you held me through every phase
of favorite
with one hand on my stomach
like you were teaching your
child how to swim
through pools of myself that I
hadn't learned

purple first, I casually declared,
and you nodded and smiled, baby's
first favorite,
and when I screamed and cried that
we had to move houses you
made sure the next one
had purple walls and frilly purple
curtains to hide away the other
options and keep me floating
above regret

then green, you didn't know where
I'd picked that one up
but you'd raised me with one supportive
hand underneath and the other
holding back my wrist so I
wouldn't write words in green ink
on the walls
so I sank down a level closer
to whatever you were holding me
from but it didn't matter
because you'd lift me through it,
because the blinds behind the
curtains were green, more
and more layers between
me and other things,
and a green blanket for the bed
so I could hide in an island of
me surrounded by the raging
sea
of some girl I used to be

then yellow, orange. you nodded
and smiled,
any color was fine, you
held me right through them all,
we were so far from that first house
with the white walls
where I hadn't any favorites
but now I fall, and you'd held me and
hid me through so much
and you can practically touch
the colors in the air
when you walk into this room
now,
I wish I knew how
you managed to hold me through
all that change when I can
barely keep myself in the lane
of existence,

I'm swimming on my own now.

I don't know when you let go,
but one day I became me
with all my past phases in tow
and no matter what I picked you
treated it like something legitimate
and I took it for granted,
enchanted by colors but now
I've landed,
and the layers you built were between
me and myself
and you hid me well.
I'm sorry that existence is a phase,
sorry mine is too heavy
for you after all those temporary
colors you held me through.
how many favorites you held me
hold up but I guess I never liked
my in-between colored eyes enough
so you didn't support me through
me and it's my fault,
give me all the weight back and
I'll try to show you the difference
between a phase that ends with unwritten
words on a wall and a phase that is
an existence
so you don't have to be burdened by
me while I learn to swim with myself

this town was bare when I left it
and green when I got back
but green isn't my favorite color
anymore

Rain magnified the words
on the page and then drifted
away, taking bits of them
with it; ink swirled and
dissolved in the drops
that soaked into the earth.

There are worse ways to
have your copy grow faded,
crumpled pages;

like a child in the meadow
of a fairytale I dance in
circles as the rain comes down,
because water is constantly
cycling.

There is, within the confines
of this planet, literally no
limit to where this rain could
be from.

I could be dancing
in a shower
of words

The silicon in sand is learned
by crystal system, organized
into branches and the seed
crystal is cubic imagine
diamonds in the grains
imagine cut
against the grain a glass tree
doesn't know enough
of crystal symmetry to grow
back imagine it opens
a book leaves to pages
to learn only half
how to help the other
half how to dissociate
ions scattered across the earth
crust never enough.
This is how sand is made.

The skin on my fingertips is cracking.
I washed all the dishes by hand.
I dried them and stacked them
and put them away.
I walk on the wall between honest and kind.
I wait for the film to unwind,
or become exposed.
The darkroom is where I first
taught my heart to close.
To add the sulfate and turn on the bulb
so the picture wouldn't change,
the way turning on the light
doesn't knock over the first domino.
How your arms rise from your sides
when you skip, a bird taking flight.
How you lie on your stomach
to photograph a seagull.
How do you love two people?
When I close one part,
the cracks form somewhere else.
I walk on the wall between honest and kind.
It is seven feet tall.
I throw an arm out to either side for balance
but it reminds me of you,
so I fall to the right.

Books recommend people to me.
I scan spines of every person and
every book I see,
just waiting to find you.

As an exercise in moving-on
I am looking for you in new
places because the old one
is hidden in a sea of faces
with smiles like they can see
I've made a wrong move and
are about to point out the error
to me to spare me the shame
even if it means they will lose
the game.

I can bear that look in any
face but yours.
So for you I tore
a length of orange ribbon
and tied it around the lid
of a jar and littered the bottom
with scraps of paper,
small scraps for small things,
pieces of poetry you didn’t
think I had that I was scared
was just the you in me, so I’m
sealing them in a jar to be
distorted by the glass
until 2015.

You are a story in thriving rising action.
This year is my character development.
Next year I will open the jar
and let the poem scraps spill
like ink into the sky,
like snowflakes flying light
and weighing down the wings
of birds in flight
and I will see if I can shake
off the snow and let the ink
flow into cohesive phrases.

The goal here is to be worthy
of you
but not for you.
While you rise I’ll rise behind you
and I’ll just follow
where you lead
until I swerve.
I cut the hair you once
ran your fingers through
today.
It looks the same.

So as an exercise in moving-on
I am looking for you in new places
because you are gone.

If we stop learning moon names at Callisto
and Ganymede, where are the other sixty-three
whoop, there goes gravity
If Themisto stubbed his toe, how could we
teach everyone else to cringe?
We are growing,
Elara, we are learning how to reach
higher with the hands we’ve got,
how to be tiny dots full of not-quite fire
in a world so much bigger than desire.
The best advice you gave me,
Elara, was when you silently tied back
your hair and rolled up your sleeves,
cleared your throat and decided
It’s not the fire after all, it’s the light.
And I might have burned out by now
if you hadn’t just rolled up your sleeves
like that, not flaming or fuming or
running or burning but steady,
ready for the rest of forever.
You are fire and water at once,
Elara. You take my hand and we walk
calmly upward, one step
for me and one for you makes two
for womankind.
Stepping over the black hole
of expectations and into the revelations
of well-lit night. You and me,
Elara, now we’re ready.

Alaska is the largest united state. Jupiter
is the largest planet in our system. Yours
is the brightest eye in the darkroom,
loudest boot-soles in the hallway, a real
sonic boom of a presence. I like
to see you taking up space. Weaving
the lanyard through your fingers as you
swing your keys, chains colliding over
and again bringing you home. I like
to be there when you return. Green
walls, eight paws, books strewn and notes
scrawled--I like the signs that you live
here. I like the volume you occupy. Demand
a kiss when you burn your lip. Unzip
your coat and hang it on the back of your
chair because you live here. I like to see
Jupiter's cyclone hasn't shrunk it and
your storm hasn't stopped you.
Think of space, and then take it.

Each day I wake up younger
than I was the day before,
Look around with open eyes,
knowing less and learning more.
I tilt my head to understand
the tide that eats the shore,
And at night I sleep well knowing
that I don't know the score.

thirteenth north and left on third,
climb the hill,
confuse the bluebirds with the jays

and orion with aries,
a fumbling through
everything you love.

and when you've burnt it once
and can't forgive,
consider this:

the soufflé is not the soufflé
but the recipe

And then one day you spoke
and I had nothing to say.
Free, just like that.
Oh how the lightness
starts to weigh.

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.

Little gold arms and legs
dance below a little
fake diamond head.
Little gold chain around
my neck that had been
around yours instead.
Little gold ribbon around
the box,
long thin gray box
with the little gold person
inside.

I don't know what
you are trying to tell
me but I know what
I'm hearing.

You wanted a man
for me but you gave
it to me in a coffin,
thin and gray like
my soul,
but your ribbon outside
was alive and gold.

The ruby heart-red body
was fake.
So I can't accept
your dead concept
of man,
but the least I can do
is move the little gold
arms and legs
and thank you.

I read books and had the practice
wedding in Sunday school, where Benjamin
got to break the glass with his foot
while I watched--I watched films, I knew
what I looked forward to. As sure
as I knew my baby teeth would fall
out. But unprepared for five years old,
when my first loose tooth fell in.
Not me and him but me
and Sandrita, little milagra, on the swings,
she knocked into me and the tooth was
swallowed whole and nothing to show for it.
I had the tooth fairy pegged from day one--
how would she have have known to look
for the empty promise under my pillow?
Now every time you stretch your neck
to glance up at the moon, hair behind
your ear, roll up one sleeve and then
the other, every time I fall again to five,
unblinking eyes, something shatters and I have
to run my tongue over the gap in my gums,
leave a note for my mother so she can see
her girl smile gap-toothed for the fairy
who will never come. You tilt your head
towards me and I must take the promise
of the broken glass beneath Benjamin's foot
and swallow it whole.

Absentminded speech.
You had taken the scissors from the basket
in the darkroom, they were just
still in your hands, the ones
not covered in rust.

It was absentminded, that part
is important. Just absentminded,
like the way you'd play
with her hair or pretend not
to care,
like the way you'd talk with
your hands even when the
darkness spoke louder. The way
you'd nudge me, a "don't move"
elbow, to let me know you'd
dropped your film and I shouldn't
step for fear of stepping on it
like the shadows did.

I absentmindedly twirled a pen,
and you absentmindedly looked
down again and again,
scissors open, scissors closed,
running your fingers over
the little ***** between the blades
as I ran my fingers
over a little ink drawing I'd made.

You absentmindedly followed
my eyes with your own, and then
threw absentminded to the smoke,
up and out the window and gone,
and the smooth blade up and down
your arm.
It wasn't sharp. It couldn't even
cut the film. That's how you'd
dropped it in the first place.

Still watching my eyes, my dawning worry.
Oh, you. Ignorance reduced me
to child and pity before your
knowing eyes, but what do.
You know me, I know you.

A deliberate story now (absentminded
can't be filtered out of the smoke anymore),
of a girl you used to know.
Something to do with little screws
in every pocket of every
long-sleeved shirt she owned.
They had to be from something cheaper,
you mused. Mindedly.
Scissors don't come in bulk.
Little screws. Not razors, not knives.
Little screws.
You thought out loud, but it wasn't
thought. It was speech. It was
words you already knew.
Where'd they all come from?
You asked questions to give me
the answers.

I reached out for those ****
bright green plastic scissors
that wouldn't cut a piece
of film in a darkroom, because
fear gives light great powers.
You smiled at the anxiety in my
eyes. You chose then to stumble
upon the answer. (It wasn't scissors.)
To relieve me, you meant.You
meant to share without telling,
to lighten my head and dissipate
the ignorance like your
absentminded smoke.
You knew a girl...

But when you put knowledge
in this mind it gets picked up
and circled around and around,
centripetal acceleration, exponentially
flying, so fast, so high, what do I
do with it there. I build it up.
It tears me down.

I scanned your wrists for months.
I watched you pull your wallet out
of your pocket, checking the floor for
little screws.

You knew, ******. You knew
your wrists would stay smooth
as a scissor blade, smooth as
darkness. You gave me the story
deliberately, but you gave me the
answer absentmindedly.

You didn't mean to.
You gave me the worry,
you gave me the thought.

You didn't tell me where to find
a ******* screwdriver.

And you think
no one will know
to put change in this cup
because it is empty.

The rain hitting
the paper of it
doesn’t sound the same
as the clinking coins of yesterday.

A child skips across
the bridge, outrunning
her raincoat, ahead of mother,
does one and then another

double take because she
does not want her raincoat
anyway, wants to feel
water bead on skin,

she falls back and takes it
from mother’s outstretched hands
and tosses it to the folded ones
of the man.

She has one pound
to spend today, mother may
I?

No.

Mother, why?

You watch her little hands
ball into fists,
her eyes cloud with mist
that melts into the rain.

You watch mother open a door,
watch a wind tunnel batter
the chandelier ornaments,
they clink like wind chimes or coins.

The child safely inside,
mother’s eyes glare back,
fear without reason,
they shout
*I want that raincoat back.

the person who doesn’t have
any reason at all
is the person with the farthest
to fall

don’t patronize me,
it’s the fire station across
the street
that doesn’t have any open doors

and the pack of people
on the road
making a solid wall of liquid drinks
     (once more unto the breach)
in some big show

that I can’t pass through.
where are you

and which one of us
is here

i.
as we get bigger
our handwriting gets
smaller

ii.
stars are bigger than
the sky itself
but their light forces
the past into the present
and forces our wishes
into the past

iii.
there are so many
women out there with
my name but
this increases the likelihood
that you've said it
out loud
and identified me
with sound as i have
you
sound travels slower
than light but we are never
alone

iv.
she showed me your
picture with some words
square tight around it
and two dates in the caption
and said
nothing is ever worth this
until i wanted to reach
into the earth just to
cover your ears

v.
the dementors couldn't
distinguish between crouch
and his mother because
this illness doesn't discriminate
so i don't know why
people do

vi.
you and even
i
are lowercase letters
today
with no punctuation

i.
it takes the end of a death
(because death is where things start)
to realize how important it is
to lie down with heads close
and look at you falling asleep
across the way
with the same combination of
reds and greens
on your shelf as on mine
across the way

ii.
i don’t know you

iii.
i miss you

iv.
how do you measure a year
or the two years you steered
through the halls like you
knew them
or the two years i didn’t know
them but steered through anyway
and why am i still here

v.
there is punctuation now,
pauses and stops,
organization and fear

On the backs of receipts
and physics formula sheets
I've been drawing compasses.
Needles pointing randomless,
concentric circles, shaky lines
creeping outside their contours
and I don't need you to tell me
I'm an amateur.
I already can't
find my way.

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.

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 noise yet
every day you choose life,

man and wife
man and wife

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

I will love you
come hell or high water

and the first time you flew
you heard birds laugh at you
and the air was so thin
you fell right through,
and the silence so thick
you landed hard,
lungs aching,
but you were never afraid of the dark,

in the high water
watch out for sharks

because you aren’t one for stark
contrasts and it’s nice to feel
like nothing at all,
keep falling.

The first time you didn’t
write a poem you 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 your new house’s door
it fit so perfectly that you didn’t feel
at home anymore,
and the first time you were afraid of the dark
you weren’t,
because it can’t get you
if it can’t see you’ve left any mark.

The first time you didn’t
write a poem the *** boiled
even though you watched,
and you drank tea 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.

If showers are man-made rain, then
you are a man-made hurricane,
obliterating everything in its path
while people take photographs
and storm-chasing is a sport
that people will die for
and storms are named after people.

This is a lightly used copy of Nancy Drew.
This is an eraser shaped like a softball.
This is a bit of unraveled tennis racket grip.
This is an empty paper picture frame–
this is the picture that went in it.

I leave them all down south. Here,
I have only what I need:
the books, the periodic tables on the walls,
the dried leaves she collected for me
and had laminated last fall.
The star charts and on the top
shelf the glass jar of dead roses.
The little drawings she left me
on the backs of receipts, the graphs
of crystal shapes and symmetries.

I have only what I need now.
I am surrounded by me,
having survived my youth, ready
to start telling the truth.

This is a string of beads with half
a heart in the middle.
This is the remnant of a joint collection
of bobble-head turtles;
these are the heads that have fallen off.

Now look how much farther
they can see.

People are full of fire,
you told me.
You said that people glow red,
their eyes full of stars that are
bigger than them, chain reactions
refracting and exploding light,
because when people are infinitely
small in the universe they fight back.
They sharpen their words with their teeth,
until swords are glistening, ready
to keep out ghosts blistering
in the heat, get out stay out,
this soul will collect and over-
flow with fire, will burn
like the sun that started it all,
will fight back,
white hot, on track,
for the right to stand tall.

I lit a candle to show you
how the hottest part of flame
is actually blue, but
you blew it out and flicked your wrist
and sent it flying high as your far-flung
hopes and you sat with me through
the darkness, ghosts gone, we are
glowing red, we are fiery and content
to sit among what we can’t see.

luck is like gold.
196.967 grams per mole.

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

Kids will be kids
and boys will be boys.
We’re not who we are
and we don’t share toys.
Most days I can think
of yet better things
to paint and to trace
than my face, but that
acrylic blue, they tell me
I’ll rue the day
I let it highlight
my fingerprints
so well.
And so by fall, I  
am scrubbing my hand
off the bedroom wall.  
There are spikes inside
my unpeeled grapes,
in my father’s wine
and mother explains
about seeds and vines
but I forget, ask,
say it again, please,
she says write it down
instead and I tried
but I can never
find a pen.

Tell me about myself.
The way you’d explain to the moon
why bits of it sometimes go dark,
tell me what I’m waiting for when I
go still in the dog park. Tell me how
my silence sounds when everything
is muffled and magnified by air
full of snow and empty space. In a
shuddering state of icicles inquiring
ice, as the shards fall into the vacuum
below and shatter outward, as they circle
your head and orbit your mind, seeing
the whole thing from the outside,
check your privilege.
To the rest of the sky, the moon
is always whole,
so before you ask me,
you know what? You know
what? Just this once, please,
you tell me.

What does distance really do? I don't feel
like I need you now that I've been balanced
with only my own arms raised
at my sides, my questions asked, my
physics written out in chalk, my palms
wiped on my jeans. I can do without
Rube Goldberg machines.

Was I supposed to miss you more? What
is distance even for? And be honest,
are you really shocked that I would doubt
what I want? On every Apollo mission,
two men walked on the moon
and the third one waited in orbit.

All right, you’re pretty. But more specifically,
you are falling snow, crystalline in the street,
muffling motorcycle engines and businessmen,
falling, falling up and all around,
you skip along the shoulder of a forest road
snow falling up but still covering the ground.
Whimsy but efficient.
The sun sets to back down.
You smile and he wraps his tail around
his paws and tilts his head at your feet,
how was he to know?
He flattens his ears and looks down
so that you may rise with all
the glow and murmur of the moon,
a bulb of sun draped with a lampshade of snow,
snow falling up, moon may rise
during sunset, the sun can’t succeed
even half as well as you can try.

Away from the city I see Alcyone
and all the bright things I didn't know
existed,
and girl have I missed it.
At the pediatrician's office my mother
told me there was nothing
the doctor could do about my
anxious palms, no salve to cover
it, just keep rubbing them on my jeans
and raise my hand in class
with blue dye on the sides where
other kids have graphite but
you say you like the way my hands shine.
Our fingers, intertwined.

This place, its color saturates
when you return to it.
A cosmic ghost playing
a cosmic joke, waking up,
propping himself lazily on an elbow
in bed, casually sliding up
the brightness of the universe
like he does it every day, like he
was born to it, when really
we were.

I am not a moth
but I fly to other flames
moths do not feel shame

Space all fills up with futures
that flow between the cracks
of everything like water:

everything is murky thick
with what we could have had,
bay windows and granddaughters.

I swim through the parallel universe
in which you and I hold up
your father’s old desk between us,

tilting it to follow the bend
of the stairs and leaning it to rest
against the wall of our new place,

aching with the weight of it
and with the possibilities for how
we’ll organize ourselves together
in this new space.

An apartment that is empty
but not hollow.

Eating takeout on the floor
and imagining the bookshelves
we’ll build tomorrow.

acquaintances pass
and eyes meet
instinct happens
       (heartbeat)
because maybe all
they need is a
smile
you didn't know
you remembered
how to do that

I'm thinking of events that require name tags.
The first day of camp. College visits, and orientations.
Conferences. Mock United Nations.
I'm thinking of hearing parties through glass
and turning the fan on for the noise.
I'm thinking of trying to think about boys.
I'm thinking of driving from Illinois
to Indiana to Ohio and watching the terrain
stay the same. I'm thinking the check
engine light is on. And I should get a new
lock for the back door. And fill out a W-4.
I'm thinking of how intense a crush
would feel to a binary star.
I'm thinking of the oceans people are.
I'm thinking, what is it with poets
and the sky?
Why do people hide? How many strokes
can I take without a breath?
What other kinds of sentences are there?
Are we there yet?

I’ve learned that in the morning
light is liquid, flowing golden,
and I’ve learned that in the ocean
every motion turns to fluid,
and fish glide, learn how birds fly,
and their eyes are always open.

I’ve learned that if you stand
in the belfry when the bells ring
you can hear them in your heart
like when she calls you and the phone sings.
And I’ve learned that when you’re hoping,
light is lighter, clearer, brighter
and I’ve heard that you can see it
with eyes open

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

In a land without hills
there are as many bicycles
as people.
There is a synagogue
with a steeple.
For every boy on a swing
there swings a man
on a pendulum,
explaining Illinois to you
like he invented it.

why is it that everything about heartbreak
sounds like a cliche

heartbreak is not cliche
it is different for everybody
it is the most personal thing
and the most painful

it demands  time
and space
and respect

it effects each person
so differently, so
profoundly,
and while only those
who have experienced
it can claim to understand,
even they cannot claim
to understand fully

or maybe people are just
so self centered, inherently,
that each assumes her
heartbreak to be the
deepest.
and how lonely it is
to be experiencing more
pain than all those surrounding
you.

just the sort of heart-wrenching
loneliness one wants
to wallow in
in times of heartbreak

my hands are still
soft from rolling dough
in sugar,
still smell faintly
of cinnamon and nutmeg

cardamom and clove
spiral upward in
the smoke from black
tea, a warmth
inside to mingle
with the smoke of
fire

I have nutmeg hands
and chai-campfire lungs

I am warm-scented
steam in an empty
orange sweater

I am the poem

Raw
egg whites cling
to your hands,
you won’t wash them away,
the smell of dish soap
still tastes like flinching
away from your mother
the first time you cursed
and she tried
to clean you.

The back of the bottle
says Dawn is just a base,
with a mild pH,
if swallowed, simply
dilute
by downing water.

You won’t wash your
hands by drowning.

They are still soft
from rolling dough
in sugar,
the whites retaining
everything you touch,
cinnamon and nutmeg,
cardamom and clove,

everything warm
you learned from her,
the command of the kitchen,
the heat of your skin
under her quick palm,

the heat that concentrates
in the steam
of the boiling water,

black tea,

and you burn your lip
and your mother kisses it
and you gasp in the smoke
with your chai-stained lungs
and you hug her
with your nutmeg hands
to which every spice has clung.

the only place left to go is up
so I lick the syrup
from my fingers and drive north,
but every time I leave this place
behind it doesn’t stay;
it relays back and forth
between my head and the
thick rope that ties it to the back
of the car where it scrapes
against the road
and bounces between
the back tires and
the north star,
which you pointed out to me
once on a night
when it wasn’t the brightest
in the sky.

you stood behind me and pointed up
and I heard your hand move
and saw your voice rise
and questions knocked this place
out of my mind until
a child
tugged on my sleeve
and I came tumbling down,
pulled along
by the sheer weight
of here.

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.

Where does pumpkin pie go
to die
in the spring, when everything
smells like pollen or else nothing,
air conditioning sterilizing the air
into bits while everyone sits stuck
to their chairs and
if there’s a scent in the room
someone asks what’s gone wrong
but scent is right sight is
blind he couldn’t
smell carbon monoxide

Nothing comes to life in the spring,
it springs back to life
it wasn’t dead, it’s
back, from dormancy, it wakes
up,
and everyone knows the dream
is better than the reality

But in the season of warm pies
when air smells of cold,
I can taste the snow and I can
taste the sky,
and everything is bright
and snow appears to swirl not down
but up all around and your eyes are
just the shade of brown
that can
probably smell cardamom, or
cinnamon spiraling in chai and
he smelled warm fire and cool
sky and it kept him alive
and olfaction, olfaction
the only sense we can’t remember
technically
with neurons but we hold it anyway
because sight is blind
and come May—

it wasn't snowing yet, but they'd told us it would.
probably I said something infantile, about how
I could smell it, the frostiness of snowflakes in the
air, because you smiled that knowing smile of yours,
like you were an adult and i was a child and you
didn't have the heart to take my innocence away.

that look always made my heart smile, sadly, and
it also drove me up a wall, partly because it made
me want to hug you close and pity you the
burden of assumed moral superiority, and whisper
that you, too were a child. but mostly because you
were right— I clung to my naiveté while you, you
had already had the good sense to push it away.
it followed you around with sad puppy eyes, but
you knew it and you kept it at arm's length.
you brave, brave soul.

when it did start to snow I wasn't surprised. you
were. you didn't say anything. we were in
a deserted school hallway, listening, removed
from the other kids' cries. we were
delighted too, but the others wanted to run home
early, and we knew the definition
of home better than they. and I can speak only for
myself but it seemed we both wanted only to stay
forever side by side, tucked away in our corner,
me reveling in the softness of love and friendship
and winter, you trying to be there with me but having
trouble leaving your mind, where that sad-eyed
puppy snapped at your heels. it whimpered
but you held your own.

and slowly, we built up moments like this one.
we wallowed in each other and in the coziness
of cloudy days. we read good poetry and
heard good music and took photographs as we
discussed life from our  softer world.
there were moments of such pure white happiness
that they came full circle to being sad,
simply because I knew I would never be that
happy again, and I was not wrong, and I didn't
want to be. and we had
sad moments, too, never ever think I am not
happy to be sad with you.

and slowly, too, your innocence knew its
defeat, and sat obediently at your feet,
and we shared things.
but I was a child, and a weak one at that, and
God knew I was not as strong as you so she
gave me no great suffering to speak of, to
share with you. no way to reciprocate the
vulnerability you gave, and that in
itself was suffering for me.

I regret that I was not good at saying things.
that while
you had to be your own adult and push childhood
away, I clung hopelessly to mine as
I discovered me and watched it slip
from my small hands.

among the plethora of reasons I can give for
bitterly hating sunny days is the
way the sun slanted through the window and lit
up your eyes and swilled particles around
your face like fairy dust on the day you reached
out and pulled my lanyard over your own neck.
look, you said, content. almost proud.
I'm wearing a bit of you around my
neck, and you wove it through your
sunlit fingers, eyes bright. you tugged on it,
lightly. that's what love does, it strangles
you. and we all want it.

and I gasped at the way that word sounded,
so harsh in such beautiful sunlight on such
a soft face. but I don't want to strangle
you. I said that. thoughtlessly,
instinctively. I regret it every day. in that regard,
you gave me a strength, but it's no german shepherd—
you are so **** strong.

when your ache tugged and tugged at you,
tore you from reality, or brought you closer to it,
it slipped its finger into that lanyard knot. loosened it.
I could have reached out right then, as you had when you
pulled the sun-soaked string over your head, and
tightened it. tightened us. been a friend.

I didn't tug the knot. if you run.
when you run,
I know that two grown dogs
will follow after you, blocked
from the sun by your receding shadow.

I'd drive down that road
still laughing at a joke,
with the ghost of a smile on
my face from seeing a friend's
smile,
grumpily silent after failing
a test,
grudgingly alright after a
stressful lab.
always on the road, headed home.
I can complain about the heat
and the south and the suffocation
and the big, impersonal town
till I'm blue in the face
but it's where my house is, even
if it's not home, and it's beautiful
sometimes.

I cross the intersection just as the light
flashes yellow
and in the rearview cars spill out
where I've been not a second before.
the action gets smaller as I get
farther away.
I am leaving, and everything is covering
the ground where I've passed
like nothing is different
because nothing is different.
we pass through intersections
every day.
we have to get where we're going.
we leave things behind.
sometimes we don't come back.
intersecting lines that never
cross again.
parallells would be different;
to not know what you're missing.

members are stronger
in tension than in compression.
once in tension, always in tension.
pulling separate ways
destined to long
from afar.

we pass through.
we cross over.

sometimes we don't come back.

I can't stand that.

The side of my face
that was facing the sun
knows about being burned
slowly by a loved one.

life is contradictions, and love is contradictions.
both are complicated enough to give you a
headache but really they’re the simplest
things in the world. they are like the warm
weather; it sneaks up on you slowly and
it’s pleasant and soft and bright, optimistic
it caresses your skin so you might as well
go outside and you run along and you feel
the pain as you gasp for breath and you
push harder because you want your muscles
to be sore, to ache for days after this one,
you want to be reminded of this moment
and it is a painful moment, you want the
pain but you’re too cowardly to inflict it
yourself. so maybe if you appear to be
chasing a goal you can elude yourself,
or someone. maybe. so you’re running,
and you’re combatting inner pain by causing
outer, and it makes no sense and it hurts
like hell and you can’t stand it but you don’t
want to, you never did, and your balled-up fists
grow sweaty and uncomfortable and you
run and run and
boom
the warmth becomes heat and the softness
stabs you and surrounds you and the optimistic
sun blinds you with its light and you squint
your eyes against it
but there is no moving the sun.
it will go down on its own.