Wake up. Stretch neck
left, then right. Swing legs
over edge of bed.
Water the plants. See
how they drink up another day
without question.

Hit me with that difference
between nodes and cores
and processors, between
being me and being sure.
Tell me again how to
calculate it, I missed the
first time, don’t shout--

remind me the difference
between comets and asteroids
and meteors, and how computers
and space are not the same
because to me it’s all voids--
the Perseids could be anything
as long as I get to watch
something else burn as it falls.

The bigger the tree in the front
yards I pass, the more my eyes
narrow, focused on the hunt.
If I’m quiet and choose my
moment just right, I can catch
the future I want. Don’t look
at me that way, like I’m all
the songs I haven’t sung.
I have only ever been young.

Next door the king who’d ****
a sorcerer on sight,
Merlin is living plain.
He nods at me on the street;
we know what secrets
can do to the sane.

A drop in the bucket,
a nail in the wall,
the wind lilts east
and an acorn falls.
A grain in the sand,
a change in the weather,
the wind shifts and
we are not together.

Just sit still. Look
out the window and wait
for the wind to change,
and the tornado will teach you
to feel relief when waking up
held by no one.

There is taking off
and there is jumping.
One for up and one
for down.
There is sitting in
a garage and there
is waiting, in its air,
to drown.
There is falling for love
and falling for gravity.
There is the clatter of
your fallen crown.

Falling in love?
Falling into the well that is love?
Falling free through space until you hit
the bottom of love?
Gasping for air and rubbing your neck
from the weight of the drop?
Climbing the perimeter of the pit
of love, eyeing the top?
And in a place like that,
what is there to do but try
to climb out, see what you’re made of?

In a moment of stress
I count the many ways to dream:
one, flying on a dragon’s back;
two, parent having heart attack;
three, dog chasing squirrel;
four, sun swallowing world;
five, duck in a witch hat;
six, her hair falls in curls.

What am I tethered to?
Anger? Distrust?
The tree will die
if you dig out the roots
but I’ll close my eyes
while you do
what you must.

Why are you trying to stay here?
At the bottom of my eyes is just
retina, muscle, gore.
Have you never seen the sky before?

My bones remind me
to love what can be broken
every time I stand

My heart reminds me
not everything that falls breaks
so I'll shake your hand

here we are, dangling
our feet over the edge
of the meantime,
here we are, sitting
on the edge, dangling
our feet over, letting
the cracked skin of our
fingertips skim the surface
of the meanwhile, waiting
for our reflections to break

Between the sun of my eyes
and the canvas of my eyelids
is the silhouette of you
which I must always look upon.
There is only dead.
There is no gone.

I’m collecting keys,
weighed with opportunities
that stretch my pocket

A foot slips on moss
from rock into water.
Like the phantom final
step at the top of the stairs,
the ground that’s not there
is my final monster.

The thing about doves
is that they’re pigeons.
The thing about grass
is that it itches.
The thing about love
is that it is made of glass
and not religion. Anyway,
I’ll see you after class

As adventurers prefer
hot air balloons to trains,

death is convenient
but I've found something better.

This time, please,
can we take it?

None of this over, no, not
start, not twiddle your thumbs
lined up for take off.
We only want the beginning
of the middle. To wake up
on a Saturday morning
instead of Sunday or whatever
the other options--maybe

she sees you back, wouldn't that
be nicer than standing
dripping de-icing fluid
on the tarmac,

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.

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.

There is a fine line
between wanting to
be healthy & happy
and wanting to take
up less space.
Wanting to be less.
Matter is neither
created nor destroyed
in the universe—
wanting to take
as little as possible
from the world,
wanting not to leave
a mark.

A fine line between the
BMI of activity & health
and being told that the
gaps in me are the
best parts.
The spaces I don’t fill.
The matter I don’t use.

I draw this line in the
sand, thin—with just the
very tip of a nail—
but the world screams
in protest at me until
my head aches, and it is
more relaxing just to
let the sea
reclaim the small
mark and wash it
back into
the universe.

So as a reminder to
myself I keep
drawing fine lines
on my mind and
on my skin, where
the world and time
can wash away
at it but I’ll still
have the mark
all to myself.

Maybe not the
world, but this
being is mine
and I am
welcome
in it.

The first time you flew you told the birds how unfair
it is that the air is so much thinner up here, that below
they have to breathe the crushing weight of the stratosphere
just because they’re accustomed to it, and your gasping
for breath doesn’t make any sound yet every day
you choose life,

man and wife
man and wife

placed in a gunfight with a pocket knife and a guidebook
of expectations. You don’t remember filling an application
for this, for now-flightless wings or for being this daughter

I will love you
come hell or high water

but the first time you landed you didn’t write a thing,
you just drank tea out of a paper cup, no mug in the sink,
no need for anyone to look up when she came home.  
The first time you used the key in this new house’s door
it fit so perfectly that you didn’t feel at home anymore.
The *** boiled even though you watched, and you drank
out of a paper cup and no one looked up, it was
biodegradable and then it was
gone.

The first time you flew.
The first time you really saw you.
The first time you heard that song called poison oak,
the first time you said what you meant to say,
the last time you spoke.

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

A schoolgirl, if you will,
in a fluid dress with fluent hair,
long, she’s probably blond
if we’re being honest,
and the dress is yellow too.
She hopes it is bright enough
to distort her vision.

She leaps in the rain,
but the water beads right
off her skin
long as she keeps her eyes down.

Moths swarm and settle
in her hair, mistaking it
for some sort of sunsilk.

It is the silk of her cocoon.

When she comes out
later, she sheds it all
with scissors.

Soon as the silk breaks
the water spills into her
but her lungs barely even whimper;
she has suffocated before,
and it hasn’t killed her yet.
People are waterproof;
water beads on skin.
It’s the dress they want her in
that makes the rain so public
and clingy.

But all the moths have drowned.
She kneels down,
bare knees on the concrete,
and picks up a wing
and lets it drifts to the ground.
Limp, listless flight,
more gentle than ever
the moths were in life.

The girl now
stomps on the wing,
scolding herself under her breath
just quiet enough to forget
that she is alive.
Like a knife she twists her heel
and rips the waterlogged wing
into fractals of nothing.
She knows there are some things
she should never find beautiful,
like death,
or girls.

The sun catches her fallen hair.
With fingers that boil
it offers her molten gold
as compensation for the world.

On the back of a receipt written
in a language I don’t understand,
detailing a currency I don’t use,
I sketch hands holding each other.
I can’t get the fingers to intertwine
properly so I don’t know
what the point is.

The texture of your skin
that’s so impossible to catch
is just a mess of atoms like the rest of us
and it makes the cabin pressure hit my heart
a little too hard, besides.
Flying doesn’t feel very free.

Below me, streetlights flicker in alleys,
sketch out silhouettes of strangers
that could be a little frightening
but from here they resemble ursa major
twinkling,
and the continent is a pond
reflecting the sky.
Even the city gets prettier
the farther from it I get.

With all that air between us
I am the color of Orion,
neither white nor blue and not quite light,
the color of a dandelion that knows
it is a **** but hasn’t the heart
to turn away from the little girl collecting it
in a fistful of wildflowers.

And with all that air between us
and all that way to fall without you
I find that for someone who must try so hard
to want the rest of my life,
I am awfully scared of missing it.

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.

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.

Here’s something about watching birds:
you become them.
You become the heron slim and silent,
walking on her toes.
You become the crow who just for fun
slides down a pitched roof after snow.
You become the seagull who can’t lift
her wings for the weight of the oil.
You become the robin looking over her shoulder,
hopping lightly, not taking off
until she knows you’re coming closer.
You become the hawk’s focused soar,
the vulture’s misshapen roar, the finch’s stutter,
the kestrel’s hover, the hummingbird’s all of a flutter.
When I cannot speak, you ask me what is wrong.
I am full of birds, I mutter.

I ache with how much I want to do nothing.
I want to listen to someone else sing,
and live in someone else's life with my legs
crossed until they go numb, the dregs
at the bottom of my mug unnoticed and the
feeling gone, focusing on living unfocused.

I want to hear someone else speak silently, I
don't want to say a word, and when one defiantly
speaks out loud I want the sound to be blurred like
my vision because I've left my glasses on a stack
of books somewhere and I don't want to see
anything farther away than what's in front of me,
don't want to hear anything that makes noise,
nothing that destroys,
only things that build the life of another,
I want to cover my mind with yours and live under
it for a while, stumbling through my life blindly
because yours is right against my eyes, so close
I can hardly see,
and I want us to live like that, blind, tucked away,
you and me.

The young Earth sleeps a fitful sleep.
Her oceans, rivers, dreams grow deep.
Her people shout and she can’t wake
Until her fitful fever breaks.

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.

I had my phase of finding things
and picking them up,
of wanting to turn them in
but not having the courage,
a little butterfly charm at the bottom
of the pool and I was always
scared to put that much pressure
on my ears but someone
was missing their wings
so I dove,
and I was missing wings too
so I came up sputtering and coughing
and afraid to talk to anyone
with the authority of Lost and Found
so I left my conscience drowned
and the wings closed in a fist.

And I found another thing, a
butterfly charm again,
mocking me,
and I stayed up and hoped
the guilt would fly away
but 'social  butterfly' is a misnomer.

I had my phase of refusing to eat
anything inside of which I couldn’t see

even grapes had to be peeled
and I would marvel at the spiky lines
tearing through each one,
angry veins
in something so soft and sweet

my raisins and my juice
my Friday-night wine substitute
seemed so childish to me
until I knew about the spikes
and watched as they grew
inside myself

I had my phase of being me,
and it is isolating and spiky
and you don't like it

I am drawing lines
in the sky.
A carefully engineered
map of whys,
of stars connected
by thin pencil lines

stars are exploding light
but you are graphite,
(the pencil lead but
insight)
conducting the chaos,
in your element.
Stability that can hold
the heat,
and diamonds are tough
but they are just carbon
and you are so
much more.

The clouds crouch low over
San Francisco, and they are deciding
between blanket and weather.
They do not know whether to be
comfort or a cold matter of fact.
They do not want you to look back and
sea provides the cold, air provides
the hot, the marine inversion
the Atlantic never had.
Have you ever said things confidently
without being sure? Have you ever asked
about her faith and listened to the answer,
say, the number of beads,
without being sure,
but knowing she was? So at least
that makes you sure of something.
Have you ever heard music
in a public place and felt that foggy weight--
what does it take to dance anymore?
What is that extra oomph it takes
to get your arms above your head?
What is the difference
between fog and dead?
The joke is that I don't remember.

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.

Admittedly, the beginning of this is not a poem. It is a link to a video that everyone in the world needs to see. The poem follows.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ROXTFfkcfo&list;=PL9ABB2F7C182BA1D8

this way people can see
because when the roles
are reversed, everything feels
wrong. you are suddenly
trapped in a world that is not
right. everywhere you turn, the
wrongness is blatant to you.
but not to them. to them it
is normal, a vague term,
an existential-crisis-invoking
term. but what do.

that is how it is. in a normal
world, the normalness surrounds
and suddenly it is like being trapped
underneath a bell jar of a dream
and everyone is acting like nothing
is wrong, but maybe they are just messing
with your fragile mind. because shouldn't
it be the other way around?

wait, what?

it's like everyone got the memo
except you and not a single
soul will share it with you,
because you should have gotten
the **** thing yourself,
and nothing makes sense, how
can they all think feeling this way
is so normal, it's reversed, it must be,
nothing makes sense and no one
will explain and some people feel
like that all the time.

what can you do
when no one is there

nothing. you can do
nothing. you must
be strong and you must
wait and you must
know that someone
is coming, someone must
come.

you must do nothing.
that way, you can stay
alive

for something.

no one in the water yet.
the smell of chlorine cuts
the noise, which is so loud
you can hardly remember why
everyone is here.
shadows step on you,
the pressure growing as
the sun sinks. you want
to sink with it.
instead, you outrun the noise
and you dive.

You slice the water, slash it, push it
behind you, but it never fights back.
You slide through the water and it
caresses you softly, as though
it has been clinging to the sunlight
all day, just for you.
You cup your little fingers, hands
slapping the surface. The sounds
of the people and their shadows
alternate with the fast-moving silence

of underwater.
At the deep end of each lap the ground
falls away, but you feel safe.
Air would have let you fall.
With each breath you are more eager
to plunge back into the warm
support of water. Breathing
is a hassle.
When your limbs ache with a pleasant
soreness you cannot ignore, you drag

yourself out of the water.
Gently, it tries to pull you back.
The rippling splashes fade into
Where they come from. Whatever
you throw at it, water can heal
its own scars.
His scars would not
heal. Water is the universal solvent,
and he needed to dissolve.
You don’t know him.

You know only the cold hand that
reached into your heart
and twisted it,
painfully, on its axis as you watched
Grandmother’s eyes when she
mentioned him, in passing,
by accident.

But the noise,
then the silence—
you can understand
why he wanted this.

It was the faint smell of chlorine
on your skin; that’s
what reminded her.
Not five minutes after your
wet hair had begun to dry,
her tears spilled over and
ran down her cheek.

(Fight or flight,
air or water.)

You told her
they were there
to stroke her face.

Why is there so much sugar
in cake? Why do we never notice
mosquitoes on our skin
until it's too late? How do some
butterflies travel farther
than some birds? How
have you not heard me?

How come an eagle always
soars overhead the minute
my camera dies? How come
it's so easy to lie?

How can the lake look so much
like an ocean, but I
always just look like me?

A cloudy sky offers so much
more than a clear one--
more texture, more tough.
There's not much salt in
Lake Michigan, but
there's probably some, right?
That's gotta be true?

I'm sorry I like you.

I ache

smiles glow like mobile little campfires
warming the room
comfy, cozy. home.
you are home in this place, because they're here.

arms wrap around shoulders and hug
them tight
comforting, together.
you belong here, because they're here.

eyes closed in laughter one minute
sparkling with care the next
depth, affection.
you are loved here more than anywhere, because they're here.

you breathe the air and taste the
sweetness of familiar voices,
snuggle into the cadences and timbres
instantly recognizable as
belonging.

this is a special place,
this place where you belong.
this place where you're together.

like an old favorite blanket
you have given the memory to me
of belonging with you
to wrap around my shoulders and
hug close when I am touched
by the chilling fingers
of sadness.

I ache
because I miss it, yes
but mainly because
it is such a beautiful thing
it hurts.

Oh, people.
Always saying something
different than they mean.
Always covering themselves
and then rolling up the sleeves--
that happens, I believe.

In a row, three
generations of prayer. Your
forehead greets the floor

the way chipmunks touch
noses, but Nanu gets a chair.

Imagine how scared the stars
must have been the first
night they couldn’t see her.

Silk whispers messages
from the rug to your hands,
from Nanu’s feet and mother’s head

to your hands, and the crickets call
to you to say—

we know Nanu has made her
vows and we sing
and we sing with you.

They understand about the chair,
do not want to see
her flicker and fall

is coming with its fallen leaves
so 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 New York City skyline
from across the water;
sunsets at sea;
the shadows of clouds
shifting over treetops;
my sisters wishing on
a shooting star;
the sunrise over the desert
from a hot air balloon;
the warmth and light of a
campfire as the voices rise
into the sky with the embers.

And I have tallied up these
beautiful things and kept
tabs on them, memories like
index cards in my mind, labeled,
categorized, logical, the way
I like my things to be:
landscape, cityscape, skyline,
harmony, melody, warmth,
friendship

and then somewhere in the back
of the drawer is a folder, a
category that is not a category
and it is spilling into the
other categories and it
is disorder and the absence
of order, the incapacity to
categorize beautiful things

overflowing, not logically

and then, there's *you

I hear you tell
me I’m the trash
your college roommate
forgot to take
out on garbage day.

        Now this will sit
        here for another week,
        in our kitchen,
        where we eat our food.

are you mad?

        It’s fine.

        It’s settled.
        I have resigned
        myself to you.

As a mother pulls
her little
girl’s arms into a dress,
the Gunnery Sergeant pulls
his dog into war.

The difference is the dog
is permitted dirt under
her nails, is allowed to
gallop ahead, to tuck tail

at an unfamiliar scent, and
feel the scales lurch with
every foot until she swings
her head around, sees the up
in flames ringing soundless

red of a step taken but
not had. The weight
of a limb lighter, fur lit
to sizzling with the pride
of protecting you,

Sergeant. The dog is given
rest with her nose on her paw
and honor in limping
forward to collect
something else that marks
her neck as someone else’s.

Whatever Maria Dickin had
in mind, her medal pulls
at the throat and
it’s not even edible.