We stare at each other while in an
Under-rehearsed waltz around the coffee table
Keeping us an armwidth apart.
Stiff as oak, we resist the breeze from the window,
Tensing with the smallest tremors in our roots.

Touching our fingers will let the dominos fall-
Your jeans taking off my socks ripping off your shirt pulling
On my bra straps- I walk toward the couch,
You, the window.

I start to wonder how your hair looks hung to dry, sweaty,
Over an ached and trembling brow
When you hang your hat on the chair.

You tell me the evening weather is pleasant
While my thoughts are in our hands, clenching,
Longing for skin and breath in grasp.
My eyes light a wildfire on your neck.

Every step is flint stone and steel wool.
Can I take off your coat
Welds the air between us stiff, baking
And begging to be dowsed.
The floor ripples under your extended palm.

So you came down to me:
     at my feet, not the wax
     leaves of the wild blueberry but your fiery self, a whole
     pasture of fire
Louise Glück*

There was flutter of worked cotton hem
between fingers. Ring of cicada click in birch tree leaves,
muffled by swish of grass in breeze, matching

the wisp of sandhill crane feather on fern.
Skin sliding over fragrant sweat.
Sweet waterfall of hair in your hands, fluid in the heat.

Echoing flap of fat trout tail bounced inside the valley,
Scales skimming lake water. Our knees shook
above the foot-bridged creek.

Low groans of swaying trees, aching
in their old bones. Guttural tones.
Your palm shivered on my heart in the haunted noise.

Beneath all our sounds, the under-ripe
blueberries thudded to the ground.
Our love pounded best when they were still green.

On Mars there is a merry-go-round,
Carnival music cast into ether to scatter through the asteroid belt.

There are probably fireworks on Neptune
Set to the solar system’s intergalactic anthem.

Several stars away, a few light year blinks,
A thoughtful ear might hear a car crash, the dislocation of a shoulder.

Hubble, aging in ancient expanse, no doubt squints.
She struggles to focus, senile metal heaving in its last orbits.

What does the sound of the border between Space
And Earth feel like? The inside of a vacuum cleaner? A harp string vibration?

The belly of the Sun churns from the low gurgle
Of gas station sandwiches. This is why he is stationary.

We crave the experience of watching a supernova
And listening years later, anticipating rising crest and falling trough.

Eons in our future, we’ll hear the coo of the waking universe, muffled
From primordial placenta, slapped to breathing by the biggest question.

The farmer cuts the corn,
Swear from his brow on the wooden handle.
Before the calf was born
The farmer cut the corn,
His sickle left the fibers torn.
5 AM, his daughter lights a candle
While her father cuts the corn,
A shiver on her brow, hand on the wooden mantle.

Your watermelon vine fingers
Caress my sunflower stalk spine.
We dig our trowel toes into the lome
Of my mattress,
Cover our shoulders in frost-evading fleece.
I hear your heart ripen under your skin.
I smell the heat inside your lungs
Growing and expanding in the August crisp.
You seed a whispered kiss on my lip.

You are planted inside me,
digging into me,
And I bind to your stem
With my peach flowered palm.
We bloom at the first ray of morning as
I weave deeper into your trellis arms.
Our breaths match the pull of the wind.
You touch your forehead to my breast,
Our stems heaving.

Here we grew our love.
Here we grew the foundation of our separation.

When I stare at my wall
With the right slant of head
I feel my toes in Superior sand,
Remember the silhouette of your hands
On my back. I hear the water,
Your breathing, how they were
The same. I feel your timid face
On my nose, telling me stories
Of every crevice in your atrium.
I taste the warmth of your tongue
Breaking through your blossomed lips,
Inching nearer my teeth with every ended
Chapter of aorta.
I catch your warmth as it boils under my chin,
despite Northern winds,
watch our chests weld into one with our heat.
I see your soft eyes,
Drowning in your heavy lids
As they fall asleep to the sound of our
Silence.

But your hands were too big for mine
That afternoon.
I think maybe you need to shrink,
Or I need to grow.
Or we will meet in the middle,
Frightened and in love
with our new shape and size.

When you look at me
I kiss you with my eyes,
Lashes hitting each **** in your heart
Which I taste in my mouth,
Rusted iron clots.

When you look at me
My knees buckle
Under the smell of your warmth
Behind each tooth,
In the snug of your baseball cap.

When you look at me
My fingers resist to trace
The lines of your face, down
To shoulder blades and tendons
In your arms.

When I look at you
I sweat in anticipation
Of someday, maybe, understanding
Everything blooming about you
Under the beds of your nails.

I stare at my bedroom wall
Laughing with crinkled eyes.

My walls are blue
Like the sweatshirt you wore.

My pillow is blue
Like your blue sweatshirt arms.

It's wrapped around me
Like your arms were for seconds.

For seconds
I imagined you never letting go.

When I imagine you
I laugh from how easy it is to imagine you.

I laugh because you
Find a way into my smile easier each day.

I smile easier each day
Because you make me laugh.

Laughing with crinkled eyes,
I stare at my bedroom wall.

Within our 400 mile distance
There's a point where our distinct
Gravities will overlap,
Where our eyelids will refuse to
close until they can face each other
In rest.

All my laughs, every goodnight
And goodbye only increase
Your mass.
I feel your weight tug
On my brain stem stronger
Each day. You loop
My string around your finger
Once at night, once in morning.

Each twist draws me closer
To your jaw,
Wrapped in your arms
Under sheets of snow.

I am small.
When I scream my limbs shrink shorter.

I eat my hair.
The frizz sends me into claustrophobic tremors.

I have seven teeth.
I unscrew them with frantic fingers wrapped around a flathead before I sleep.

I never sleep.
When j sleep I keep a test tube of your thoughts twisted in my sheets.

I've seen the largest rivers.
I never travel because I fear sprouting feathers, being a freak.

I've planted 10 trees.
The roots sinch my toes and bring me to my knees.

If you saw me
I might be upside down,
Different spectra of vibrations
Pulsing from my goosebumped knees.
I imagine if I sweep my arms back and forth
Across the benthic stretches of our skies
I may feel your structure
In the crease of my thumb.

I reach my hand out to touch you.
Your elbow is somewhere in space,
Bent a certain posture.
It's possibly inverted,
But it could be rigid and reaching for my hair.
I think your forehead may point toward my collarbone,
Protruding like deer antlers.
In your universe my collarbone looks different,
Objects that will never be
metaphoric molds for my words,
But exist in every third line of your poetry
You may or may not write.

In-between our possible distance
There are millions of bodies,
Or just a few.
Neither of these options we can see
Or touch.
We will never know how close our blinks are.
Yet I can feel my breath rush down my chin,
Knowing if we ever found each other
Your exhale would twist into mine.

I pretend your smell
Walks the same blocks that I do
Home. Kindled under street lamp.
Or sleeps in my passenger seat,
Underneath fingernails and
Seeping through my palm.

I also pretend to know what your smell is.
When I remember how I don't know
I pretend I'll find out tomorrow,
Reaching for the smallest wisps
Traveling down jet stream and Lake Effect crispness.

I watch our arms sew together
under gravity's needle.
Our fingers bloom roses
as our blood shines and spins
together on our now single palm.

Mother watches from home
through her crumbling telescope.
She sees us suspended
in half kiss. She waits for impact
of hips, her fingers moist,
slipping off her eyepiece.
She wipes the sweat from her lip.

When I feel her gaze on the soul of my foot
I know she is watching with
cataracts and bifocals.
I am the same age a when I left her
while she cries dust on
her cracking refracting lens.
She can't look away at my stuck body,
rigormortic, frozen and unfocused
in her left eye.

She sits down and dies.
I have just begun.

In the dark we marked tattoos of
disintegrating constellations
on our rib cages,
our fingernails filled with ink.
We were told they would last
forever on 19 year old skin
when carved on the night where
each fallen brother of Sun kissed
our mid-August goosebumps.

The weight of our bodies
cut into the grass.
We came back the next evening to
watch these human Grand Canyons
sink deeper to Earth's liquid center
underneath flashlight flickers of an
approaching thunderstorm,
each bolt echoing on the hearts
of Lake Michigan fish.
The trees fell inside our craters
as we walked backward to my car,
fearing for our lives, but
immobile from each reaching meteor.

Perseus fell through Earth's granite throat,
parabolic melting of night sky.
Collapsed Big Dipper and Ursa Major
illuminated our chests
over shadow of dying white pine.

I throw my gubbins out
in my net, casting for a
dinner to feed you
by spoon.

My words are gubbins.
Irritating impulse of
fingers and joints
bending around your waist.

Our speech is gubbins -
puked through esophagus
bile and awkward conversation.
A belch of early caught perch.

We make love like gubbins.
You flop wrongly, I flip coarsely.
Our toes knot and break.
We kiss backwards.

I cry gubbins
on your sweaty shirt.
Your gubbin caught dinner
still smudged on your cheek.

I wake up to your bucket of
gubbins from dinner next to the bed.
I bring it to my boat
to catch our next meal.

I'll fly you to the southern shore of
Hudson Bay,
tucked into my chest.
You will watch the trees become thicker,
the humans lesser,
and I will watch your eyes widen
your mouth corners curl.

I will hold you by the creases of your arms,
dip your toes into icy Canadian ebbs.
Your naked shoulders will shiver
in North American wind,
whipping your skin with
Chippewa feathered designs.

I'll drape you in buffalo pelt
weave your toes dry in ****** hair
crown you in northern pike jaw.
You will mesh into the chestnut treeline,
fingerprints flowing into root and permafrost.
When ready, we will ignite
our forgotten primal wings,
ride the air stream home as baby eagles.

The number of stitches in my thigh,
punctures in my wrists,
the number of times you tried to **** me.

The number of paces I creased the carpet
with contemplating
how to escape you.

The number of hours you told me in bed
I'd be sorry after I left you,
naked and stabbing with your voice.

The number of  times I told my friends
your anger was disgusting, scary. The number
of times they told me don't worry.

The number of times you banged on my door,
****** knuckled, how many times I begged
for death, how many nights you barely left me
breathing.

When you held my hands in your lap
your stare tattoed eyelashes on my wrists,
they're still bleeding.

You used inexpensive words to tell me
you never wanted to make me cry again,
I'm still sobbing.

My soft-petaled wings faded and crushed
as your last kiss fell from your lips to my cheek,
I'm still wilting.

For three months I held up my green-bean spine
with a meter stick, a lifeless statue of sprouting stem,
I'm still dying.

When I called you I know my hair slipped through
the phone speaker, and you could smell my skin,
You're still yearning.

But it's been three years now, and you no longer
care for teenage laughs and the discovery
of thigh and shoulder kisses,

Yet I'm still writing about
what a beautiful thing to have loved,
what a terrible thing to have said goodbye.

You had a butterfly
Glued to your ankle.

I imagined it flying
Up your thigh,
Crawling up the
Curl of your hip,

Resting in the arch
Of your ribcage,
Then finding your shoulder
To whisper with fluttering
Into your earlobe.
I felt it too.

It found your nose,
Standing with sucker feet
Over your septum, painting
your eyelashes with wing.

I heard my tongue fold
to the roof of my mouth.

I am 14.6 billion years old. I am energy traveling at the speed of light,
I am a single proton with one orbiting electron, perfectly balanced
With quarks and bosons and higgs inside
And pieces of matter yet to be understood by man.
I am every star, every atom of Hydrogen fused to Helium.
I am a massive object of molten rock, cooling and fusing.
I am trilobite knee and dinosaur tooth,
Wooly mammoth hair fiber.
I am Permian Extinction, I am Ice Age, I am all surviving species.
I am most distant brothers of man, I am first language and first songs.
I am Bubonic Plague and Death
And life out of new molecules from old.
I am the Industrial Revolution,
I am Depression and Holocaust and oppression.
I am titanium and assembly line.
I am Perseid meteor shower and Halley ’s Comet.
I am every black hole,
Inside, another whole universe of me.

I am seconds young, and I have much to learn of
The multitudes of the universe, myself.

The joint in your hand quaked
Under the pressure of your diagnosis,
Its flame slipping into the air,
While your last puff trickled into left lung.
At first you smoked for depression.
Now it was a cry to God,
A beg for mercy from lifeless feet,
A trip down a flight or two of stairs,
A fall in the shower.

I didn't know how you would walk again without your toes
Knees
Hips.
But I learned your condition is a silent killer -
it started with the smallest flakes of skin,
As Satan lit an accurate match to singe your nerves.

You told me you had MS
And I didn't know why your breaths became frantic,
Or your tears screaming.
"Mean spirited",
"Mouthy sister",
Was what I told my friends.
God was playing jump rope with his spinal cord.
Multiple sclerosis didn't roll off my tongue so quickly,
first attempts were stutters at best -
I had to grow up first.
And while I was lying about your health
You were in agony over your grandmother,
Dead for five years on a stained hospital sheet.

In the end she begged for death,
And we have years to go.

A fire breathing dragon lived inside the nook of a tree,
Small enough to fit in a man's watch pocket,
Big enough to singe the bark around his door.
We peaked around the nearest trunk,
His smoke billowed around our adolescent ankles,
From his penny-sizes nostrils protruding from the plane of his oak.
We figured he ate the ivy snaking through his neighborhood,
But noticed no pin-sized tooth marks in surrounding leaves.

We then became bored with our own imagination.
We realized this black mark was only mold,
And we aged ten years.

I've been watching you from the nightstand,
Eyes closed,
But hearing, feeling
Each rat tremor on top of cheap carpet
Covered in cat **** and ***** stains.

You have been sleeping too long,
Eyelids turning to flakes of skin,
Feeding your floorboard friends.
I have seen your fingers curl into messy knots of
Purple thumbprints and veins reaching
For the ceiling and roof.

You left me plugged into the wall,
And I have inched closer to my own death
With each misses phone call and text,
My predisposed convulsions.

I just wanted you to know
Your mother called today
To ask for the new street address,
The landlord says the rent is 8 days late,
But your boyfriend is ill concerned with your state of health,
In fact,
He left the state
And bought a new haircut and identity.

In a fourth grader's bed there are rats eating at her mattress stuffing,
Stealing for her own young.
They nip at her toes while she finishes her math homework.
She always is hungry
Because at night the vermon crawl down windpipe to steal mother's cooking.
Mother is forced to throw away the mattress like a forgotten sock,
But fourth grader still wakes up sick from churning bile
In an empty stomach,
Because Mother was just fired from gas station #12.
Fourth grader has forgotten the feeling of warm toes, comfortable back, and being undesirably full.

I looked at Dr. King's grave and felt his love
Support my lungs while I breathed in air
Full of chapel pew and piano key ivory.
The world seemed more manageable in the presence of his granite home.
His wife was nestled under his knee,
She curled under his wings
And I could feel the rumble of their flutter on the concrete
Underneath my arches.

I sat in Dr. King's Baptist Church
And saw his mother's shoe prints
Stitched into the floor,
Where she smelled those wooden benches in her leaving breath.

I watched Dr. King's childhood home
As his father walked into the door frame,
And Coretta looked on in a Sunday school dress down the street,
Longing for smooth skin
Of bible infused hand.
I felt the same rumble in my toes.

I saw the world in twenty faces
All watching with me,
History in shadow.
We smiled at the colors of our skin
Standing together,
Watching the memory of a house that created our shared joy
And hope for the next minute to be more equal than the last.

When a man found a rotting piano
In the woods of Germany,
Each unplayed note traveled through his red blood veins
up to his brain painting colors of wound and gas mask.
He could hear the music of war within each taste of sheltered forest air.
In his nails, shadows of bleed
and drops of motor oil,
the residue of sea salt from the hulls of ships.

The man
Thought of all the Jewish and non Jewish fingers
That never touched each key.
He played all the combinations of chords never played
On the tree trunk next to him.
The man felt his right fingers cramp,
Riger-mortic,
And saw his fallen brother behind the largest tree holding his palm the same way.
He thought of all the stiffened hands sitting in holes dug by living hands,
Hands begging for one more sip of water soup,
Hands begging for freedom,
Hands begging for death.

The man forgot his salt crusted boots.
The man couldn't forget how his gas mask could have saved two more hands to play the unplayed piano.

Dad’s ocean is washing away
The frame of our house.
I am on the second floor,
Riding the waters of Mother’s tears.
I plug my ears with my fingers
And hold my breath;
I still feel the ebb and flow of his rage.
The hypothermic water winds
Around my toes like nooses.

My body is a life vest
Floating on top of a row boat bed.
Its boards are rotten and creaking
Under my adult weight.
Our house is a fish tank. Everyone is staring
through our windows with bulbous eyes as
Rivers flow from our pains of glass.

The plastic lid on the fish tank locked you inside with Death-
A cold, liquid murderer.
You breathed in His saliva through your gills.
It gummed your mouth and jaundiced your eyes.
I watched you suffer through quarter inch glass,
While you, an inmate, wished to die
From poison oxygen on our cherry floor.
I rested a shoe on top of the aquarium lid
To prevent your suicide while we slept.

I dreamt that night of you
dragging me to the bottom of your cell
With your chapped fins and rotting
sucker mouth grasping my shoulder,
Gasping for clean water.
You forced me to inhale
Death's unforgettable stench
As we did you.

You were dead the next morning,
And I never got to tell you sorry.
Instead I shoveled your carcass
Out from the blue gravel
Coated in your corpse.

I found my mother outside in our shed
holding her trowel in May.
We walked to the farmers market
and she told me where vegetables come from.
The morning was spent planting seeds and bulbs
close to her heart, my future siblings.

Mother taught me the painstaking birth
of cabbage and watermelon.
We were impatient in the kitchen
while we stirred soup and noodles,
peaking out the kitchen window.

I started planting trees for distraction.
Mom told me
I would hammock under them in time,  
shade my forehead in leafy kisses,
turn my novel pages with soft breeze.

Father watered the tomatoes to relieve
mother from the neck-breaking June sunlight.
She watched through the doorway.
Each night, with baby monitors wired through
cracked windows, Mom waited to pick
her devotions from stem until they were ready.

In August I saw my grandma smile
in crow’s feet happiness
at life that she held in cupped palms,
covered in placenta dirt.

I watched a single spruce sprout out of crack in asphalt
Sunday morning, church time,
From my skeletal apartment
high above the street lamps,
While my eyes dried and crusted with dust.
My fingers charred to leather, tightly bound
on to the iron balcony.

But the stubble-like blemish of the road's surface
Was ****** back inside concrete
From which it grew,
A magic trick,
Like a rabbit reentering its black hole tophat,
Just as the earth was flushed
down the esophagus of Satan,
Swirling in a tornado of molten lava,
Lucifer's saliva.

I know exactly how you’re ******* your new girlfriend.

I know you’re going to play “Sing for Me” by Yellowcard in the background. I know you’re going to **** on that song like we never danced to it at prom, like you never learned it on acoustic for me, like we didn’t make out to it under my lit Christmas tree.

I know 9 times out of 10 she’s going to initiate and that will **** her off.

I know how long it’s going to last you, how you’re going to try so hard to old it in but in the pit of your stomach you know it doesn’t work.

I know your glasses are going to fog up and get smudged with face grease and you’ll need to Windex them afterward.

I know you’re going to say “I love you” to her right after. You’ll mean it, but regret that you do. Soon you’ll need to fix that.

I know you’re going to eat a bowl of Raisin Bran once you’ve dressed again.

I know you’re going to talk about this time until the next time, and she’ll give in just to shut you up. Also because she really does love you, and wants to please you.  

I know you’re going to beg she sleeps in your clothes without underwear before showering, and she will if you reciprocate.

I know you’re going to talk about *** like it’s divine, like it’s balanced on a pedestal located in the most untouched corner of Eden.

I know you’re going to treat all of this like a chocolate fountain, infinitely filling and never squandered.

And you haven’t been home, so you don’t know that the first place we made love is demolished to rubble and stone. You told me good things last forever,

But I know you lie. Yellowcard told us “no looking back when I am gone”, and for a year and a half those words were wedding vows.  

But you’re obsessed with conclusion, and feeling,

So you’ll leave her, just like you did me,

To feel again, because these love affairs are nothing but alcoholic drinks you choke down to numb.

You said don’t look back when you’re gone, but there is no forward from here.

When my ear first orbited your throat
to listen for a roaming balloon of nestled flesh
I heard trailer home hollowness
in copper vein pipes.
You draped a scarf over your superglued
neck, telling me it was normal to fistfight
death at 35.
On Dad’s desk, your weight breathed feebly
inside a sandwich bag. At night
its nuclear green cast Orions across our ceiling.
I never knew what real stars looked like,
while you had completely forgotten.

Years later,
in the dark of our 17-acre home,
you handed me your thyroid in its bag
swimming in opalescent fluid
and you looked at Polaris for the first time,
as that same glow painted the Big Dipper
on neighboring snowbanks.
I dropped the bag on the dry rot porch.
We heard your cancer flatten to a deflated bicycle tire,
sweating from death,
watched through squinted eyes as its glow turned
from hazardous neon to cinder.
It dried in the moonlight,
a forgotten, frostbitten raisin,
and our eyes readjusted to the perpetuating darkness.

I saw it then like a long constellation
line connecting star to forehead.
It had been a lie before,
but the North Star is truly the brightest
in the sky. We looked through its surface
underneath the star’s skin to its heart space,
and we realized that Polaris can only be seen
when thin plastic holds inside
damaged shadows of family
dinners bathed in deionized salt,
where I ponderously stared at the ****
in your esophagus, drawn with knife
like ruby crayon into office paper.

Leaves in trees sing sweet and sharp breeze,
Iced dew on trilliums with spring freeze.
Hushed omens of rooted deer femurs,
Rushed growth of leeks and small rivers.
Hiss of cricket and cracked, damaged
Branches that creek above in suspension,
Poised avalanches.
Moisture wicked off budding ferns down
Stems like ballpoint, quill pen turns.
Blankets of moss overtop cedar gently padded
Our toes between sock and polyester.
The smack of coyote howl hacked
Like woodpecker thwack through antlers and
Tree trunks tracked by my own ears,
And I twist each string of melody into my
Cataloged years, so I never forget the swift lifting
Spell of days when red robin throats first swelled.

****** is a tough thing to digest, it
Haunts the deepest pit of your stomach,
Steeling food swallowed,
A perpetual hunger.

It crawls on all fours
At midnight
Up the throat.
It's a slow process.
Burning pink, beating flesh
With acid coated paws.
You feel it as a chip not fully chewed,
A pill taken in absence of water,
A greasy grilled cheese.

When I feel it beginning
To swell in my throat
I brace myself
On the kitchen sink,
Notice my distorted, clammy cheeks
In the stainless steel warped metal,
Fingers digging into the pressboard cupboards.
I don't have anything but time
To cool the flame under my tongue,
Inside my teeth.

The building ate itself inside,
Flattened to a lake of brick,
Like a table
Disappearing from underneath shadowed cloth
As the magician snapped his fingers.

His trees in the yard looked like
men standing beside a dead
body wondering what to do next,
With shovel branches
And shotgun leaves
Soaked in ember autumn blood.

I imagine you cradled inside
the wing of your rocket ship, vacuum
sealed, sheltered from the noise of solar wind.
Remembering our goodbye at the launch-pad
Creases the aging skin around your eyes.

Tears, weightless and buoyant,
Collide with the sputtering, decrepit
valves and cogs
tracking your orbit
through Saturn’s dust.

You bottle them in mason jars, capture each one on fading
fingertips like paper white snowflakes,
Sealing them inside with aluminum twist caps.
You fill each one and let them clutter the windows
like drunken periscopes.

If I could shine a flashlight through these memory
telescopes, black and white 1920s movies would reel
cracked turtle shells on the highway,
Four rabbits, their intestines spoiling on mowed grass,
Synonyms for “stupid” piercing into heart with arrowhead.

    You curl tighter into the spacecraft,
    Breathing uncontrollably, painfully.
    Canines cut into tongue to suppress sobs.
    Folding over naval, knees to forehead,
             The gravity of surrounding, misplaced moons
             pulls you to collision with an asteroid.

I wish I had never tried *******.
I wish it was some fresh mystery
Calling my name,
Like Satan seducing a lover, a victim.
I wish I could watch a needle point kiss,
Search under my dress and sink into myself,
Folding over pelvis,
Tell myself I'm ****.
But my voice shakes,
My lip sweats-
I never learned how to lie to myself.

Everyone lies
When they say self love is
A fulfilling replacement to foreign flesh,
My palms are no exception.
They twitch,
My limbs are gangling,
Alien-like,
Nothing compared
to the comfort of your fingernails
And tarnished knuckles.

I try to find the time,
I'm too busy. I'm too tired.
I convince myself I'm perfect for dwindling moments,
But my elbows do not
bend to care for myself
Like yours did.
I take baths by candlelight
With Marvin Gaye and The Temptations
But my fingers wrinkle with water and I weep for my ugliness.
Im hungry,
But I eat before and I feel sick,
I starve myself instead and ***** from the sensation of skin on skin-
My skin.

My skin isn't as feather-like as yours was,
And self love will never float as softly
Above me as yours did.

I like to drop pebbles into water,
watching them turn and swirl in the waves,
while they transform from a stagnant object
to one with a chance at life,
to cute craters in the foreign objects of rivers,
to carve an indented home into sand and clay.

I let them slip from my fingers to be pushed ashore centuries later
by some animal, in mouth or hand,
and if they hold my pebble closely
to the nape of their neck,
feeling its morse code vibration,
they will understand to let it slip through their own grasp,
sliding through the atmosphere,
kissing each fragment of pollen,
back into the pool of consciousness.

I've wanted to draw Native American Art
On your etch-a-sketch canvas for two decades,
And now given the opportunity
This spectacle I'm immersed in
Disallows me to master the act of this ecological connection.
The water behind me whispers, slowly,
The words necessary to ****** me.
My fingers slide along the slanted planes of sand,
Memorizing each blemish
Created by the ceaseless power of Earth.
Every tree stump boasts the bust of a woman,
Tantalizing in its mossy negligée,
But ashen by the blade of an angry flame,
Stripping them of life.

Superior's Two Hearts tends to my
Earthen love affair
As a fishing lure guides its victims-
With careful precision
And a predetermined purpose.

I have meandered onto the patch of land
By following that drum beat
Of the blood-flowing waters.
Graced with the flower of fruit,
Blueberries, the crooked banks become
A whole cosmos of wonder embedded in soil.
So I fill my mind with the swirling waters,
And my stomach with the periwinkle nectar,
To finally pick up my pen,
Not to draw pictures of your beauty on sand,
But to write words of your wisdom on paper-
The strength you have given me to
Become something other than a blank page.