Blonde, blue eyed, suburban, two hundred percent American
the nation hangs on the perky point of your nose as your
corn silk corkscrew curls are straightened, and you fly to Paris
to collide with fellow shooting stars, but you never forget that boy,

although there are quite a few, lyrics recycling their smiles like
Splenda confectionary tissues. Your melodies are one note harmonies
on the discord of Romantic Middle Class Mediocrity, saccharine
apples in a shiny package for teens who haven't bitten life too deep.

But there is still a boy in a red pickup truck, teardrops and Tim McGraw.
The girl next door has a backbone of country strong and books filled with
silly, sweet, strawberry sodapop songs, slipping over herself in earnest
for the rawness of four chords about love, ends that spiral back to beginnings.

When I wake up
the house is singing an aria.
The heirloom waterstains bloom
with each crescendo.

At the closing of a door,
my families roots are pushing
through floorboards. Marshlands
fill the empty highway.

You stand in corners, faceless girl
on your arm. Your name rolls around
her mouth like a cat's eye.

My friends are on the roof,
sipping champagne from open palms.

In the earthquake
I only can save myself.
I look for safety
in a school desk.

Then the world is rivers
of orange-creamicle fabric,
prayer mandalas turning
in song, in song, in song.

The birds start singing around three,
once the coffee has unsweetened
from four spoons of sugar to two
and leftover Indian food has been
devoured and my contacts start to
tighten around my corneas. This
paper on ideological death of the
author has thoroughly kicked my
***, wrung the sass right out of
my tongue. All I can do is sit and
listen to the birdsong and wonder
what is so important that it must
be said at 3AM and is it really a
song and does it even matter if I
will never speak bird? They might
as well be speaking Chinese or
waves seizing the shore or you
and I locking eyes for hair split
moments. What did you mean to
say and does it even matter if I
have forgotten, if I ever even knew
how to speak your language?

handpicked blueberries in yogurt,
tea on the porch, Ellen,
in desperation to plant a raspberry bush.

jogging through a grasshopper field
holding in screams at the small green chirps
shooting up around my ankles.

grimy trails of sweat, the daddy longlegs
crawling out from under my thigh
the dirt at home under my nails.

nickel-bright stars above
the trees, a cool tress rising,
buzzing in the porch light of
bugs going for our jugulars,
still tight and smooth.

The days when I could grasp life around the hips
(and hang on as she strode through sunburnt suburbia,
keeping bare feet free of puddles and chalk)
were long surrendered when my legs lengthened
into those restlessly swinging stalks
that grew down just to kick up their roots
at the possibility of roads vibrantly unfamiliar
from what they've known.

Once soft sapwood, all pliant and green
we had no wit to appreciate these pains and aches
as muscles break, tear with every step and repair themselves
only to creak the next day in protest and celebration,
each smile born of fear and exultation.

This is my new way to feel contained and stable:
as I grab your hand and slip under the library table.
There, hush sound is our breathing deep to laugh
harder and stronger, silent and crouching alive together
here, our legs feel like heartwood, the sturdy stuff
that only softens to ash when our stomachs catch fire.

Dublin is soaking,
ink running on sentences, churning on the page.
America is splintering,
(the suburbs specifically, not the nation)
into  leftovers of Ticonderoga No 2.

These streets breathe in and out and
up to clouds illuminated by the Temple Bar,
as people stream through Dublin's narrow straights,
running thick and bright and damp
soaked with the scent of amber,
brimming with warm words like barley and hops,
the world reflected through the half-empty glasses
abandoned to rest stale at the bar.

This boy is a livewire to a madness,
quivering gasps flying to spark on her tongue when
she finds the kiss in the corner of his mouth is
tightly stitched in with the sound of each smile.
Her hand still clings to the smells of sweat and beer
with miles of backtracking ahead.

Oh, these are the words that
dropped off the branch of
the tree hanging down, to
hover the river that
roils though shafts of
refracted light that shine from
sun dripping into your eyes,
giving amber sheen to hair that
surges and breaks under the sweep of a
hand picking up a pen to scribble the words
welling past your lips,
leaning in to press close to mine
off the page.