the sun is setting in slant
through the window, outlining
everyone in gold thread

there’s loud music and
laughter and RESERVED
tables full of people eating and
laughing like they’re at any tables
at all

at the end the music is still
playing
and the sun is still slanting its way
down but the rainbow flag is draped
over the dusty piano to free up her hands
so she can clean other things. everything
is tidied up, things gathered, minimizing
space taken

the stickers, the flags
of all combinations of colored stripes,
pink and blue and purple sunsets,
prism rainbows, the black table cloth
stretched out below the window
as two people fold the sunlight into it,
packing it away. name tags
are peeled off shirts. In the end,

they leave with a whole
foods canvas bag full of things
that could be anything,
ready to blend back
into everything else.

the sun ducks behind a mountain
on the horizon and the sky purples,
bruised by indifference. the sun ducks
behind a mountain on the horizon and
no one is outlined anymore.

I wonder if you pay as close attention
as I do to the little things,
the ones I go over in my mind
hours after you've walked away—
you turn and wave over your shoulder
and I walk the other way smiling at
myself like a fool.  I love it.

I am thinking about the slight tilt of
your head when you want me to
hurry up and follow you; about the soft
way you tap my arm with the back of
your hand, that I might turn round in time
to see what you're pointing at, something
you've decided I will enjoy, before it's
gone; the way, when I am sitting with my
gaze cast downward, that you reach out
and brush my hair away just to check that
my eyes are sparkling but not wet.

resting your knees against the tips of my
feet when they are in the way as we settle
into our little corner of the world, trying
to get comfortable. small things. I wonder if
they are but instinct to you. To me, they are
you claiming me as a friend.

I am weak. I let you, but I never claim you
back. I am no good at subtlety— everything
I do is too little, too late, or else it is too much
and far too soon. But words are forever, and
since I can barely speak at times, I have written
mine down.

Words are forever, and these are for you
my friend.

A student of mine wrote me a note
on the blank side of a 3x5
index card
and she hugged me goodbye.
Another went home and built a telescope,
and he sent me pictures
of the pieces along the way,
apart and together like an array
of Martian images coming in
from the Opportunity in a
pixelated panoramic display.
I told him about lenses
and the human eye,
about why stars will always look
pointed unless we get close enough
to really see them and he said-
I’ll try.

We used to play.
Climb rocks of dirt
and red clay and you would tolerate
my singing
and help me with my math.

And shout when I said "minus"
while you said "no, negative"
and I, your double
negative reckless
optimist, couldn't possibly wire up
that light switch
that you installed wrong,
couldn't read a diagram of circuits,
couldn't take a tour
of the machine shop
because just looking at the gadgets
in wonder might get my
fragile fingers
cut off.

You said trust no one,
not even someone who smiles,
not even the janitor who whistled
when he mopped the school halls.
Never get in a van, sure,
but what if that man at the airport
was just trying to get home, dad?
What if he had a daughter to see?

What if you could see me?

I bet you're glad I never learned
how to fix your cars.
Glad I left my bike at the house
so the grease doesn't get on my calves.

'I'm just trying to keep you safe.'
'Why.'

No one is ever safe,
no birds are ever free.
I have learned so much about circuitry

but even back then,
I could have gotten that switch working
if you'd just let me play.

You’ve taught me to be more
fragile than I’d like but
I could have done it because
despite what you say about trust and luck
and when a girl should give up
I will always try,
always go to the ends of the earth
to find light.

And I will show you
that you don't need to be made
of stone
to love a girl.

I know the quietest way
to crack an egg.
The softest way to close
a door. How to pour
the water into a tilted
glass so it doesn't splash
back. A bird chirps at
just under sixty decibels.
A light bulb sings at
fifteen. I dream
of polymer chains snapping
clean, recyclables humming
to each other at night
while they biodegrade
at a rate negligible
to the human timescale.
Twenty decibels: the chiral
calcite spiral of the snail
when it falls to the sand,
when it dies,
when a girl apologizes
for asking a question.

19 April 2013.
Today is silent.

Today I write day of silence on the back
of my hand, letting the words sink into my
skin the way they try, heavy as they are, to sink
into the minds of the ignorant chatters who ask
why I haven't spoken. If, indeed, they've even
noticed. Nodding and smiling will get you pretty
far, and people hear their own voices so loudly
as to assume yours has just been drowned out
by their own superiority.

Today I get home before everyone else and
I scrub the words away, because while it means
the world to me and I stand for what it implies
I cannot show it to them; they don't know who I
am, but they think they do. I do not have the heart
to crush their reality. They're wrong. There is only the faintest
off-colored tinge to my hand now. It could be a scar.
But they won't notice it. People cannot hear something
as loud as silence— certainly, then, they cannot see
something as loud as scars.

Now not even the message remains.
Ink down the drain.

Standing at the edge of your eyes
my toes curl over the rim.
They push the ground away
I am just cold enough to breathe. I am
just helpless enough to let the water
support me and float free.

I am afraid the way I was
afraid of the mossy dark reservoir
behind the second dam.
Afraid the way I was
when I watched kids haul
their bodies onto the rocks
with their knees still shaking,
their teeth still protesting against
each other.
I am afraid the way I was
when I dipped my toes in the water
long enough to hear them scream,
afraid of the bottomless, afraid it wasn’t
bottomless enough, couldn't see.

Just afraid enough to jump.
Just cold enough to breathe.

the sun is brighter than the moon
but its light washes over everything
till the world pales
into insignificance and routine
and night is more colorful than noon.

The no-two-snowflakes
phenomenon set my brain
off into a million different
fragments of star, each
looking down on the world
from afar.

You were already up
there, just waiting
to tear
it apart, or maybe not.
You didn’t need sweet
tea so you swirled in
apathy where I took
honey, and you turned
to the screen while
I watched the sheen
of gold
protecting little pockets
of air like they were
all that mattered.
If I protected you that way
you’d say you weren’t
worth my time.
No time is worth
anything, when you’re
going to run out.

Run out to where?

We took still lives in
photography but I couldn’t
bring in honey or pockets
of air or the raindrop
that froze on the airplane
window with ice shattering
and spiraling up around
it, but with the intent to
put the stardust in everything
I touched I arranged
the things for us
since you had something
kind of maybe more important
to do.
You like orange, right?
Yours still looked better
than mine.

Your mind is still in flight.
I wonder if you see the
fragments of ice
on the window of the
emergency exit row.

So snowflakes are no different
than fingerprints,
and neither is made
of stardust bright enough
to make sense
to you.
We’ll all be up there
soon enough, you say.
Whether stardust
or dust.
You love Mersault,
in an indifferent sort
of way.

But I zoom in on these
oranges and the ridges don’t
match, the RGB codes of
every combination of
orange shadow are off
by a letter
and no two oranges are
the same, I take two
photos without moving the camera
and yet something’s
changed.

It takes conscious effort
for me to be the type
of person I’d be friends with
but you do it so easily.
And if you recognize
that as unusual, it’s
one of a kind
just like everything else.

No two anything.
No matter what I look
at, it’s
still life
and I’m still living it.

It’s a hard choice.
You made the same one.
But it was different.

Look up.

The sunlight filtered
through feathers splayed
hits different when
the wing is stayed

I wrote about her
in an essay
and never once
used her name
and she was she
and I was me
and no one knew
including us two

And then I asked
the world to
read it and the
page came back to me
sanitary
full of cross-outs
well-read and heavy
and looking tired.

And not a
single person
asked who
she was

from the sixth floor, see
the traffic lights change
in time with each
other up and down the
street snake eyes snake
eyes snake
   eyes snake eyes
       snake eyes
green green
green  green
red  red
as they always
did but not just
as they used to

After every word I say
I think about how I'll cringe
as I walk away
from you,
just from thinking.

I can't deal with this sunshine,
this vastness of sky
like this whole **** planet
is a collective spy
on the universe,
and some of us are afraid
and some of us are too brave.
Some of us choose science
as a faith
and are let down when we
can't get far, bound to
be lost within this vast collection
of stars that no longer
exist.

Some can't resist
the pull of gravity and so remain
here, a pin on a pin cushion
in suspended animation; the
pins come and go but the
cushion's still got the holes.
And some can't resist the
pull of nothingness,
to drop out of gravity,
from a needle in a haystack
to a needle in the sea
to a needle in infinity,
that is to say, basically,
D.N.E.

I am unbearably light,
with no one knows how far
to fall.

When the clouds cover
everything a lid hovers
over the glass jar of the universe,
and a needle could break through
but at least there is some
resistance, at least there is
some effort put into keeping us
within this section of
stratosphere.
Maybe we belong here.

It takes effort to fall off the
planet, but none at all
to fall
down.

they say if you are with
a writer, and she never
writes about you, she
doesn't love you.
    
                          i say some things
                are within you that are
                      just too precious to
                                               share.

some things are buried
so deep in your soul,
your mind just can't form
the words.
                           so instead of saying
                     what i came here to say
                     let these words suffice:
                          some things are just
                         too precious to share.

And if you follow the line
of Orion’s arm up and to the right,
there’s a faint blur, a whole cluster
of stars that one may not have known
was there, not in all her days
of suburbia. The Pleiades, hiding
behind brighter lights
as she lays her bad back on the asphalt.
And Alcyone, the brightest of the lot,
mistaken for a dot of sleep in the periphery
of sight, lost to time.  
She is waiting for the sun to wake up,
their fingers intertwined like children’s
in a fairytale, she blinks the sleep
from her eyes as it blinks the stars
from its skies.
I guess that is you and I.

silence.
what? don't you have something to say?

darling, i always have something to say.
my mind is a construction site
alive and busy
people everywhere, moving
every which way
but it is so far away that
to me they are but ants
small and busy, so many of them
who knows what they are doing
what they are thinking.

i try to build words, but i am
too weak to lift them,
they are heavy as bricks
to my crew of small ants.
sentences thicken
into mortar that your
strength can master,
but when my ants
band together, bricks on
their backs, to spread it,
the weight crushes them
to the ground.

i fall before the words.

but
i always have something to say.

say it, then

.

I remember sitting up with you,
trying to show you how the glow
on the screen could be you,
how you could stop saying her name
over and over again
if you wanted to,
how I would stay on the
other end and still be there
on the other side of the night.
How there were at least words
we could say, books to read,
at least soon it would be day
and there would be things to do
and it’s easy to move on when
you really need to move.

I remember you sitting up with me,
trying to show me that I
don’t need to be guilty,
that I can just be, and I can
like who I like
and it doesn’t have to be
the likes of you.
I remember sending you a picture
of a yellow bird on a telephone wire,
you sending me a song,
me sending you a joke,
you sending me a poem,
you sending me a wedding song,
your wedding song
from your wedding with her,
your signature on the divorce papers.

The way you looked right to me then
did not make me feel not guilty.

It is not my fault that I am
this far away, it is not
my fault that I befriended a bird of prey,
that your hawk eyes saw right back
to how little I knew of me, to how
much I hated myself yesterday,
it is not my fault that I am
this way,

it is not my fault.

I remember your children being born,
your wedding song and the wordless
music at the end of it.
I remember never thinking you were wrong.

I remembering sitting on my jacket
shivering
outside the door of the observatory.
My friends were up two stories
watching other worlds move,
and I remember listening to you, pulling back,
looking at the phone and thinking,
‘I am too.’

You told me that today I sounded happy,
I sounded me, less guilty, more free.
And you spun away slowly, thinking
that kind of friend is not worth having.
So you sent me to orbit some other planet
with some other sun
and I have to tell you it won’t be hard.
I can find my way to light from dark.

I will take a girl to the observatory some day.
I’ll walk her there, pull her up the spiral
staircase by the hand,
and over her shoulder I will point
to constellations you have never dreamed of
and I will tell her,
‘these are all the worlds we could go to.’
And we will start to move.

And we will take our friends with us,
up the spiral stairs,
and I will not stay at the door with you.
I will wrap my jacket around myself
and I will take what I know about the moon,
a glow in my hands,
and I will hold it out to them.
And if I move all over the universe
I will always come back to them.

Because that’s what friends do.

So I tied the string
you gave me
around my ankle, and
I left it there
forever

which was foolish of me
because nothing is forever.

I hope the pieces did
not end up in the shower
drain. I hope they're still
in Town Square being
blown in the wind
and driven over and
kicked by shoes.

I hope a bird picks
up the tattered remains
and adds them to his nest
so that they give the
faded familiarity you gave me
to another life form.

That would be nice.

Now there is only
the sensation of nothing
where there was, for so long,
something

and when I wake up the next
morning the sensation
is gone and bare ankles
are the norm again.

Relief I did not notice
from pain I did not feel
and now the pain is gone

it's not pain if you don't feel it.

All week
they have been predicting
thunder storms.
Each day I checked
the news and grabbed
my raincoat
off the hook
on the back of the door
before walking through.
Outside the flash
of every turning car’s
headlight shoots
the gun that starts
the race—
my heart is off.
All week
when a squirrel snaps
a twig I cringe
and tuck my ears
into the collar
of my jacket
but there is no boom.
There are only clouds
and humidity.
All week
I’ve been waiting
for the sky to crack.
I’ve been
waiting for a heart
attack that’s worth
my while.
I am not ready
to breathe
the moisture in the air
but hang my coat
up dry.
To realize I
am not excited
to see you.
But there is no boom.
I am just the fool
who covered her ears
for nothing.

big is strong and
color is a joy--

human growth hormone
till the plates ache,

there are no blue
fish past the twilight zone

because of ocean
optics and wavelength
eating economics

it turns out luck
is like gold--
196.97 grams per mole

in the silence where the storm should be,
in a room with slanted, loft-low ceilings,
you sit by the window where the cold gets in,
wrapped in a blanket you wouldn't need
if you'd unlocked the door.
the rest of the building bundles up
and walks across the grass
they shouldn't be able to see.
the storm watch buzzes
through the air where the snow should be,
and no one should bother searching empty shelves
but everyone does.
milk, and extra batteries.
all that unused energy,
crackling through the sky just like the lies
you've been told and those you've tried to hide.
I can't act, you say, I can barely tell a lie
without cracking a smile, without losing face.
in the silence where the storm should be,
you wait.
the lights go on.
in the calm after, you piece together
your shattered ruins, rebuild the floor,
unlock the door,
and carry on,
with a smile,
as before.

In a row, three generations
of prayer; when foreheads
meet the floor, Nanu
gets a chair.

Imagine how scared
the stars must have been
the first night they
couldn't see you.
Imagine the gasp, the
wind's fist unable to grasp
the cosmic impermanence
of what it made
while you and two mothers
sway, there is mango
and honeydew on three plates
and dates to break the fast
the shadow crossing
the moon so slow,
the tides forecast.

but the inflection of the human voice
saying God only knows,
she doesn't say it like God
is the only one
who knows;
not: God, only, knows,
but God only
knows.
She knows and says nothing.
God is not one to kiss
and tell.
She keeps some things
to Herself, doesn't share everything
with me. Think
how sad a couple of souls
would be if truly
one, grown
so together that they are
once again alone.
God only knows
what I'd do without you;
nothing more.

She doesn't wear sweaters anymore;
the thread unravels at the edges
when she needs things to stay together.
Every group of things she sees
comes unstuck in space; a sheet
of glass over everything
magnifying what's underneath, so
as she sits letting droplets hit her back
one after the other on the floor
the bathroom tiles file past her eyes
like crystalline symmetries,
footsteps in the snow fold over
on themselves, glide planes on high,
her own feet are a rotary inversion
of the version of her that mirrors her walk
upside down, her own feet
are always the ground
she walks on, always moving,
always soothing and then falling through.

To see the world on the scale
of atoms,
to break down
the random, to battle the chasm,
to search for structural integrity
in her enthusiasm
so she can know it will hold her up

and yet everywhere opposites attract.
On the scale of atoms, positive
and negative, north and south,
an attraction and repulsion,
and evolutionary revulsion
that she can't make herself feel.
Ratted out by evolution, still
she zooms in on everything
to try to see a reason she still exists.

There are two ways to fall
in love with the stars.
Each begins with a child on her back,
asphalt and grass,
looking up.

Each begins with a reaching.

There are two ways to fall
in love with the stars. Each begins
with a feeling of light that is cold,
of the glow of afar, of nothing
but the magnetic math
of the vacuum between here

and there.

Each begins with finding
light in dark.

She can at this point grab the tail
of her hope in a telescope,
wonder at the whole mirrored mess,
open her aperture as wide as her heart
and stretch the shutter speed as long
as her patience, let in all the light

she can.

She can mesh her fingers through Orion's,
standing ready to help him catch
the Pleiades that hover above his hand,
she can hold his sword for him
for a while.
She can brush her fingertips along
Andromeda's straining arms, soothe
the chained flesh of her wrists. She
can trace faces in the sky
with her kind touch,
ladle warm soup for every one,
scratch the bears behind their ears
to keep herself coming undone.
She can blush, timid to reach
the extra lightyear that will bring
her hands to Cassiopeia's hair.

Or then she can
calculate the cold,
Orion's sword a pen, fight
through the mechanics
for the dynamics
and get there.

Wild woods, moss-green gowns,
secret keys and magic crowns
are lit by the sun until
this forest is so bright with hope
that you shrink away, blinking,
still learning to cope
with your right to stand
among beautiful things.

What if I told you the fairy dust
was just bits of dry skin,
nomadic in a sunbeam through a window,
forest of perpetual Sunday afternoon,
slowing the light down
to the quaint speed of sound

would that make you feel better
about lying on the ground?
Your shoulder blades are not cutting
at the grass like you say.

You are a resident of this light,
citizen of the liquid state it’s in,
of every grain of sand in this clearing,

you are so alive,
and every cell of you that dies
is a particle in the current in the sky
that gives buoyancy to fairy flight

so please, come sit back down
with me.

There is a child in you that still believes
in fairies,
and I would like her
to see how green the ground is today,
how sure
it is that her feet belong,
that this ground is hers
to walk upon.

A duck flutters onto the path
and we are at an impasse;
we wait in the dark until the
sun comes back,
but the thing doesn't move.
I can see in your
stubborn shoes, laces never loose,
the unwillingness to let
this creature be afraid of you.

On the way back there are
other ducks that don't notice us,
and that is enough.

In a row, three generations
of prayer. When foreheads
meet the floor, Nanu
gets a chair.

Crickets shout through open
windows to break the silence
and silk whispers between
knees and rug to break the bows.

Nanu is too old to bend
to pray; you pull her up
a chair these days. There

are Stars scared of the night
they’ll see you flicker.

You and two mothers
sway, there is mango
and honeydew on three plates
and dates to break the fast

shadow crossing the moon,
the tides forecast.

The bridge between us
stands in the wind stoic
with indifferent strength,
resigned strength.

Static trusses of steel
withstand without a sound
as forces crack through it
and propagate to the ground,
like how the lightning through your
mess of veins
is grounded in the rubber soles
of your sneakers.

We are stalling, looking for veins
in everything to prove our alive—
a dragonfly’s wing on the floor,
a leaf’s venation,
the Arabic graffiti lost in translation
on the railing
and the rivers creeping
outside their contours.

Your lips are turning blue in the storm.

The bridge is strong.
Nothing can go wrong but
every bar is under stress,
yours in tension and mine all compressed
and the bars don’t move but
underneath is a storm of forces
pushing and pulling us at once
with the cold magnets
of the poles of the earth.

If we jump off this bridge
instead of across
we will not fall

The picket signs put your life at stake.
With your hand in hers it is all
you can do to keep moving forward
because the signs are telling you
that love is not love after all,

that eves proceed their holidays,
spring freezes into winter
which ripens to fall.
Light burns off the earth in waves
that crash into the sun.

Bodies float out of their graves
like astronauts jettisoned from the shuttle.
Dirt hardened by ages sighs
beneath your toes,
magma slithers back into volcanoes,

the biker’s tires only spin forward
because he’s zooming back,
he holds a beer can in his hand
beneath one streetlight
and a firefly in a jar beneath the next.

Children are releasing fireflies
from jars, poking holes
back into the lids,
cutting off air supply,
untelling lies.

And you, as you walk
through the picketers,
are become a child again,
weaving through the legs of women
and men a party, hugging your shoulders

to yourself again to confirm
that they’re yours
as you stand in a dress
your mother picked out for you
the night before.

As the picketers leave you fall,
glasses crack, voice creaks
like an attic door.

Rain dilutes the salt on your cheeks
as it rises from the floor;
this is a mind war.
After all that backwards,
this girl is not something you want
to find beautiful anymore.

But you are still holding her hand.
Look,
she says to you,
maybe G-d doesn’t mean it
when He says He hates us.
After all,
He said let there be light,
*and then there was darkness.

In eighth period no students rest
their heads on their desks today.
They are afraid that the moment
they look away, they will turn back
to find they’re not people anymore.

As for us, we had a voice at least.
We had a dream of being
the teachers with the same last name,
the English teacher with the periodic
table on the wall, and her wife
who teaches monomers
like they were grass’s leaves.
Is that a complexity you can understand?

You can repeal our hope
of exchanging rings—
our feathered thing—
but we will still converge
on the ninth graders of your nation
to be sure your face has not tinted
them with your fear. There will be
no redshift here, only a drift
of progress. There we’ll be,
stationed in the inspiration
of youth to undo
your unfathomable bigotry.

Those who can’t, teach.

You sit in a large hall.
On one wall,
windows climb all the way to the ceiling.
There is too much sunlight. It is bright,
and drafty, and always crowded.
But you can glance
up from the depths of words
and notice her, notice how the room
gets even brighter, notice how it gets
quieter and cozier and louder and smaller
and magnificently taller, and
you are terrified.
You smile in terror, and laugh in terror,
and wave in terror, and in terror
you watch her sit down,
and in terror you struggle through
a proof together,
a quietly terrified give and take.
You are content to wait in this moment
for the moment when you can give in
and accept what is true.
For the moment when you can stop
proving things.
You are afraid.
The sensation is not enough
to drain the warmth or color from the room
until she leaves it.

she couldn't see it
she tried so hard
to be who she is
and she is
but she can't see

it shines in her eyes,
all the long hours
she's put in,
all the success
it shines so brightly
but she cannot see
her own eyes
or maybe the light
is just blinding her

she casts her eyes downward
content in herself
but it's not herself
it is her own warped version
of herself, that has
not been properly
reflected back to her
vision.

she is literally perfect
and she doesn't see it

why can't you ever help
her see it

it's heartbreaking.

She was beside this guy,
and beside herself with her
and him. She remembers sitting
on his shoulders while the sun
set over Jerusalem. She
was smiling in such a way
that the sun was backing down
from a challenge neither it nor I
had seen, which is why
I took the picture.

It was beautiful to see. The tilt
of her head for his photographs, the link
of her arm for his steadying walk, the share
of her sounds with him--one
earbud apiece--all the things
she used to do with me

And in the holy city I was blessed
to see her dance
between two kinds of love
so seamlessly

she used to say,
I want to go to a small school
where no one locks their doors
and everyone knows each
other

she came from a big high school
so many kids in the hallways
and naturally she got used to
being able to slip though the cracks

of the system and avoid the world,
to use the people to hide from the
people. oh, how she hated the people.
and now suddenly she is seeing

that in order to blend in and be quietly,
in order to hide from the people, you
need to be where there are lots of people.
humans are paradoxes in everything else

they do. why not this too.

a question on a slip
of paper, maybe the back
of a receipt, maybe written
with the pen at the bottom
of your bag that has been
missing its cap for two months
but is not yet dried up
and you fold it in half, maybe
three times, partly to hide
it and partly to smallen,
and you roll it and hold
it between thumb and index
and you look for god in
the rain taking the ink and leaving
the leaf-litter wishes sodden
on the ground. your prayer
was query, not request, but it
too could litterize. then you tuck
your roll into the stones and
turn around anyway,
all forward eyes, and
that is faith.

At sunrise a little girl calls
Uncle and he comes to
her and past, down the pier
to reel in the blue *****.
Everyone is crossing
the river where it meets the bay
to exchange pleasantries and
to tear off the legs.
So by mid morning: north
up the winding road past
foggy construction zones.
Everyone is crossing
the lake in canoes while she
is catching salamanders,
throwing news in campfires
and tripping over her shoes.
She takes her paddle to the water
and then the sun right above:
time to move.
A couple hundred exits passed,
a couple hundred exits past
noon. A little northwest
this time, a little late
for lab. Everyone is cross-
ing campus like they mean it.
She climbs and counts
and it's actually one hundred sixty-
two steps up the clock tower--
you have to count again--and what
a view. Jumping isn't the way,
you can't go down when you're
on top. She follows the water
norther, wester, you have
to count again, have to see
something new before dark

i knew something was off

because usually i like to
seek out the sad ones
and give them someone

but that day i wanted
to find you.

holding everybody in arms
of a bowl to catch
what we cry.
Turning the saltwater into oceans,
mirrors still enough that we
can see, watch ourselves try.
And for those who like waves she
pulls at the tides,
rough hands smoothing the sand,
and when she thinks she can't
get it right she consults the moon,
watching and learning till she's
ready to teach.
And for those of us who don't
like the beach,
she holds her hands out to us
with palms up, lifting the salt
away and the water up,
sending our tears
purified
to the sky to rain down on us,
fresh and quiet
every one.

I am melting.
There is me and us and the air between us.
The falling is the best part.
Will I ever start again?
See me crystalline, and marvel
at all of us different but packed, whispering across space.
The best thing I ever did was grow
into the shape I am.
I slicked the roads.
I slicked the roads
but in the morning I refract the light.
I am for growing, then falling, then rising.
For children not knowing how I came to be.
For curiosity.

I am erased words,
it’s not fair that birds
can fly when I don't feel worth
walking on the ground,
when I’m a fish out of water because
just for breathing air, I'm drowned.
It’s not fair that the air
is thinner up there,
that death takes years and years
and then disappears,
that we have to walk upright
and breathe the crushing weight
of the stratosphere,
and none of us are volunteers
yet somehow everyday we choose life,

man and wife
man and wife

placed in a gunfight with a pocket knife
and a guide to your expectation.
I don't remember filling out an application
to be your daughter,

I will love you
come hell or high water

but maybe if I had and you'd known
what you signed up for it wouldn’t hurt
that you can learn to hate me right
down to my wrist bones
and leave me alone in this fight.

Erased words,
with only the indentations on the paper left.
Placed on this planet to live to death.

Out of sight, out of mind
       except
I haven't seen you for a while
and I see you everywhere
in everything

The sun is setting in slant
rhymes and readings, outlining
the pride poets who stand in
front of the window in gold

thread. Those who listen
eat and laugh at their RESERVED
tables until the end of the catered
event, when the flag is draped

over the piano to soak up
a patch of dust and the
sun reaches to steady itself
on the horizon and the sky

purples— sometimes indifference
leaves a bruise.

Rainbow stickers and flags fade
to dusk hues as they
are folded into a Whole
Foods canvas

bag, minimizing space taken,
and nametags are peeled
off black shirts and blue jeans,
the lint sticking to the backs

of the names in the trash. The
sun ducks behind a mountain.
Colored stripes, prism rainbows
masked. Sweeping the floor. No
one is outlined anymore.

Hubble saw stars between stars and
there is more space all the time. Sometimes
things go in fine and come out far.
But what about us is getting more apart?
What about Einstein seeing the same
signature of space expansion as you?
What about couples who smell different
though they use the same shampoo?  
What about black boxes—does
the butterfly remember its cocoon?
Does a firefly see its own light? What about
dressing babies in clumsy shoes?
Do bare feet mean nothing to you?