you...my favorite poem
is that hard to believe?
it is to me
when every poem I write
develops like a newly planted tree
the seed
precious and ever so kind
I plant it into the cold thick ground
but you see dirt
just embraces the fact that every beautiful start
has to start with a little bit of crap
and so we wait
for this noun to grow
everyday elements expose
who it is
the sun signifying his eyes
the rain washing away as it lies
and washing away his lies
once the elements combine
you create one heck of a dime
a flower whose every bit
would never be diminished
and a flower who has been giving the power
to thrive

you are better than the best poem I've written
you make my heart beat faster than time
I am lemon, you are my lime<3

There are parts of you that make you who you are,
And parts that don’t.
Parts of you, that without them,
You don’t feel like you belong to the group you
Once associated with.
Having my ******* removed in order to enter remission
And beat breast cancer
Feels like my womanhood has been lost.
Flat chested takes on an entirely different meaning.
It’s crazy how I hear women
Wishing that their ******* weren’t so small
But they don’t know what it’s like
To have no ******* at all.
Or that they wish their hair was longer
When mine is the length of the guard
On an electric razor that my husband uses.
How does a man begin to love a woman
That has scars where her ******* should be?
The hair on my head has yet to grow back, even a little bit.
Reminding me only that I’m still a woman
Is the gift Mother Nature sends each month.
The cramps in my abdomen seem ten times less
Compared to heaving an empty stomach
Into a pan or toilet bowl next to me
After the chemicals have entered my system.
Throwing up from morning sickness
As my unborn child has just started to live
Told me that I was indeed a woman.
But now after she has grown and must
Watch her mother battle cancer,
Lose her hair, throw up nothing but emptiness,
And she still tells me that I’m the
Most beautiful woman on the planet.
How do I tell her that I feel like
An alien from Mars?

The schoolteacher had an affair in Santa Fe.
She was a schoolteacher and a tourist.
And an affair adds dimension.
It makes a place more than memory.
The notion of it inverts.
Santa Fe now resided inside of the schoolteacher.
The city had a cracked voice and blonde hair
and a slightly sagging belly and pictures
of a New York niece on its phone and
an ambivalent relationship with combing its hair
and an irrational fear of left turns.
She expected young artists with vague academic worldviews,
chainsmokers talking loudly about point of view and Heidegger.
Instead the artists were retirees, painting nothing but landscapes
of red earth, attempting to improve on the natural world.
The schoolteacher did not like this kind of art.
It was trivial.
Wholly unnecessary.
Then the blonde artist walked up behind her
in a stucco gallery. He said, "You hate it don't you?"

"Yes."

She turned. He appeared to be in his early forties.

"Tourists never understand it."

"I'm not a tourist."

"You are. You've never been within the land."

"Don't talk to me like this."

"This is how women prefer to be talked to."

"Not this woman."

"Even you. You want to be told you're wrong.
'I look fat' No. 'Everybody hates me.' That's not true.
I'm skipping the stage where we agree. I'm going
straight to the stage where we are opposites.
Plus and minus."

"The part where we *****."

"Or connect or lose ourselves."

"I bet you live in a loft. Dozens of half-finished
canvases strewn about. Dabs of dried paint on
newspapers."

"I live in my big sister's basement. She isn't home."

"There's not enough wine in the world."

"That's where you're wrong," he said.

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cozy parlor, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamor
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamor
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past