The sheets yet to cool and the sun yet
to rise, I've already practiced an easy
goodbye– but seeing you wreathed in
sheets, sleepy, pleased, feels unkind when
you're just a dream I have sometimes.

To your can't, I say won't,
and that's fine, love. That's fine.
To your try, I say don't,
and that's fine, love. That's fine.
To each failed attempt,
I say wasted ambition.
To your look of confusion,
I say you wouldn't listen.
To your heartfelt regret,
I say no need, it's fine.
I felt loved for a while
and that's mine, love. That's mine.

Perhaps not love – at least akin,
this shatterbelt of sheets and limbs.
Our hearts break for the smallest things,

but if we're just two burning bees
in a forest full of cardboard trees,
I wish for drought, dry leaves, a breeze.

If this poem is like our love
(and the sky as
clear)

then it will rise like a rocket
and stop short,
here.

Before the rain falls,
the leaves turn their pale bellies 
skyward, playfully.
She is staring at the sky.
He thinks *I should kiss her now.

You were in your forties then, lived upstairs with your
old man, gave the neighborhood someone to feel better
than. I was maybe nine or ten, and Franny, oh! I could
have cried when he blacked your pretty gypsy eye and
Franny, oh! my restored hope when I saw Joe, his lip laid
open; Franny, you could throw a punch. So here's to right
hooks, Franny. Here's to gin before lunch. Here's to street
smarts and cunning hearts. I didn't end up like you. I got
out of the neighborhood. I'm my own woman; that's our
slogan, but you know, Franny, sometimes even that 
makes me feel like I'm swinging my fists in a third floor flat.

Forgiveness as a chosen way's
like bringing home a cagey stray;
it may bite, despite good will,
but tend your wounds, and feed it still.

days brisk with drumbeats,
evenings spilled from riverbanks—
drifts of violet, ripe moons.

Not my stop, but
still the thought of
leaving makes my
heart feel hot – to cross
beneath the buzzing light,
softly into this crisp night.

I tell the girls to pick up
their clothes, to make
their beds, brush their
hair; I tell the girls to
tuck in their entitlement and
pull up their despair – there's no time.
I tell the girls to be kind, to build
up their sisters like each word is
communion and that girl is divine.

At night we were a fresco 
painted by an astronaut, our 
messy bed the chapel of a
voyeuristic God, where glory 
worked with hurried hands
in frenzied fellowship and
hallelujah was a sigh that
quivered on my lips, then we
nodded off like angels of our
own apocalypse; it was made-up
love, when we woke up,
the dreamed up stuff of kids.

Felt good to be warm. Felt good to find
somewhere quiet. Felt good to be ankle
deep in the river, to be knee deep in the
river. Felt good to get your hair wet. Felt
good to let the mud on your legs dry in the
sun. Felt good to dig your hands through to
cool earth. Felt good to close your eyes. Felt
good when he touched you just as a breeze
went hushhh through the trees. Smelled like
rain, and God, that felt good. It felt good.

The moon only wants everything,
her net always cast;
greed versus gravity.

The only things Earth cannot
hold fast to
are oceans and imagination.

A last incinerating kiss, then
the exponential loss of  bliss–
take my heart and divide by
you; leave me with poems and
warm anecdotes that I'll store
away like Marie Curie's notes:
still hot, still toxic, still true.

Because inventing heaven
from pebble and mist
was backbreaking,
heartquaking
work

and
because I
shivered with 
fever, my body lit
by rapture unfathomed,

I sought stillness in the mouth
of the ocean, gave myself
to her shallows and,
with sleepy eyes, 
said

Leave 
me here.
You laid hands to my 
dreaming curves. They became 
dunes, shifting; you filled my sky with birds.

I cannot deescalate you,
or pin you to a warm bed and
kiss the anger from your lips.

The trap is set, or sprung—
always in the teeth of something;
always wondering if it's best
to struggle or lie perfectly still.

Your words ****; they remind me 
that I've made all love borrowed,
having spent mine as I pleased.

My father, in those moments
of what almost seemed like
hope for me,
would push back his cap,
tap his forehead and say

This is the only thing no one can ever take from you.
It's the only thing that's yours.

His brilliance was his only pride.

When I left his house,
I took only what was mine.

Wait, please—
don't go.
There's something I
need you to know;

when I fall,
it's headlong
and this poem,
these poems,
are all wrong.

This is a lonely poem,
a half an hour before dawn poem,
a poem like an empty kitchen –
a godforsaken (god, I'm shaking)
feeling like I just want to go home
poem. (and I am home)

When you are over me,
I'll pluck my poems from your hair
and shake them from your sheets;
I'll take longer than I should.

On hungry days, I hail
the hunt, squint my
eyes and spin my guns.
Your heart runs by.
I count to one.

Look, I am shook from my
shallows, ten thousand leagues
deep – my heartbeats were war-
ships; you drowned the whole
fleet, but I'll hold on to hope like
sand holds on to heat that for all of
my troubles, you could love me, at least.

Seeking refuge,
I appeal to your memory
of love.

If you remember blithe abandon,
the thump and swing 
of a heart unhinged,

then light a fire for me in this dark night;

if you know that 
what the eye discerns as reluctance
is often fear

then kindle something brave in me
and fan the flames with patience
until they become
inferno.

I couldn't sing the hymns,
but I could recreate you
in the corners of my eyes
so that you could walk through the door
in a storm of miracles
and we could all gather on the lawn
in our summer sweaters and our sweet perfume
to laugh about how scared we were.

You did.
I was parchment;
you wrote with both hands.

I curled at my edges;
the ink is still wet.

I only said I love you once,
one early morning while you slept.
I was quiet so as not to wake you;
I said it softly, then I left.

I wasn't sure I meant it then;
if I loved, I did so badly,
to let it wait until the day
that I could only say it sadly.

I swore I would not write a poem for my father,
who hated poetry
and poets
and most things,

as though it would dishonor him—
his bookish daughter
who cried too easily;
who sat silently through dinner;
who slipped quietly from rooms
as he entered,

still thinking she was better than him.

Fifteen years later, 
I find myself in Boston,
rattling through cool tunnels
below the city of my birth.
I think I see him—
younger than he could have ever been;
but still, the white t-shirt,
the thin mouth,
the blue eyes that I did not inherit—

and what disturbs me the most
is not that I have just seen my dead father 
step out of a train into
the cool white, 
the great big;
it's that my first thought is

I hope he doesn't see me.

So I am trying to love him.
I am writing a poem for my father
who smelled like
cigarettes
and soap
and sawdust
and raised five girls on a quarryman's pay,

and I am crying,
but it feels different this time.

If I wrote you the shortest poem,
a word, or less
that said as much as any
poem, or more;

worked through this night, and the next;
by sunlight,  lamp light
head bent over every word I've ever written
and all the words I haven't learned;

if sometimes I cried, and thought I'd never stop,
and sometimes I found a word
that was not the right word
but it was a good word,
a perfectly sweet word
so I held it to my chest for a while;
curled up in bed with it,
stood there, waving
long after it was gone;

if I wrote you the shortest poem
and rode my bike to your house
because I wanted to give it to you
while it was still warm,

would your door be open?
Would you smile for days?

I'm still like a child
with love—

wanting more than my share,
impatient, reckless.

An unruly student,
I have learned nothing

except this:

Love is indefinite and
ill-defined,

but we should study
together
sometime.

By accepting the terms of this agreement, you represent and warrant that you have the capacity to love.

Any similarity to a previous love is circumstantial; this love is not affiliated with other loves.
We assume no responsibility for for the shortcomings of prior loves;
we do, however, assume all responsibility for any loss, error, or communication failure incurred while in possession of this love.
It is, after all, love.

Love is available as is; no specific results are promised.
If you are at all unhappy, you are encouraged to return love.
If you find love to be damaged or defective, well, it's love.
Slight imperfections are to be expected, and add to the character of love.

Love may occasionally send you poems, letters, or declarations of its continuance. If you wish to opt out of this correspondence, you may cancel your account at any time.

The service may be temporarily unavailable from time to time; this may be due to maintenance, or periods of reflection. It in no way implies or forecasts termination of love, unless specifically stated so.

By accepting this agreement, you agree not to abuse love by acting in a manner inconsistent with the provisions listed above.

(please say yes)

For the same reasons that I stay hungry
for dinner and tired for bed, I keep my
heart a little lonely for poetry; that way,
I can imagine your weathered hands against
my pale thighs as clinging starfish – my
fingernails, bleached cockleshells washed up
on the barely evening beach of your back.

My mother washed potatoes
one by one while my father
went carousing with his
favorite gun; I dragged sticks
through dusty gravel while
I watched it all unravel,
wondering what to make of
such an ugly thing as love.

When you said
what we have is magic
I didn't think it meant
you'd disappear.

Not so long ago
you thought that I made the weather;
you braved me

and when you thought the sun would be nice
I gave you auspicious skies
and a sweet, cool breeze
so that you might feel me,

so that I could whisper in passing
I love you, remember?

Well, I don't make the weather,
but I still love you.
Remember?

I'm not good for you.

I'm better at seduction 

than love; love is hard.

I can't write about miles of sown fields
or the absence of rain
or silver minnows in a cold creek

without also imagining
how the sky would look from underneath you.

I can't write about sugaring season
or my grandmother's barn on a foggy morning
or the thrum of an August day

without also imagining
kissing each one of your berry-stained fingers.

I blamed it all on Scorpius—
my secret self, the sting, the lust,
my conditional approach to trust.

I shrugged at Mars when jealousy
and suspicion got the best of me;
I was just his astral devotee.

And my vengeful hate for all unjust?
It all went back to Scorpius,
but, alas, I hovered on the cusp;

I'm Libra now. I'll readjust.

When I was eight, I threw a rock at my cat.
I wanted something to love me, and he
didn't. Unfamiliar with rage and unskilled
at throwing rocks, I missed and hit the fence.
I was and am ashamed of this.
I wasn't that kind of kid.

Once, a boy sent me photos from Scotland,
daybreak over  the snowy moors where he
hunted grouse with his father. He was skinny,
and sweet. I stopped writing him because I
had a thousand words for love, and he
couldn't spell any of them.

And once, I took your love for granted. It was vanity;
I felt like the lost works of a prolific master.
I wanted someone to delight in discovering me,
to wonder where I had been. It was easy to
blame you; all those years and you didn't
know what you had.

If you believe in all possible universes,
I aimed for the fence and hit the cat.
I married a sweet, skinny boy who will never
love a poem. I never had anything to prove
and I don't need you to forgive me.

Translations frequently differ;
sometimes it means
you feel good tonight.

I've removed the blankets from my bed
although the nights have gotten colder.
I dare not let them touch my skin;
you've left me, carelessly, to smolder.

You obviously don't speak silence
or you would have heard me say

*Stay.

When I had nothing to mourn, I did anyway, 
not knowing the difference;

it was just autumn wail—
an old wives' tale, 

and you were indelible,
but I was 

forgettable.

Little more than listless guests,
we play the game I-need-you-less.


Discord, missed turn, second guess;
things are different. Bitter? Yes.


Weary, naked– I'll confess;
you drew your hooked line through my chest


so meet me in your battledress
and if your blade finds  tender flesh,


I swear that with my dying breath
I'll say * "I won. I need you less."

Cue our story halfway through,
without the benefit or detriment of history—
affinity, no past attached;
you don't know me, I don't know you,
but yet, we do.

I would bring you lunch just to watch you walk
across the field; you reminded me, then,
of a young Fidel Castro. I had just
read his prison letters, and was feeling like
maybe we didn't set enough things on fire.

At night, we played games; I would call you
Comandante and undress you, trying
not to smile when I spoke of the uprising,
but I always did. Some nights, my mouth on
your skin and all of those fires not lit

and all of those things  left standing
made the world seem too big and my torch seem
too small; I could never be brave enough.
On those nights, you kept my heart in my chest
with your grenade-throwing arm, tenderly.