "Bleeding Heart"
is "dangerously softhearted."
I recoil, then nod.
It is dangerous to care so much.
My heart will crush itself
under the burdens it takes on--
Fold like tinfoil, till it has turned into nothing
but a hard silver ball,
I cast into the kitchen garbage.

I’ve tangled myself
around an ideal,
again.
**** I, the idealist.
Someone pass me the scissors.

The grief has not set in yet.
Only the foreboding weight of sorrow
hangs in the distance.
I will find it in my mother's eyes,
bright from weeping.
The sweetest lives are always the shortest.
The Good die young,
and we the half-good, remain.
Pausing for prayers and graveside tears.
I would say unfair,
but death is always the great equalizer.
I may join her tomorrow-- who knows.
Cradled in earth still damp from rain,
or burned to ashes.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
But Death, be not proud.

I am frightened
the world will break me,
wring brittle bones in iron fists
till they lie in porcelain shatters.
All the king's horses
and all the kings men,
will sweep me under the rug
with half of history,
and a score of lost souls.

She was tired
of pretending
she didn't go to bed
alone.

I apologize that this is not a poem.
but a simple thanks,
to all my followers and fans
for creating such a lovely community here.
Thank you for your encouragement,
your compliments, your critiques, your concern,
and sharing your own work here, too.
Somehow,
it feels better, safer to share things with you all,
Nearly-complete strangers,
than with even my mother.
However your life goes on,
beyond the screen, between the words,
I hope it goes well.
Thank you.

I like my days melancholy.
But beautifully so.
When the sky is grey,
with the few solitary raindrops.
I stand at the sink, in the fading sunlight,
washing my two navy dresses.
A soft old jazz piece plays on the radio,
I turn the fabric over in my hands.
Scrubbing between buttons and seams,
washing the remnants of church services,
a job interview, presentations
down the rusting drain.
I dunk a lace collar into the water
it comes up dark, black, heavy
as though someone has dipped it in tar.
It's delicacy is gone,
but it's spaces seemingly filled.
I stretch it across my palm,
black against alabaster.
The emptiness is here, today,
as it is in all days,
but for a few moments,
it feels filled.

Bruised and blistered hands
from digging up memories.
Someday, child, you will understand.
When your joints ache,and your skin is creased,
you will understand.
Your hands will sting against the shovel
raw from blisters you didn’t take the time to bandage.
Time is to precious to waste here.
No one wants to greet death
without these memories by their side.
Every bruise it worth it, dear.
Never forget to remember.
For when everything has slipped away,
youth is gone,
the places and people you knew,
vanished.
All you have are memories.
So dig them up.
Brush away the dirt,
turn them over in your hands.
It will all come back.

I picked my poison blindfolded.
Fumbling like Jane Grey
at the execution block.
Grabbed the jar closest,
cool glass with death beneath.
It was the slowest.
Death by leeches,
who **** the spirit dry
and replace it
with lead.

The world lost a beautiful soul today. But the beautiful thing about poets is that they never really die. Their secrets, their hopes, their most intimate thoughts are tucked between the lines, even in their most light hearted pieces. Poetry is a very honest medium. Maybe not as honest as sitting and having conversation over tea, but scraps of living soul are always left in the spaces between letters. David, Ovid, Homer, Shakespeare, all of these have survived the centuries as poets. I have no doubt that centuries from now, if our world is still turning, Maya Angelou's works will be counted among these eternal ranks.

I had forgotten how it aches.
Like old men before a storm,
complaining how the weather
makes their knuckles throb.
Here you are,
dredging up the things I buried months ago.
The old ache returning
as the clouds gather.

stand quietly here, love
yes, next to me.
Enough to feel the air pass between us,
between breaths,
as the wind gasps.
do you hear them, dear?
those voices the Echoes bring to us?
Ghastly, aren't they.
******, dark voices,
wrought and rent like the chests they came from.
Look at them, darling.
watch their feet melt into red earth.
their hands, too, fraught with iron.
Faces, see their faces?
There is your father, your husband, your brother, your son, dear.
Your daughter, your wife, your sister, your mother.
See their hollow mouths agape?
Hear their voices screaming?
That's what pain sounds like.
Your heart is making the same noise, isn't it?
I can hear it.
This is hell, love.
Just another part of life,
and death, I suppose.
It's all a circle anyway.
This is where we learned
to spell hell with three letters.
Remember that, dear,
remember that.

Here, again, a campaign of confusion.
Assaults of second thoughts
and broken promises.
What we failed to say then,
we're saying now.
But the question of casualties
still remains unanswered.

Alone she weaves her tangled web
Twisting, tying, all amiss
and she sees not the darkened threads
that twine about her wrists.

A single light in a darkened room
one window one mirror, little sight
to the world outside her bower wall
Blurred separation between day and night.

Her head swirls with tangled threads
forgotten thoughts and anguish low
the monotony of a thousand days
left to weave and wind and sew

Sighs escape now from her lips
those ruby lips, once known by kings
now known to only lament and sobs
for what she lost in love-lorn pining.

"Faithless have I been, O father."
she breathes at morning prayers
as pearl beads slip through milk white hands
and dust hangs about the air.

When all is done, and mass is sung
she retires to her cell
once again to sew and weave
her rich and long, sad, tale.

First she finds the pale while thread
and then she finds the blue
And quickly, with her shaking hands
weaves the face she once knew.

She weaves the gown of green she wore
on the fated wedding day
and adds the flaxen hair he praised
When laced with the flowers of May.

At last she finds the golden thread,
but pauses, silent, the room a mess
she lays the golden spool aside
and kneels before the long locked chest.

With trembling hands, and gleaming eyes
she lifts the lid, on the life she once had
A rush of air and dust and mould
and feeling, at once, joyful and sad.

First she takes the bright blue gown
and then she takes the green,
finds the jewels her mother wore
it's all where it should have been.

Within the dusty corner dark,
the twilight fading, sun going down
she sees the gleam of gold once more
and takes from the depths her golden crown.

In the flickers of the candlelight
the jewels they sparkle once again,
And all the memories come rushing back
From childhood days to the kingdom's end.

Tears are falling from her eyes
when again she takes the golden thread
and reverently she weaves the crown
upon the figure's head.

At last she's cut the final string
and takes a step back from the frame
she sees her life before her eyes,
and feels the tears come again.

There Arthur stands, in kingly garb
His soft eyes staring back at her
and in his arms, her younger self,
she remembers, how happy they once were.

To her left stands Lancelot
his shining armor gleaming bright
his pleading gaze finds her again
with the love that turned to blight.

Between these two men she still stands
Two heros, once in brotherhood bound
She chose the Knight above absent King
and three hearts were trampled into the ground.

Memories swirl about her head
as she takes the knife flashing flint,
and drives the blade into the silk
Till every thread once whole, lies rent.

I've learned to hate uncertainty.
Changes that come cursedly unannounced.
The future glass is half empty, and leaking.
God, Luck, and the Fates have lost my file.
Tossed by mistake to the recycling bin,
to fend for itself.
Time is the only one that plods along,
dragging moment after moment
to the slaughter, though they shriek
never taking a day off.
Death is the only certainty
and even he
works by spontaneity.

It's time I fall out of love with your memory.
Admit, like Augustine, "I did not love, but yearned to love."
(Though I still cared)
I've scraped the bottom of the barrel.
Turning each curl of wood
till it crumbled in my fingers.
I could have stopped long ago.
Should have stopped long ago--
unearthing the memories
again and and again and again.
I think now,
I will let them rest in peace.

The silence
is too loud here.

Home alone.
I bake to distract myself from thinking too much.
I'm leaning away from a *** of bubbling oil,
trying to fry cake doughnuts
for my Great Grandmother,
The great cook of the family
who loved to make them back in South Dakota
for the guests in the little hotel she owned with my great grandfather.

We didn't have enough oil.
And the misshapen rings begin to burn.
I bat them, annoyed, with a spoon.
Somewhere, in such a mundane moment,
the sadness rises, unexpected.
I think of last summer.
And dissolve into tears.
I have never felt so alone.

They say it’s okay in the end.
But I can think of so many times
when it wasn’t.
Or maybe that’s what death says
when he takes your hand.
”It’s okay…”

You have lost yourself, I think.
Or deny it, wherever you've buried you
A scared child with a hardened heart,
beaten pain into armor too thick for anything
but her blue eyes
to penetrate.

There are only small pains, now.
Paper cuts, hangnails,
sore arms from trash bags too heavy.
It is strange to be so free.
One grows used to the darkness,
the light, blinding.
I blink, my eyes dry,
I feel my pulse in my lips--
it feels strange.
I stare at the ceiling,
your memory resting on my chest,
lining the gap I want to fill,
but my hands lie empty.

Does that book still burn on your shelf?
Or have you stuffed it under your bed,
its pages torn, still smelling of cigarette smoke
with a few coffee stains.
(Mine rests next to Tolkien).

Do you flip through it once in a while?
Noting the words you marked,
once full of meaning.
Are they empty now?
(I found empty words in my copy).

Do you take care to avoid
the covert letter under the jacket flap?
Or maybe read it, and wonder
(I regret writing it.)

To my left,
there is the Neoclassical beauty,
profile drawn by David himself,
delicate,
bright eyes, reminiscent of Gainsborough.

The Rubeniste sits in front of me,
full figured, though not as colorful
as the Graces.

Behind me lurks the Rembrandt,
moody, dark,
in the chiaroscuro of a leather jacket
and tousled hair.

Here I am.
With my Schiele hands,
Rosetti lips,
but without the quiet grace
or distortion of either.

She was a child of the forest.
Birthed on a bed of moss
and swaddled in beech leaves.
Her first cries shook the trees,
as they reached branches out
to stroke new infant skin.
They coaxed her spirit into the bark
where it seeped into sap and through her veins.

He was a child of the sea
Born of the waves and rocks
placed in a cradle of sand
still wet with his mother’s blood
the sea winds stole his first breath
And cast his soul to the depths,
he would always return to the sea.

They were sun and moon lovers.
She, the daughter of golden light through leaves
He, the son of silver glints on dark waves, fleeting.
She would find him on nights of the harvest moon,
walking along the shore, stop him from running
into the sea.
He would find her at noon,
lying in the leaf mold beneath the trees
her eyes cloudy with sunlight.
He’d cover them,
afraid she would go blind.

"Ma'm,
can you remember the name of that tree?
the one with the big leaves?"
He asks me, raising a withered hand
towards the young magnolia,
not yet blooming.
"Magnolia, I believe."
A light comes into his clouded eyes.
"Ah! Magnolia! Thank you."
he says, before shuffling away.
I pause for a moment.
Staring at the sapling.
Something stirs in memory.
Something deep, or shallow,
I cannot tell.
Memory, none the less.
I feel as though I should remember
a meaning behind the white flowers,
and broad leaves,
but I draw a blank.

"Am I fat?"
My little sister asks,
poking a delicate finger at her tiny stomach.

My heart sinks.

I stare at her thin limbs
well muscled from gymnastics
and playground antics.
"No. Don’t ever let me hear the "F" word come out of your mouth again,"I say.

But I know she will ask again.
She will ask herself when she stares in the mirror,
and will pass judgment on her thighs, her hips, her stomach.

Just as I
and nearly every other woman ever born,
asks the glass, permission to approach the bench
and the judge gives a final verdict— not thin/pretty/beautiful/skinny/fair/tan/ enough.

How ****** up it is—that we think worth is visible.

She cut her finger while slicing bread,
no one gasped, or winced
with her exclamation of "****"
aimed towards the bent, saw-toothed steel.
She bloodied a kleenex,
then strangled her fingertip
with a band-aid.
She didn't mind the sight of blood.
She'd grown used to it in childhood.
From scratching the welts
left by mosquitoes till they were crimson.
She remembered accompanying her little sister
to a routine checkup
and the nurse looked down at her scarred legs
and asked if there was anything wrong
with the big one.
It was the first time
she learned to feel shame
for her scars.
In fourth grade she had a crush
on the class clown.
She liked his black hair
and blue eyes
and he made her laugh.
He ignored her.
Later, she found out
he called her pimple-face behind her back
by then, she no longer cared
what he though, feelings had faded,
but the pain of being told
you were second to last
in the classes "Beautiful" rating
(second only to the freckled girl with tiny eyes).
She learned her crooked teeth were things to be ashamed of.
Braces helped, but four years of wires
and widening her tiny jaw
with medieval, key driven devices
that prevented normal speech,
were hardly an improvement.
She learned pain was beauty,
but being able to take pain well
was not beautiful.
Being able to run swiftly,
having monkey-bar calloused hands
and strong arms,
only made her unfeminine.
She did not sit placidly on the swing-set
admiring her fingernails,
screaming,
when a fly buzzed past her ear.
She rescued frost-winged bees from being crushed,
laying them gently in the grass.
She held back tears when the asphalt stripped her palms.
She wanted to be brave.
Respected for the strength she thought she had.
That did not come till ten years later.
He called her a water nymph,
jumping from rock to rock like a small child,
though childhood had long since gone.
Laughed as she caught salamanders.
She cut her toe while they were walking together.
It began to bleed.
She said nothing, thinking it would stop,
letting the blood fill her shoe.
He panicked a little, wanted to carry her.
She refused.
But he bandaged her foot, gently,
like a morbid Cinderella,
as she washed the blood out of her sandal.
He complimented her graceful run.
Things she'd wanted noticed
for ten years.
She didn't know when she would find
another
who saw her, as he did.

My hands hunger,
Tired of holding themselves.
Of aching emptiness,
that permeates the metacarpals, the cuticles, and
especially the palms, where lines lie in wait
for another artist to trace them.