My nutritionist told me I need to increase my caloric intake and eat more carbs. I asked my nutritionist, “aren’t carbs bad for you?”
She said, “No. Carbs are not bad for you, carbs are an immediate energy source for your body to use, what’s bad for you is not eating enough and passing out at the end of the day like some ***** *****. Now eat some carbs and get some meat on those bones before I order you a ******* pizza myself.”

I should mention that my nutritionist is also my best friend. I call her Lady Reptar, because she is one. A lady, not a reptar, even though she’s twenty times more awesome than a dinosaur and fifty times nicer. She’s beautiful like a ******* daisy in the woods and she’s sharp and wittier than her cooking knives and she’s warmer than her father’s woodstove.

"So, do poppy seeds count as protein?"

You tip my femininity when you scratch my back with your stubble before you shave in the mornings and it is so lovely to be near one who can cry.

You wear heavy boots with the tip of the steel toe showing to match the glint of mischief bouncing off your eyeglass frames and i stand on your toes to kiss you goodnight on my porch in the snow where you brought me oatmeal cookies to talk with you about foundations.

I don’t know if you needed help with that paper, but I certainly needed the cookies.

hazelnut coffee cup
cotton button down
hem my skirt
hem my thoughts about your hands
your belt left bruises
your teeth leave marks
your eyes leave me without

Speaking of the kids in my hometown

we used to walk the traintracks obsessively

like they’d lead us somewhere

like they’d show us something

like the end of the summer was just a bookend parallel line with the river by the library card that promised if i only read enough books i could get out of there and over the moon.

just parallel lines, but they made as much sense as any other way out.

And the gazebo where the high school band played

and I swung on my first date

over analysis

of unexpected poetry

pretty words on a pretty page on a pretty day

(****)

i climbed the tree because it was there

and because i need a classical role on my resume

If today was for giant caterpillars,
giant crowds,
giant sounds,
and chaos, then this evening must be for

Blueberry fingertips
white wine in my glass
the music of an accordion
and a paperback novel.

Breeze in the window that waltzes with ribbons
and fills the bottles I’ve collected for the past six years.

(soft t shirt from the first time I fell asleep on his couch)

mmm, stop WORRYING.
It is no time at all for any of that.
Take the time to take the time to take your time.
shhh, brain.
hush, mouth.
Quiet Quiet Quiet

You are the velvet to my lace, the freckles on your face, the rocket to outer space when i’m forgetting why my feet need to hit the ground.


You are three seconds away from a sunrise when I desperately need the light, you are a cup of tea and wisdom, and you are a giggle at just the right moment while the blood exchanges ideas between my wide-eyed fanatic manic panic mind and my static acrobatic heart.

You are love and a smile when everything around has fallen dark. We fall down the seasons, each leaf turned to green as the time is subjective as valued.

we fall down the winter of broken glass and torn kneecaps and into the summer of understanding and patched hearts.

We fall down the stairs of the boy who was the blank slate and into the arms of the boy who painted his stone happy.

You are the living room of my soul, where all the pictures make us smile just to look at them and the quilt on the couch is beautiful enough to make up for the small tear in the corner. Where the cups of tea sipped are innumerable as the curls on your head and the watercolor windows open past our souls and into our worlds.

Someday we’ll be able to keep track of our socks and get enough sleep but right now I’m still figuring it out. I’m still trying to connect the sky to the tree to the earth to the tesseracted interaction theatrical statement of who I am and what I will be. We will become.

It was cold and I was tired
so I fell asleep
with the taste of Sunday still in my mouth

i think i meant to tell you that i loved you

but instead i told you about a dream i had where you locked me in a room and wouldn’t shut up about your socks.

i think i meant to ask you to kiss me

but instead i asked for a cigarette on your porch even though it was cold out and I wanted to go home.

i think i meant to tell you i trust you

but instead i told you to buy a notebook and fill it with lists so that your mind can work again.

I love roller coasters.
I love the old rickety ones that jar my spine and push me into my little sister and i can feel our ribcages collide with the
click-click-click as they slowly build suspense and propel me towards the sun.

my last boyfriend hated them. He felt that his stomach couldn’t stand up to the drop of gravity so he ran at the sight of the climb up to reason and fled the line when i unbuckled my seatbelt.

i love waiting in line for a **** good thrill, and i count down the minutes until the spill of my scream echoes into the hairspray of the woman in front of me as she holds the hand of her cut-offs husband.

i guess you aren’t one to pine for the wooden tracks of thrill, either. but last night i lay in bed, on my side, trying to memorize the planes of your face, trying to calculate the angle of your nose as it leans slightly to your right, you tell me it’s crooked, i tell you it is lovely. it is the finest architecture this side of eiffel tower and you run your hands from the top of my collarbone, down the valley of my waist to the top of my hip, and you tell me you wish you had a tiny car to run along the line.

most of all i love the fall.

tiny wrists made up of clothespins

sharp hips made up of awkward wingspans

held my smile like a knife made up of coffee stained teeth

walked me home like a dance with the broken sidewalk
kissed my scared hands with a scarred mouth

I said darjeeling and masochism,

you said

that sounds like a nice day

Chalkboard

Blindfold

Ripped Jeans

take

off

your

glasses

i’ve got a crush on a boy i call Elbows.

he’s got grace in his hands and anarchy in his mouth

he’s got angles where i’m soft and softness where i’m angled

His voice is like flowers, his voice is like puddle skipping, hand-holding, his voice is almost like Thursdays and his work is to speak the words of men long dead. But I like his words best, I like his stammerings and stutterings and ums and ohs and the slip of vernacular into something more spectacular than the slip of his tongue into my mouth.

the cab drivers always look hopeful
and the bicyclists always seem scared
but it feels like my ribcage birdhouse could stay

it’s my version of home that lives in my chest
past the honor of winters plaid sleeves and silver glasses
it’s room for just me and my clothespin wrists fold up to fit inside
and my braids tickle my nose while i’m there

i can get anywhere from there
and it’s exactly where i always return

there’s a dinosaur on the corner of my favorite place
and all his friends remind me to stay happy
as they stand by and good bye the places i need to go


and i walk up the thousand and six stairs to the top
more alone than i wanted to be
and i am quiet
and i listened but that was the day that the city shut up

and i’m always looking for motorcycles out of the corner of my eye because you pause conversation to watch them fly by
and i know for a moment there your head gets lost

just exactly where you like it


or at least i think you like it

For Little One
June, 2012

I want to be a giant girl

with my hair caught in the clouds

and a bird resting on my nose

I want to be twice as small

as the fly resting on the wall

I

I want to watch small men

smoke pipes and sing to themselves

I want to grow too magnificent for the room

and push down the walls with my elbows

and use the chimney as a periscope

the sheer enormity

and when I dance

I want to fell the planetary divide

and taste the milky way

and wear saturn’s rings as jewelry

stars tangled in my braids

and i’d let humans walk across my shoulders

so that they could see the moon

and remember how it feels to be

small, childlike, wondering

and then things might be alright.

I write too many poems about my body.

but it’s the only house my spirit knows

and the only movement is my own

I could write you a love poem

or one about the way the kids in my hometown

used to walk the traintracks like they led somewhere

but i’m completely obsessed with this idea of entrapment

that i could be more than skin and bones that i could be made of

ink blotch shoulderblades

ribbon ribcages

clothespin wrists

and ruby lips

that i could abandon myself and get out of this cage

that’s too big or too small or whatever the **** they tell me this week.

date a boy who owns a sewing machine
and takes you to feminist modern art exhibits

date the son of a librarian
who can tell you all your favorite stories
while you fall asleep

date a boy who wears a chalkboard helmet
to ride a motorcycle to the top of the mountain
to see the city lights

date a boy who follows you up mountains
to kiss you in the wind
and run his hands through your hair

and date a boy with glasses
who pushes them up on the bridge of his nose
after he kisses you

your voice still sounds like flowers
but now your hands feel familiar

I'm not good at closing doors quietly.
So much so that my father made a sign to remind me.
It says:  

Shh!
Quiet Please!

in blue magic marker.
It's not that he's trying to stifle me, he's just sleeping.

My mother told me that she had to realign the door frames after I moved out, as they had grown used to my proclivity for slamming.

I wasn’t ready for your sky-eyed nostalgia any more than I was ready for my suffragette seclusion.

I couldn’t have swallowed any more of my snake bitten hollow intellect than that which allowed me to kiss your throat to the stars skin.

So I’m hoping the ochre-rayed sun moon stars rain clock parts will aid in the time that can make things like they were in the gazebo with the puddles stuck in my shoes and your hat already full of thoughts.

And then can we spin around again?

my mother was born a gardener

and my father became one

through patient snap peas and

angry red tomatoes

he seeded and watered and waited

while my mother grew hibiscus in the mountains

and plums in the shade

i was born a painter

but its tank me years to pick up a paintbrush

and my brother was born a poet

but i sincerely doubt that he’ll ever show it

i mix my paints on my palette of flowers

and my brother goes to meetings at banks

My other attended the only Agricultural High School available to her within a 40 mile radius of her South Philadelphia home. This was not a coincidence.

My father attended the best athletic conference in his affluent suburban community. This was.

She started out watering plants in fast food joints, arranging flowers for junior proms in the poorest neighborhoods of the city. When my father met her, she only ate lettuce and seeds because that was all she could manage to put in her body.

My father kneeled to the ground, saw the soil beneath her fingernails, and fell in love.

I can only love men who garden. I can only be a daughter of the earth because of them.

I don’t like terrariums because they frustrate me. Life trapped behind glass, that I cannot touch, or feel, or smell. I cannot water, I cannot fathom to even slightly disturb their existence, no matter how desperately I want to.

I’m getting my hands ***** touching old soil. I wipe it on my skirt before I touch the sweat on the back of my neck. I’m planting forget-me-nots and basil. I don’t even know if those go together. But I am putting them deep in the ground and it occurs to me that in a few weeks, I might not even remember them. They might die and become some stupid memory, a part of my dinner party story vernacular, Or maybe waiting for them will change me, will allow me to commit as a meditation on earthen peace.

you are splatter-painting in my living room
bright red like blood,
like the light in the room from that day you took me away
framed in the center.
"Oh."
we chase and try to catch the moon, but it isn’t out tonight, so

we hold each other instead.
I use my garden as a tightrope and you challenge me like a ringmaster.
I’m in a spangled leotard, turning for you, charming under the ink sky, and you go inside to make me some smores.


You said you couldn’t stay over because you had work in the morning, but I woke up to your elbows and my coffee.

i have plenty of dried leaves and hot water at home, but my winter self hikes four miles in the snow for a cup of tea.
i know more words than i had ever hoped to understand, but i still shuffle them like tap shoes to place meaning on my notebooks.
i have seen mountain views that make me weak in the knees, but i still need to see what else the world holds, and if that makes me reckless beyond being someone’s wife, then so be it.
I understand that the life that I want is not one that should be kept up with or stood alongside, but one where I deign mystery into my own flesh and mysticism into my own sky

I’m learning to travel light. A backpack, a mandolin case, and a water bottle. That’s enough. A black skirt, an extra pair of wool tights, and a teeshirt big enough to sleep in. Headphones.

my sister asks me when and where and why I’m coming and going and leaving and staying

I’m packing up

I’m always packing up

but my suitcases are getting smaller, more efficient, less attached.

I can’t keep track myself

You pick me up right on time

"this is for you"

i sip

it’s cold and sweet

just perfect.

before i left, i slipped a salt water painting under your helmet.

I have shaken you off
like his cold from Thanksgiving
or like summer skin
freckled with "you look beautiful!"s and my weight on your shoulders
among green sheets and purple walls

In a hardware store we felt like a bad couple
such sad and discordant energy among
steel hammers and that perfect bracket
that I couldn't find.

I am told that my anatomy is the sheer academy of my lack of sensibility and that my sense of autonomy is just my way of rebelling against my own skin.

Because I was born in a body that is just a little too small to contain such an opinion, and so this must be just the remainder of some book I read, right?

I am told that at times my mouth traces outlines larger than my hands can, and all I know is that my fingers stretch to try and reach the cord that turns off the light on my porch so that I can find the streetlight shadow puppet.

Because I am at odds with the lightbulb delivery of my best friend’s idealism and my body’s realism and it’s all a sense of alchemism when I’m searching for altruism.

I’m told that I am too big for my body, or “for such a little girl, you’re very smart,”. I used to start in the plus-size section of stores, only to be escorted to diminutive floral prints and capri pants.

I am still mistaken for a lost child at the airport, I am still advised not to go out in certain areas after dark, I didn’t realize I was small until I wasn’t listened to.

The old man living next door to my rented shoebox

told me that the hospitals are slowly draining the humanity from the city

and that the country is just animality rationality fictionality

and that at least when there was a king, everyone had food.

now his wife can’t pick things up because her hands hurt

so she throws things

constantly

and at least in India, he knew where he stood.

"My granddaughter on the fifth of July will be coming into her ninth year of life. She wants the world, though."

Artichokes will always make me think

of you drunk in Vermont on your 22nd birthday.

Giggling and tired from the rocks of the mountains

you spilled both our drinks and wrung your hands

in complete defiance of giving a ****.

long fingers crooked with the holding

of the words of dead men and motorcycle handles

called me brave instead of pretty

and my whole heart took

courage by the throat and kissed it madly.

my anemic blood the color of saffron
is running out of my back
and into the bathwater

my sister is screaming
quarter past a freckle
and she jumps out

the metal faucet where the water
pours out in gallons
is sharper than I thought it was.

it’s the razor's edge of winter
and kissing you smells like mustache wax.

you drive me to the hardware store to pick up galvanized wire
so that i can build miniature shadow people
that make us laugh for hours

it’s hard to find the soft parts of you to rest my head on
but it’s always the simple parts that i like best

I like when we are alone together.
I like to be alone with you.
I like to be safe and adventuring at the same time, when my head meets the mountain and my feet meet the rock.

my moonbeam mountain boots fell apart the moment I left home, but I picked up my blueberry pail and I took to the fields like I always do.

He picked up your knife and he stabbed a man in the stomach of his heart, where he kept his daughter’s pocket mouse nomenclature. He kept the cells in a jar next to his collection of Roald Dahl stories.

Probably. Maybe not.

I like when I can sleep in your bed and feel absolutely balanced. You tip my femininity when you scratch my back with your stubble before you shave in the mornings and it is so lovely to be near one who can cry.

clockparts.com
i fell in love with dali’s ghost

on the day i kissed the 34-mile horizon

i watched his clocks melt away

so i made him a new one and painted it purple sky and yellow sun and lavender clouds and ochre rays

and he filled it with the ace of spades

this isn’t well-crafted surrealism

it’s your story spent

Full sta(r)ring
I sit as the window
was a pleading enormous nobody
he declared my head
practically lost.

2.
flustered you’ll doubt that
he glanced
sleep can’t.

3.
Crooked conversation listeners
clenched authority grimy
beside the sight attempt

4.
that chanced amusement
obliged its stiff attempt
by askance explanation
he and the slipped tongue
therefore sitting
on the heels of friday

5.
overhead the engine slipped suddenly when
she whispers explanation
grand

6.
growling hurried difficulty
shouldn’t reason but
the creature bitterly
declared in smaller steps
"you’ll doubt when i"

7.
I blinked and riddle
the shifting moral of executed
fright the cunning
underpromised
dependent muddle
congressional huddle

8.
not the sadistic wet world
glaring or the the the
defended
answers soaped the the the
dyed course
hello doesn’t the the the
let my coming

9.
adding highest denial
we tear the despair
rolling secret sea so far
winter guard softly introduced
my remembered underneath

10.
his daughter
a canary warily dared
to pretend to drink in
bound education of judging

11.
the height dating
and pushy she interrupting
like the party
for wonderful
      couple of sharks

12.
elbow listening did dishes
she declared panicky
we will go by asking
uh um
curled hair blank slate
forming saucepan all sobbing

I think we’re all just honest missing pieces

shoved under the couch or chewed past recognition

we fill these flaw with tact and with sarcasm

with extremes and shouts and prayers

and kisses and each other

i walked out of my house

half past midnight

in a short skirt and torn tights but

i was not headed for disaster.

i was on my way to sit in a circle

and dance in a triangle

and sleep

on a square.

his sheets felt like the ocean on my skin
so i forced his head head under the surface
while i counted his eyelashes.

his hands looked like paper lace
so i grabbed his fingers tighter
and brought them to my lips.

his shoulders smell like the floor of a forest of pine trees
so i laid my head on his chest
roped my fingers through his hair
while the lights flickered in his basement

i wonder who let him hold the keys to his own chest
or the cradle for his own mind
his structure of patience is beyond architecture
and his touch of my spine is beyond medicine

I want my heart to feel like the great Salt Lakes, reaching towards each other, constantly suspended in the moment just before contact. I want to build this anticipation, but my patience is shorter than your last haircut, when we sat by the river to discuss model trains.

I want my mind to feel like a hummingbird when it finally lands to rest on the red plastic device filled with sugar water outside my mother’s kitchen window, but I’m quite a ways from home now and have been for a while.

I want my stomach to feel like the tree roots, the red oaks, the ones that dwarf me and that I know would let me get my favorite kind of lost in their home, the kind we planned on visiting after graduation, but I am usually stuck in maple sap.

I want my mouth to taste like strawberries, ripened scarlet in the sun, the kind my tall friend’s mother mashes up with sour rhubarb for the perfect jam to last us through winter, but more often than not, my teeth are coffee-stained and my tongue tends to be too sharp for delicate berries.

I want my skin to feel like satin ribbons, the kind that tie little girl sashes before holy events and parties where they dance on their father’s toes for the first time, and find it perfectly marvelous, but I am covered in scratches and marks from building enormities.

I am a patchwork from the most meaningless scraps. I was a junkyard doll with mismatch buttons eyes and melted cardboard shoes. My head is a garbage heap left out too long, my eyes are scooping all of it up, and my dress is made of someone else’s throwaway linen.  My aluminum can hands stretch out for anyone’s how-town while I think of shoestring revues and paper mache.

What was it he said
while we sat on the bench


Saturn glimpsed down, considering proposal
but Mars reflected in his own vanity, said no preemptively.
Popsicle boy flicked his hair off his forehead and asked the sun why he was so bored.
"22 thousand civilian casualties in Iran and we don’t even give a ****. Thousands of homeless in this city alone. How is that possible?"
He pointed at a lightning bug.
"I can plant as many community gardens as I want, it still doesn’t make a difference!"

gummy bears and cigarettes

apologies for the time that i’ve spent

falling down your satis to your pit of empathy

because boy, you care far too much for me

far more than i deserve

to temper your acoustic nerve

what if my favorite color was the bruise under your eye?

what if my favorite number was the pace of your smile?

oh oh blank slate boy

the floorboards are cracking and i’m going crazy

your ropes are straining while girls are mistaking

you for anything but a blank slate boy

you’re sewing sleep while i’m sewing valentines

how many hours do you spend chasing he siblime?

oh oh blank slate boy

you held my hand and told me that you and your dad built a model train set together and we sat by the river in the rain

i didn’t let you know i felt sick the whole time because you were so nice and your haircut is so short.

when you sleep, you’re all angles and grace. it’s an odd combination of elbows and eyelashes but it’s lovely.

you laid down in my bed and asked me where it all came from.

It is the waiting which
makes people so vaguely uncomfortable.
So much so that
I think we all start to pretend
(as hard as we can)
that we are the only ones.

Or perhaps not the waiting.
But the lack of control it conveys
ushered in like a grey balloon  swathed in ugly red wool
and there is nothing I can do except to stare at the ceiling paint
peeling faintly slowly carelessly
to wherever old ceiling paint goes

Because after this layer there is another:
white like bones.
Next is red like candy,
then green like plastic trees,
until after ten inches of blue
you reach stone-cold metal, so ancient and unused to the air
that it might crumble if you sneezed too enthusiastically.

the mice in my ears

the ink stain on my left arm

tell me to listen

the shadow of summer haunted her like an inconsiderate ghost, but we had been sad since last tuesdays and it didn’t matter anymore.

it felt like a bouquet of “just fine, thanks” and burned fingertips and concentrated annotations of ethical etiquette, so we sat in our rooms and held onto our own hands until the buckets passed and we could all puddle-skip past the broken bicycles.

and inexplicably we jump
into the lake
though it is three in the morning and cold

i feel a young man's giggle on my neck
and turn to find buck teeth
odd-angled
too-broad shoulders for such a giggle

next to him the fog rolls off the water
and covers my chin like it covers the rocks
so i can barely see them
and she trips, tumbling, like she's a step away from an avalanche

pine trees reach up to the moon and down the water
and our laughter
meets in the middle.

black coffee is curly soft hair on my cheeks
wool in my lungs is the Negev Desert
and thursdays smell like mint

It’s a bit like climbing up the stairs to the very top of the tallest building in your neighborhood. You do it alone, completely alone, after working at some cafe a mile from your house. You count out your tips, put on your headphones, and slip into your own world as the humans, the families, the students, all become some sort of impromptu choreography. They are all silhouettes and so are you.
You take the long way home because you are tired and you don’t feel like crossing the bridge alone and hopping the fence. The tall building taunts you, leering. You meant to climb to the top with someone else, with anyone else, but today you are alone.
It’s thirty six floors. It’s the second-largest-something-or-other’s-wayward-dedication-to-knowled­ge, but regardless of the history, it’s made of stone and it’s enormous, so obviously, you must climb it. You are alone.
You walk inside. You do not belong there, and the maintenance man looks at you strangely, but you realized a long time ago that being slight of stature and pretty and female lets you get away with a lot more than you should, and besides, you are a silhouette now anyway.
Climb the stairs. It takes an hour or so. Each step feels the same. Look around, tie your hair up. It’s getting so so so long, you’ve taken to braiding it most days. Think about kissing boys. Think about ******* boys. Think about the time you kicked a boy’s heart in the teeth as a casualty of running away from everything else. Climb faster. Think of anything else. Think of loneliness. Think of sandwiches, think of dancing, think of Greek poetry. Take a rest. Climb. Think. Climb. Climb.

The top is three glass windows and two offices and one library. Sit on the windowsill and think of how small your hands are. Tie your hair up again. Headphones off. It is your nature to want too much, so by the time you get to the top, you wonder about the roof.

I hope you always remember

that time in Florida

when I came home from work

at 2am on our anniversary

to find you sleeping on the couch

I woke you up with flowers in hand.

I will never, ever forget the way you said

oh sweetheart

and held me like i could have been the only thing that mattered.

we kept the flowers all week,

and after you flew home,

I kept them on the counter

even when they were dry

and brown and shedding,

petals like promises,

and I changed the water daily (if i remembered)

hoping to revive dead flowers

and wishing you could come back.

I knew when your skin stopped smelling like oak trees that it was time for me to leave you. I knew when everything tasted like curry and *** that I needed to run, but I wasn’t ready for months.

So I spent months. I spent almost a full year convincing myself I was in love, wrapped in plaid blankets and handmade ugly red scarves and even uglier red scars and I was just running through the motions until I gained momentum.

At the time, I taught art, and I’d come home from work with big, rainbow spills on my skin. Green on my arms, blue on my knees, red on my chin, and you looked at me and said
"Don’t they have a sink where you work?"

I guess I knew then too.

We got drunk before my bus left and I knew then.

I kept giving you pieces of me to hold onto. I’d hand you my thumbnail’s song on a mandolin, I’d give you my long hair to braid, I’d give you my toes to **** on and you carried it all down with you. I’m sorry for that.