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.

so many shades of home
exist simultaneously in this city

and i feel so lucky to call this corner mine for now.

i'm sure someday i'll be hidden away in the mountains again
or surrounded by thousands of trees so much taller than i

but for now the lights on train are exciting enough.

he says don’t get too comfortable
i say it is not in my nature to do so

this is a man who stood on the edge of the mountain to make me laugh
and moved across the country three weeks later

he invited me in to see his stained glass window
but i had work in the morning and anyway his hands felt like

the roots that grow out of potatoes that you leave too long in the cabinet
knobby and altogether alien, uncomfortable and unyielding.

he plays with light and i have nothing to do with it
no emotion compared to Popsicle Boy or to the ever-logical Elbows.
(i thought i should bring him up because i love him)
but he let go on the day that I was concerned with the pottery wheel
and it was graceful and unimportant at the time

now its all a wash
and i miss the clay hidden behind my knees on the days we’d climb up to mountain for ice cream and giggling.

White tea hotter than the radiator humming
Smile sweeter than the sugar that you lump in
Your hands on my hip while the water heats up
Kind enough to hand me my favorite cup

Even if the smile is painted on
Even if the handle is chipped
Even if you send me away in the morning
Nothing better than the very first sip

Black tea cooling while we find all the clues
The failure of motion allows for a different view
The artist’s intentions were somewhat disturbing
The way that you kiss me just short of unnerving


Even if your hands shake
Even when I hold you tight
Even if you fall asleep before dinner
Pass me the honey, honey, and pass me a light

Green tea spilled while we steep our own Monday
Afternoon rain is your favorite kind of mundane
I let you spoon sugar even though I like it bitter
One taste of the brew and my heart is all a-twitter

you kissed me in the street

before putting on your helmet

earlier you told me that you see too many things to laugh at

and i thought maybe your long legs under the table weren’t such a bad thing

continuity

expression

there are others just like you on the

merry, go, round,

stop

motorcyclemotorcyclemotorcycle

whack

The museum feels like heaven, feels like I could walk into the corner Pollack and the indiscriminate Monet, but there’s the characterization of Thomas Kane and you hate Mondays security guard.

The man with a beard followed me all the way from the Impressionist room to the modern films and when he finally made me lift my eyes from the canvas, his were turquoise and shook me awake.

I kept running up the stairs because I finally found out where they keep the hidden garden with the spiraled copper fountain and I laughed when I found my reflection in the Italian enamel.

You fell asleep with your head on my knees.
The weight of your skull was alarmingly heavy, so I played with your hair until you woke up. The moment of recognition on your face was so human I wanted to cry.

You scrunch up your eyebrows and touch your glasses trying to remember and a tiny echo of a perfect smile plays on your lips. You kiss me exactly and hum along.

You carried a contraband white umbrella into the gallery so we hid it under a desk. Your helmet was still blank so I gave you some concept art. Your languid loss of service as a multitude of goodbyes allow me to kiss your forehead right as your thoughts hit the pillow.


So I guess what I’m trying to say is that I understand why you tuck me into a warmer blanket before you leave for work in the morning with your heavy boots and your thermos and let me sleep while you shower and kiss me awake for breakfast with a cup of coffee in hand.

I couldn’t stop crying when you played guitar on your birthday on my parents porch because it was time you chose to spend with me out of anyone in the entire world and it’s so rare that anyone ever gets to be exactly where they want to be.

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.

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

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

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'm sorry that i sort of fell apart after you left."

i tell him that it's okay, that we all have bad days, and that the delivery can be made tomorrow. i thought i'd made it clear hundreds of times that i am usually the one to fall apart, to scream in the woods, and to sit blankly on the bus until i am home.

Sometimes I’d just like to get out of my head and get out of my ribbon ribcage and my roadmap wrists.

And I’d like to break the glass of your eyes into the thousand and six pieces of that pickle jar I broke last week in the middle of the street. Your voice sounds the way an old book feels when I first pick it up out of the cardboard box while the sidewalk scolds me for thinking too much. I bet you taste like New Years.

All my favorite people have too much to hold onto.

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

He asks me to choke him about fifteen times a day. Fourteen times, I do, but the fifteenth, I take his throat in my hands and I kiss him everywhere he used to hurt. Somewhere along the way I lost track of what it meant to hurt. I tip toe tightrope walk across the tiniest line between good pain and bad pain and I am wearing the daintiest dress you’ve ever seen.

I wonder if a younger version of myself, even a year younger, could look me in the eyes and tell me what they thought they were doing this whole time. I wonder if I could hand that version of myself a sliver of a clock, a grain of sand from an hourglass, a tick of a kitchen timer so that she could have something to stand on, from a step stool perspective of what this year would bring.

When he grabs my wrist and pins me to the sheets like a butterfly, he uses his eyelashes to tickle my cheeks.

When he looks at me and my stomach drops, I tell him he’s handsome and he tells me he needs a haircut.

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 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."

framed in red light as we move towards the corner it grows larger while you grow smaller and i hope i can remember the image of you smiling while the projection reflected off your glasses with your hair too long in the back and your jeans always several sizes too big and your black t shirt. your underwear was my favorite color that day.

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.

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

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’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

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.

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!"

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.

i always liked the chipped bowl best.

i always liked

your crooked teeth

your frayed jeans

your broken boots

and i liked the scarf i made

with the holes

and the strings

and i like when my hair is a mess

and i like when my tights show skin

and i liked your ****** up parts.

Sometimes the days feel like a train

and I’m running and running

and the wheels turn louder and louder

with those weird bar things that fascinate me

steel on steel on steel

And it’s too loud, I’m going too fast,

and just when I think I’ll be thrown under,

I remember that I was just riding my bike anyway.

I’m weeding through my bedside manner

because I thought the dull thudding of bass line wasn’t just my heart anymore

I met a boy who could see his heart through his chest

and and and

the women on the bench moved anyway

they asked what i was drawing

and the woman’s tattoo looked like adventure

but her face looked like she had spent too much time waiting

and and and

my feet don’t touch the ground

but my soul does.

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.

the side effects of a well-travelled companion
the complications of the ticket in my hand
the warning signs of my transfer station
i am crying in the back seat of your car
**** it
i am through with this medicated contemplated existence
i am coming through the other side
because i decided it is time to stop being sad

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

the mice in my ears

the ink stain on my left arm

tell me to listen

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

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

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.

You are the moon in my sky

And the only hand to hold mine

You turn my long braids into time lines

past the world and before we both were here

past everyone and everything near

back before the sun could shine

back before you were mine

From London

From Home

From Places Unknown

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

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 ****.

Because I have fallen in love with men like shadows, I have learned what it means to hold onto my light.

You do not have to remember the day you recognized your own autonomy on the same day you continue to define your freedom.

Take it easy.

The snow falls around me

in the peacock window light

the trees wave hello to me

while I find a candle to fight

Just let me catch my breath

we spend time wandering through the towns that our father chose

and we spend days looking for the perfect garden rose

because i’ve seen men who stand behind their father’s grave while they hand a gun to the hand they shake and they wait and they wait and they wait

a woman walks into the street with a gun and a boy walks to school wishing he had one

and we hate and we hate and we hate

I’ve stood at the wall and I chased down the hall your sister ran towards the light

we danced in the morning while my brother was snoring and we held each other tight

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

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

Some days I feel like I’ve spent a quarter of my life waiting for the wrong train.

But I don’t mind the time in between

sometimes i mistake my shadow for my light

but i don’t mind the grey spots in between

i fell asleep where you slept

and dreamt that i fell asleep under the ocean

i knew i’d drown if i didn’t wake up

but i kept telling myself, just a little longer

i wondered if my sister was laughing above the surface

we were at the pool and i dove under

and there were bubbles everywhere

and i realized i couldn’t find my way up

so it turned into the ocean

and i fell asleep

and it reminded me of that time when i was ten and i jumped into the river

and i didn’t think id ever find my way out again

I said darjeeling and masochism,

you said

that sounds like a nice day

Chalkboard

Blindfold

Ripped Jeans

take

off

your

glasses

red canvas sneakers
crush a bug on the playground
right where the crayon grass meets the chalk pavement
her feet are
tiny
but the bug is even more insignificant
so it’s all relative, i guess.

because everyone who knows me past my second middle name would tell you that i crash hard and i don’t wear a helmet

it wasn’t so much that you caught me

it was more like i was running sprinting hurdling

and i crashed into you like the world’s lankiest brick wall

but you’re picking up the pieces

i know this is might not be a good thing, but hey, at least you wear a helmet.

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.