You hide yourself in the corners
Of your desk, the soft bits tucked away
Behind your vest—
A downy, growling thing—
At five, your heart is stuttering
Towards the door
And the contours of your eyes
Are something close to opening.

You never know
what’s going to happen. Back then
there were more teachers than students
and I don’t think anyone grows up.
What if I don’t want to be promoted?
It’s like learning a foreign language.
Managing the cash flow was
the trickiest part of the job.

People knew.

I listened and responded to
their problems, questions, concerns.
Good citizens pay
bills on time, they show town pride.
I am grateful to live and work and appreciate
a good town we have for children.
Everyone works to find
common ground.

But I can’t relate.

Good work cannot be rewarded.
We breed animus and resentment.

The night, my face, your hands: The world is damp.
What else is there to do with all this weight,
but sink into the autumn grass, sedate,
sticking to the lawn like a fresh new stamp,
feeling the pulse of a steady bass amp
filling spaces between us like a freight
train, roaring to a new country, so late,
bearing fragile cargo to unknown camps.
I want to rage against the worst of me,
to keep deep down that brassy, dismal light,
wailing after you pulled me from the road;
your shirt's sweet warmth smelling like wet birch tree.
It hounds me to the core, the ifs and whys
of ugly nights, the drive to overflow.

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.

Somewhere--between the last time I smelled rain
and now--are the clanging voices of angels
resounding without love, like rusted brass gongs
ringing on, pushing us into one another's arms.

We all have our false idols molded from gold,
forever confusing the priest with the God.

Right here--between the baritone of the first spring storm
and the last keen of winter--is the silence. Keep the hair
you cut while I slept on. Those were the lies I washed
with false faith, strands catching in my mouth.

Before I met him and learned to scream,
my hair hung thick, sheets of burnt oak wheat.
Rebel strands clung to my arms, trailing
my sides. Somewhere, I still hum Sam Cooke
(a change is gonna come, oh yes it will) and
Ma's back is turned in the kitchen, making pie.
apple slices in the blue bowl,
thousands of unknown thoughts
shifting under her small hands.
Pa folds into his armchair neatly,
hands tucked tight against his sides, quietly rubbing
holes in the soft wool, watching Streets of San Francisco.

The garbage can rattles, the street smells of pine.
I back out of the drive, on my way to the last first date
I will ever go on. I pop an orange tic-tac,
just in case. I don’t want him to taste
the sour ghost of an apple still sitting
on my tongue.

I met someone all stretched out
with kindness and life experience
minus a college degree. One year
younger and shameless love for
every band I socially deny.

He is dangerous and confides in me
glibly that two girls still love him.
He probably has a propensity for cruelty
and girls whose hips fit extra small
in his cello hands, his piano key hands,
Lord forgive me, his wonderful hands.

Shoeboxes in the upstairs prove
when veins were tight and hair was
that shining, gleaming, streamin,’
flaxen, waxen stuff of the 70s.
You would laugh if you could see
him in a toupee, shoulders broadened
against the end of a night shift, billy club
swinging steady by his side;
She, beautiful like Grace Kelly,
with high definition cheek bones,
her smile Rainbow Bright enough
to call the curtains down
and leave them that way forever.

But red velvet shrouds over them still;
His shoulders curve under tax forms and
knee replacements, cancer spots on his bladder and nose.
She plays with the extra turkey skin on her neck,
frowns at the grooves around her mouth.
The audience sees more than we want to.

They fade from unblemished black and white
into garish Technicolor,
Twenty-nine years
of dinner, ***** dishes left in the sink,
root canals, cat food cans,
******* stickers, laundry to fold, that milk
might be a week old.

They go on and I love them
for the death of romance,
for the things they've folded away in shoeboxes
for me to find.

What keeps you sharp,
hardening your bones against
the soft dark, between

I will never have good ***, or
The apocalypse is in process, and
My cat will die of liver disease.

Every evening I will eat alone.

Her tongue in cotton,
a crack
between her jaws:
A boy left the scar on her chin
slick and gleaming,
shriveling like a moth on fire
in the burn of those words
he lit that night
e.e. cummings was on *****
windows, blurred,
and everywhere he went she found
hope
Her heart a scoop
in a honey jar,
something thick and sweet
to toss onto breaking waves,
only to end up back at her feet.

My hand locks into yours
the same way I taste under my tongue,
parted and warm,
humming while your lips press

with quiet insistence against your heart.
I crawl inside its steady beat,
(just the summer,
sloping hills and white stucco)

lying between the hours,
your forearms tense with habit.
The white Jetta's
an uneven cavalcade of

windows rolled down, my thighs
melt bare, and
the sun burns slow and thorough
through dusk.
The tide pulls away
the thick New England sky.

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?

Her eye sight was starting to go
years before I was born.

We frequently conspired that when we hit
the jackpot we’d spend it on ourselves.

Her communion gift is a ****** Mary basin,
collecting dust instead of holy water.

Near the end she switched grandpa’s photo
with her own, wrinkle free at nineteen.

Weak tea, fig turnovers, cats scratching behind
the cellar door—my memory is a dulled down

knife, whittling her scent from an apartment, to
a shoebox, to the celibate earring in my palm.

Her ugly wool Christmas sweater sits
in the bottom drawer—

I take it out and do not cry
but I worry that I did not know her.

It was something mundane—
rinsing dinner plates, folding my underwear
into temporarily neat squares, letting the cat out,
when I remembered
the thick spice of crumbling maple leaves
piled high and burning; cinnamon and nutmeg,
woolwash and lanolin wafting from my hands.

You're wearing a soft pumpkin grin, huddled by me
under the groaning red barn,
under my grandma's knitted afghan,
under the silver dollar moon,
jolting at ghost stories, lantern light licking at your
thin mouth, dark hair dusting the cold tapered hands
that I press to the back of my neck in the October night

and I still feel the bones of you there.

What is it worth now?
The dishes need rinsing,
there is laundry to fold,
the cat is crying to be let out.

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.

They squirm inside their clothes
tweed, chiffon tiered skirts, and bows
of their grandmothers’ sepia, halcyon days

with lumberjack flannel and Kerouac quotes,
but it’s more a matter of age than size,
these charging, listless, candid creatures

with hairstyles that can only be described
as gravity readily defied and self-cut,
frequently dyed to shades that swing

between black coffee and New York poetry
deep imagism and social realism against the backdrop
of American Apparel ads on scratched up Macs.

They slouch up and down trafficked Newbury,
dropping names like Morrissey and Bukowski
pausing now and then to pick up on the ennui

of twenty-three, and how they will one day live la vie
Dharhimian, running on American Spirits,
James Dean, Truffaut chic,

a monthly check from their parents,
an apathetic sneer at holding anything too dearly
and how they hate that word—*hip-ster.

Stalks of bronze leaves croon and
the manicured trees burst jade
against the sky, dangling over
tilted dark green benches.
I pretend to read,
trailing over the pages the oily noses of
dark-eyed, wide hipped nannies
willowy limbed women whose
scarves unfurl under artless chignons,
business men with careful mouths,
long, frecking strides.

He broke the fourth wall without warning and
my laugh was sporadic while I crumbled,
under the slightest of foreign touches, there,
above my shoulder blades,
where another hand
once brushed.

I am small in my galoshes
the sun reflects into rivers
of light, we are adventurers

my fried and I, lost boys hidden
under our lace and braids, together under
one second star to the right umbrella

the hale gray sky overturns in our eyes
We gather moss under our nails, dark hairs
tangle with violet march thistles

birds are dark spear heads thrown
from the earth. The world is raw, flawless
against our chapped lips splitting

into grins. We smear the red away like war
paint across rocks and bark, our arms
and cheeks. We are fierce and do not know

what it means yet, to give our blood
so freely. The rivers of light fade
into the evening. Shadows slide

from our backs and grow in silence.
The blood dries and flakes away
into nothing.

I have seen the teahouses
carved into cerulean arches
that make a delicate reach
for the sky. From within,
smoke traces the same path
from the ends of cigars and the
infinite "oh" of many mouths.
The rafters converge in beams
of light, the tiles are etched
in holy words, the wrist of a girl
bends a perfect curve-
Another arch within arches,
hands, wrists, windows, doors,
mouths and words,
the sky.

And your cup lip dips into
a tenuous moment: a question
only form can ask, into an answer
you've known forever

I. Anna Sophia, 1878

Her name unfolds like raw white hands
small zaffre eyes, hair gold against her neck,
while the autumn air wafts flaxen motes
the men return from the boats and fields.
She follows the soft ripple of black birds
taking flight from a great distance.

II.  Annie Axelina, 1901

Her ankles are angry chaffs of red rings
as she circles the harbor, Torhamn pressed
into a pale flower between winter’s pages.
She cuts across the black ice lea
with my stride. She boards a boat, daughter
wrapped in her arms, leaning into the gale.

III. Eleanor Maria, 1921

Her roses are blooming burgundy against
the blue of the house and the kitchen heat
curls wisps of blonde into gnarled vines
under her nursing cap. She sews neat rows
of nursery rhymes into a blanket, leafs through
a green scrapbook of poetry and recipes.

Her name echoes back wings and the yearning
lilt of a language not entirely lost to me.

IV. Elizabeth Marie, 1991

Surrounded by beachgrass,
as the sun bares its teeth,
and wind tugs my hair,
we've laid the sea out, swelling
against the skyline.

We are a nest of angled limbs,
blue buntings perch on our legs
for words like what and why
and brine gathers above your lip;
Brace the slick dip between
shoulder and neck,
this swiftly tilting planet has
eyes like yellow fish weaving
circles around us.

Leave yourself up-rooted and
hide the homecoming in your kiss.
On the grass, and the sand, inside of me,
We fall apart slowly.

Disguised in a three-piece suit,
the Cowboy has made off with Helen of Troy.
Already leagues from the rubble of city walls,
the dust rises in billows as they
fly away breakneck on his Trusty Steed.
They hear the echoing uproar breaking
at their heels. Helen's hair is a streaming
banner of war, skin flushing a ruddy apple red.
She thinks of Golden Paris in his silence
reposed in long limbed quiet on their gilded bed,
waiting for her, for the fire to peel away
their faces, the scent of burnt fruit and decadent spoils
our sacrifice to the tittering gods, the insatiable Aphrodite.

But Helen rides.
The wind smells like foreign spices waiting for
her tongue. She breathes in the sweat on the back
of the Cowboys neck. Freedom is musk and cotton,
the rumbling murmur of water channels and ravines
rocking under their feet.

They sink into the western horizon and
I turn away from their embrace,
pausing to watch glorious Troy fall into
fast decay under their lengthening shadow.

Eternity:
I am seven and forbidden
a book. If I look down I'll puke.

The house:
Blue with roses ascending  
up the side. Insides smell like

Pa before he died:
Cat, cotton, paper.

My hands: cold and stained red.

At the cemetary:
my stiff fingers, pale sun, I don’t like
the carved out space I know waits under me
while I pray

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.

If you wake tomorrow with
bruises blooming purple-yellow
across your knees
lungs stinging fuchsia  
muscles coiled tight and red
only to find you’ve run out of tiger balm
and friendly shadows have grown long
in the distance of years and the unknown

read a poem

Sift through the smoking ashes
of countries lost, rooms emptied, songs forgotten
breathing verdant sparks into the rotten chambers
of your heart. Poetry is soul kissing,
holy sinners meeting palm to palm
under the wild banners of longing
waving, aching and strong.

I work poetry into my pains
through my fingers, onto the page.

that boy sitting next to her
with a slender, birdbone frame power
in his Franken-lightning hair, a hungry
edge to his jaw, who stumbles over Bishop
but compresses our breath with his words
undoes me in muted, fraying ways
the cuffs of my favorite sweater
slowly unraveling under years of continuous wear

his smile is clever and **** with drama
kept in the dark alley corner of his mouth,
strong coffee and bruises without origin

I didn't want to know how
under the soft tissue of my liver and spine
there are words that might taste
like a fire escape in Brooklyn
a night on a stranger’s couch
and how compulsory punctuation might be
only an afterthought to others

My birth was christened with a curse
but every year those parties were flurries
of bon fires and candle sparklers.
My feet didn't touch the dance floor
it seemed, not once, while
the orchestra was playing
a whirling dervish of a waltz
bangs cropped carefree
across the plains of my tanned face,
swishing and twirling the knee length
pink gown,
kicking off pinching white flats to steal
across the June-hot grounds
only to drift back to father’s feet
for another dance.

The orchestra packs up,
the courtly ladies yawn behind trailing sleeves
as I am tucked in
my bed of feathered down, only to wake up  
thirteen years later, with cricks
nestled in the tendons of my neck
and rickety cramps twitching like
the seizure flickering of lightning bugs
through my thighs, as dust billows and rises
with my shifting in the strange light.

Sleeping Beauty wakes up
eighty-seven years ahead of schedule
in the suburbs, the curse a dud
with no prince to sweep her into syrupy swoons
with no words to name this coiling, clammy heat,
this suffocating musk.

I drag my weight
through the two-story house, teaching myself
a new vocabulary
so I can learn to breathe
through the ugly fits of orange tinted panic
at the spider webbed frailty of magic
the kismet pinprick of a spinning wheel
and the helpless sighs of my parents,
a King and Queen dethroned, overthrown
from their untouchable, eternal pedestal.

I couldn't dance
at my next birthday celebration,
when the orchestra was playing
a rollicking rondeau,
mostly because
my hair was too slicked and curled,
framing my fickle new skin,
sitting and twisting a silk napkin in my lap,
ribs locked in the powder blue grip of a whale,
resting poised to turn my toes into graceful
creatures, ten crippled wood nymphs.
To run I would have stumbled,
and it was impossible not to notice that
while we stood, my eyes grazed the top
of father’s thinning, speckled head.
I would break his feet with one more dance.

I used to hear the ocean
exhaling in a pink bellied
shell. At night, shadows
fell against the windows
and my prayers swelled
to the moon. I melded myself
into old polaroids, made
enough tears to quell others'
happiness.

Now I swallow nothing
but the bitter; I pray with
braying laughter, savage
dance, muscles cramps.
Sweat stains on autumn
days are Holy. The past wades
only as high as my knees
when I'm kneeling.
If I need to hear the ocean I take
myself there, or I press my ear
close to the people nearby. I know
them and the roaring exhales of
their oceans inside.

It's summer number twenty-one
and suburbia is slow roasting,
the days turning dreamily
over the spit, as I try
not to set the sheets on fire.
Each night I drench them with
a viscous sweat, wrapping myself
in the smell of conquering Montmartre,
a rush-hour ride on the no. 3 metro line,
close calls with morning joggers
coming from the Parc Monceau.  

Every morning,
lacher is collecting in my damp palms,
and quitter runs in beads down my back.
You must have tasted non plus and
confus beneath my lower lip,
je suis désolé pooling in the dip
of my collarbone, because

You were gone
three days ahead of schedule
in spite of every word held back
in spite of the afternoon drives
and the late night talks, Scott Pilgrim
forgotten on the flat screen, the raspberries
that temporarily stained our fingertips.
Slick truth seeped out somehow, through
their perfect Golden Ratio,
these invincible, nautilus spiral prints
forensically seared to my tongue.

It’s summer number twenty-one.
I will my pores to open up, for floods
of pain jardin lune fleurs printemps
to soak the linen and swallow the words
you left behind, smelling decidedly
American, popped caps of Mexican Coke
and regret.

our bodies are slack
lines of rope
thrown up to the sky
kidneys and lungs afloat

somewhere between just one drink
and this playground
we dare this swing set
to break

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.

It was an accident
but my dad kept crossing
his legs, looking to the window.

None of us thought
the chick would make it to
morning. It would sooner

drown in the oncoming
thunderstorm, be picked off
by another set of jaws.

I am resolved
to teach my children,
“Nature is cruel.”

Next morning, the chick
is gone but birds are singing
and there's hope.

He could be anywhere.

Suddenly, all those sad Decemberists songs
we sang on our beds, your car, the bus
to Heathrow, apply to us.
Well, except that one
about the chimney sweep whose love is dead
and the barrow boy whose love is gone
the Yankee soldier whose love is torn from him by war
the Odalisque whose lover is drowned
the double spy who trades a tryst in the  
greenery for documents, and microfilm too.

We are not the star-crossed William and Margaret
whose hazardous love provoked a cruel Queen,
their fates tangled in the roots of the Taiga.
We never made it to Grace Cathedral Hill
to watch the city lights in the cold New Year night.
I was more brine and **** and vinegar
than you knew.

I'll let you know if they ever write a song
for ill-timed confessions and bitten back words
and the way love can run out
like an empty tank of gas
halfway to the sea.

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.

I pull away with the summer, my eye
loping along the quiet symmetry of telephone
wires.

The backyard trees are blots of ink,
nameless as their birds.

Mulch bags sway in reproach from
the neighbor's garden frames for

the marigold's I let die,
tomatoes never planted,

the acceptance that I could not grow
an apple tree from its core.

My tea cools in the indigo hour and leaves a
faded ring behind. The birds are thin shadows
without faces.

She will kiss in public while she’s young enough,
old enough, in love, or bored enough,
without any damns or ***** to give you.
Her hips move at a cant, leaning eager
like the legs of new-limbed lambs.

She waves them on
with twin fingered salutes,
all for a moment,
of ****** hands, tilted necks,
for heels popping off the floor
in rejection of restraint.

So watch.
Drop your jaws
and shove your sweat-lined hands
deep in your lint-filled pockets
while she pours her endorphin soaked joy
into that boy's mouth
surrounded on all sides by Technicolor
sweetness wrapped and bottled,
anticipating its own undoing.

Who was my mother before
she met my father and learned to scream?

Did she wear her hair long and loose,
the thick sheets of burnt oak wheat curled
habitually between her young piano fingers?
Did she stop singing Sam Cooke when people
came in the room? Did cigarets find their home
between her smiles, were curses running  
like bitter saliva through her teeth?

Most importantly: Did she come home one day
--to Pa folded in his armchair, hands tucked tight
against his sides, whiskey to his right, Ma fixing  
dinner with an eye on her dead sons's picture,
Franny working the late shift down at the tracks,--
and know that every night would be shorter than the next
until she was the ghost walking the bright foreign halls
of married life.

We spend our first nine months in
small sacks of transparent, rosy
membranes and indigo-blue veins.

Floating in the fluid darkness,
we breath in time to the beat
of waves rising and breaking

rushing in and out of unseen chambers
of the heart. Existence is a pulsing communion
with God in the ebb and flow of silence

before we wash ashore on the dry banks
of the canal and learn to scream.
My nephew was born small and wrinkled

into latex gloves, with fluid in his lungs.
Brushing my pinky against his petal-fragile
skin, I think of the tides and

the people who return to them with
stones in their pockets, surrendering
to the crashing of salt and heaven

as the first mother fills them
in an inversion of that Egyptian
myth of creation—a small piece of the world

sinking back into Nu’s cold embrace
—and something old and fiercely bright
rises up, overflowing into my smile,

hot and sweet. My eyes burn red against
the late November air as the origins of love
wash me clean.

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.

I started this year in heavy furs,
linens and velvet draped over burlap
dungarees, the sleeves and hems

heavily embroidered with salt and earth,
the egg white bones of small regrets
strung through yards of damaged hair

split at the ends, chipped china molars and
incisors, thorn and rue and columbine
dragging down around my heels, so

I could only stand and resign my torso
to the soft, dark peat and the lavender sky
consuming my silhouette, swallowing my body
in the slow thorough hunger of a snake.

Then I was somewhere else entirely,
planets turning sparks of endless light
in a cat's eye, the scar under my mouth going warm,

shedding my layers away to a cotton shift
and the sharp incision of your gaze.