All that you are is potential
And really, all that that is, is my willing suspension of disbelief
But I am the actress, not the audience
And when you know how the trick is performed
It becomes difficult to believe in the magic

The chunk of heart I gave you was one of my favorites
It was muscled and strong
Youthful, oxygenated and proud
It glistened with a healthy sheen
And radiated wholeness
Despite being just one portion of an *****

There are other pieces.
So you can keep that one.
But please take care of it,
And sometimes pull it out to admire
What a shining example it is.
What a perfect specimen
And how worthy.

What could have been clings to my skin
As would water dried with a sodden towel.
The air is cold, my body a certain shade of damp…
Somehow I’m supposed to put on my clothes
Walk out to the car, open the door
Sit down in the driver’s seat, ignite and fire the engine…
Instead, I begin to mold—or mildew—a human-defier,
Breathing moist breath on the windows, creating mini rain clouds that will blind me to the road ahead.
If I am to dry—I’ve
Got to turn on the defroster,
But sitting here I can draw your image in the condensation,
Again and again,
Each time it begins to fade.

Sacred Spaces come to exist
When breathless lovers
Look into one another
And see their souls reflected*

On Saturday night I drove out in the dark hoping to return to ours
Kept company in the empty seat beside me
By your phantom presence

I guess the route I took though
was not the one we had gone together
and it wasn’t so much return
As reclamation

Strange, I noticed, that where once was holy, hushed and waiting
Was now bathed in industrial light
Had become abandoned amber
that, if we’re being honest, reprimanded me.
This was not the place where we stopped to rest.

I suppose alone I was the trespasser
On a way that opened only for the two of us.

The tear emerged
Already falling
Down my face
Over my breast
And around my waist

An arm snaking
A cold, damp embrace
Welcomes the fall
The summer child saying goodbye
To her season.

Greeting a shadowed distance
As yet cold, and de-luminate
Fog and mists unburnt
the path invisible pour les yeuse
therefore, essential.

I dreamt you said I love you.
This was after I had ‘killed’ our test baby.
It was small, and fake,
And they had taken our real one away from me.

There are two things that inspire me:
You. And native quotes.
So when you quote of love
I clearly must write a poem.

When you walk away from me
I will watch you go,
Then I will turn and walk the other way
And wonder if, like his dark materials, our atoms will find each other’s somewhere down the road.

They say that as Geronimo died
He said, I should never have surrendered.
I should have fought until I was the last man alive.
Fortunately, I have never been the type to enjoy watching things burn.

At 10:20pm on a Tuesday night
The number 14 bus is full
Bright, glistening, and fevered
These tired commuters expend vast energies
on wishing they lived here—so they’d be home by now.
Transients—the unhoused—talk in believable lies
About Portland’s oldest bridges
And salmon runs in the Willamette
And every time the bell signals a stop requested
Those of us remaining heave another sigh of delay.

At SE Cesar Chavez, which was 39th when I was growing up,
More people get off than on—
A man in a brutal cavity t-shirt,
A 30-something in a grey hoodie –
Both transferring, probably, to the line 75.
I get off around 47th,
Pass the long-closed and over-priced vintage furniture shop,
Cross the street at the fading crosswalk,
Pass a bar, a home cooking joint with and early bird special of $2.95,
Another bar, and a lonely busker playing guitar and singing Weezer.

In my building, on my floor, the hallway always smells like chicken
I’ve yet to cook, to even finish unpacking
But all of this already feels familiar
My first night’s commute home
And I am as practiced and nonchalant as a New Yorker in the City…
At least as much as a Portlander can be in Portland.
I’ll have wine, or tea,
Put on my lounging clothes
And settle into an evening alone
As if I’ve been doing this forever
As if we never were.

We walk backwards through this life
thus seeing clearly in hindsight.
Here I drop your hand from mine
though love you I do still.
The liquid leaking from my eyes takes two forms I recognize.

If once you read this, and you will
Remember how my breast did feel
wrapped in your palm, knees at a kneel
tucked in the curve of time.
The price has faded on the bill, we both are freed our hearts to heal.  

Unspoken as you once were mine
abandoned path, now out of line,
vague in hopes to be entwined
should we meet again.
With fearful fretful heave of sigh, I turn mine eyes away from thine.

Whispered smiles will bring then
echoes and dreams remembered when
the mouth I loved spread with a grin—
I dreamt I’d be a wife.
Then put to sleep these dreams and sins, or let them lie awake within.

If later in deep look and flight
returns me to this quiet night,
then with my hand I will try
again your hand to hold.
Freely falling from great heights, we’ll drop together through this life.

My heart beat’s strong
A medallion, rat-ta-tat-tating tattoo
With the scent of voodoo in the air
Skipping a beat or two

If I am a lingering thought
Let me be the old cookie factory on Columbia
Women in hair nets and aerosoles
And that clinging smell so sweet.

Today is not the end of the story,
But it’s always a good day to die

Parachutes in gym class
Candy man sweet songs
Thinking back I’m golden stars
Recollections and days gone

There is the path I will not walk again
Paved in road **** and litter
These are the things that I have done
The children that I have delivered.

Black is the color of my “true” love’s hair.
His nose a beak,
His chin, and aspects of his character, weak.
Why then, do I bother?
Well, I read once, that, “there are places in the heart that do not exist;
Suffering has to enter for them to come to be.”
And I’ve always been told to be wholehearted.

My blue eyed-devil suffered
From different variations of the same flaw
Or did I suffer him?
Or did I suffer, and in suffering, bring new flawed places to life?
If that is the case, then I should be called creator
God. Almighty in my abilities to generate where nothing was before.
And if I am so bold, so audacious, then wholehearted isn’t he?

I read again once, once again
That each time a heart breaks
There is more pain than the time before.
Medically this doesn’t make sense—
Shouldn’t the fractures be slightly more vulnerable, easier
To crack? Or is it that new compounds emerge—fresh and sharp
while ghost aches, echoes, and wind still haunt their ancestry?

Perhaps it is neither.
Perhaps, instead, it is not even a matter of the living and the dead,
But of the young and the elder,
And these wounded heart bones
Are simultaneously living new aches and old pains.
After all, I’ve also heard, that, “time is a white
man’s construct,” only serving as the bleached skeletal frame for our selves.

Picture that then,
The hollow-eyed skull of the universe
Watching as we give bits of ourselves away to time
So that we may under and stand existence—
Create those “new” places with the patches and sewing
Of our old hurts, and the stretching and tearing of new.
We become wholehearted.