her eyelids close. hot heavy and sticky in the creases with the slime the heat of the day.
she is bruised on her legs. green purple yellow. clumsy her. someone ought to tell her to be careful.
but she looks again and they look sort of like mishapen art on her flesh. bruises and dark freckles, scattered, over her shoulders like flecks of paint. dark hair, crazy hair, she tries to fix to no avail. her heartbeat thunders in her thin bones, louder than her voice rambling sweet nothings and her fingers tapping the nightstand. the ink in her skin slink off of her body like vines, roots, slithering across the bed over cotton hills to reah him. soak into him and wrap their tendrils around the ink in his skin.

I heel, ball, toe on a beaten path
in the cold and the dark.

The light of the cartoon moon spills

over my skin,

suddenly braille.

Alone and shivering I begin to move.
No longer on the path in Ohio,
but in the firelight in Bogota'.
Golden flesh.
Twisting and body pulsing
with the beat of the music.


Back home where it’s cold and dark.
Dizzy and sick with heat that

isn’t there with me at all.

You can’t be here with me either.

When I sleep,

I’ll make like Eloisa, unbounded.

I suppose for now,
The cartoon moon will have to be company enough.

'Tis heartbreaking to see you marvel so at children's play.
Do you not remember that you were once a child?
Have you lost the sweet ring-a-ding-dings of fairytale teachings?
Each day you fall further into The Man
And away from Peter Pan, Sara Crewe, Alice, and The Great Baron Munchausen himself.
I have not forgotten the road to where they go.
Begin where you are,
Sitting mundane, in your realm of logic and laws, tasteless office cubicle.
Now close your eyes and count to ten!
One Mississippi, two Mississippi...
When your eyes creak open you'll have to think fast!
You've no weapon against that smelly pirate with his dagger to your throat!
Give a good kick and a hard shove and you'll see the blade has changed hands, AVAST!
One good ****** and you slice through his thieving guts like butter!
Abandon ship! And SPLASH! into a garden surrounded by stone.
All you've to do is turn your head to see the peonies, the morning glories, the honeysuckle dripping in dew.
Now straighten up and grab hold of your bearings; that's it!
What was that?!
It blew by you, fast as lightning and just as bright.
A fairy! It must have been!
You run off after it but your foot catches a mangled root and you
SLAM! Face first into...WHAT IS THAT?!
Bones?! Now scramble to your feet and dash to the opening of the damp cave,
Round the corner and AH! crash into a giant gray ogre! GRRAAAGGHGHH!
Quick! Pick up that femur at your feet and pitch it into his eye! Ha! You big brute!
Duck between his great tree trunk legs and RRRRRIIIINNNNGGGG!
There goes the office phone.
But you're still out of breath and desperate for more.
Silly, don't you know? It's not something I can teach you.
You just have to REMEMBER.

Night sweeps in with its great, black wings.
These rustling, silk feathers that
impregnate my lungs with midnight down.
I lay next to a man who is not mine and I am not his.
We label ourselves Pretenders as he pushes himself into my florid space.
My eyes flutter, a shiver runs through me.

He and I are charlatans, fabricating our worlds as we go along,
composing these ravenous ghosts line after sloppy line
like its our civic duty to make people see things that aren't there;
as if our entire identity resides in our ability to be a competent weaver of words.
My God, is this all we have in common?

This world is bleak in the winter, forced by the earth to be patient.
And yet, this air that rams glass splinters down our throats cannot muster
a flake or tempest to free my mind from this unfamiliar bed I'm in.
I lay next to a man who isn't mine, and I am not his to love.

What a wretched thing,
Hollow mahogany and
Mother of pearl inlay
That houses your love for me.

We're in our twenties now,
But I remember seventeen,
October rising around our ankles
Like a flood.

I never minded being your muse,
But I didn't want your love.
That heavy, languid thing,
Too big a burden for my fragile frame.

We used to sit on playground swings.
You would strum that hollow thing
And I would sing about the day and
The night and the in between.

Then it was my turn for silence.
And I wished you wouldn't sweat,
Wished you wouldn't close your eyes
And contort your countenance with passion.

Such sweet words rolled off your tongue,
I felt guilty for hating every one.
Your talent was undeniable.
If only the words weren't about me, for me.

And those steel strings,
Those chords that broke the still night air
Made people wonder how I couldn't love you.
How could I deny such feeling?

But they weren't there the night you kissed me.
I stood solid, didn't even breathe,
As you pulled my hair and pressed your lips to mine,
Such desperation that only made me fear you.

They didn't feel the anger inside you
When you pulled away from me
And I couldn't meet your eye,
Turned to lick away the salt and iron on my lips.

For a moment I thought you might hit me,
But the wall took the blow instead.
"God ******, Megan."
Then you were gone.

Why did you have to ruin those easy nights?
Balancing on street curbs,
Sharing a fifth of gin,
Playing under orange streetlights.

I would tap the tambourine.
We'd nod our heads and let the melody
replace the marrow
in our bones.

That's all I wanted.
Just the music,
Just some easy company.
Never asked for that sickly love.

The day I made you hate me,
That old thing turned up outside my door.
I put it in the corner
Where it gathers dust each day I don't hear from you.

No one else hears the music like you did.
But you had to go and love me.
Now you're gone and all of seventeen sits silent in the corner.
What a wretched thing.

She holds her knees to her chest,
hair falls in strings over her eyes.
Strung out in an alley that is
still cobblestone here.
She does watercolors on her cheeks in black.


Underground entrance cover stained with graffiti,
padlocked after school hours
to prevent sinners and hoodlums from
smoking down there,
and what have you.


Across the street, dance studio.
A mother escorts her offspring inside, carrying satin.
You cannot walk in them outdoors.
Piano on the roof that has not been played
in a decade, I'm sure.


My legs dangle through iron bars,
stairs on either side.
Hiding behind a garden made for children
by my mother,
I watch the sun set High on fire.

I live in limbo.
Suspended somewhere between towering
Steel Titans and
an ocean of corn.
It's that time of the year again.
I know where I need to go.

I sit in traffic, start and stop.
This line stretches to the main road.
I'll be here awhile.
I close my eyes and I'm there already
My quarter mile square of peace
that shouldn't be peaceful.

A car horn blares behind me,
urging me to scoot up fifty feet
just to stop again for another five minutes.
I just want to get there and away
from this fight,
away from these angry people.

I know they're just anxious
to get home after their
daily nine to five
in the city.
They keep inching West, like me.
But I'm not going home.

Finally at the light.
I turn up the radio.
It's clear the stiff in the three piece suit
in the next lane
is not
a fan of Van Halen.

I return his surly glare
with one of my own.
Past the light and
I keep rolling on.
Past the restaurants and
tanning salons.

I stop at the grocery store
and pick up some orchids for her.
I pick the purple ones
because I think maybe,
she might have liked purple.
But I have no idea, not really.

Breaching suburbia,
where I pass housing developments
that someone had the audacity to brand
with snooty names reminiscent
of high end golf clubs.
Who do they think they are?

As I go, the houses get bigger,
further apart.
The windows down,
I take a cleansing breath.
The air, a little cleaner
than before.

Coasting into rural territory,
I glance at the equestrian farm
and abandoned barns,
ripe with decay,
that might crumble
at the slightest touch.

On and on,
just trying to get
to that place,
where few go but me.
That peaceful place
that really shouldn't be peaceful.

I pull up to that familiar octagonal STOP.
Look right to the llama farm,
Left to the empty bean field,
Straight ahead at the sign: Plain City - Georgesville Rd.
I think maybe they call it Plain because
It all looks quite the same.

Over hills that send my stomach into my lungs,
Past the Canaan Community mobile homes
Which is apparently "A nice place to live."
I know its up here on the left,
That old gravel drive that
no one else sees when they pass.

One more hill and I'm here.
Pulling in under the archway that reads
FOSTER CHAPEL CEMETERY.
I turn down the music,
slow the car,
turn off the engine and listen.

Birds, slight breeze,
the occasional passing car
that sounds like a jet plane out here.
Sinking sun sets this place ablaze.
Wish granting dandelions and silk flower petals
strewn by the whispering wind.

Cars pass by, they don't look this way.
I imagine if they did,
they would marvel that a red Grand Am,
and a living person were there where
hardly anyone ever goes.
This is a place for the dead.

I sit on a cracked stone bench
and watch a monarch
flutter and rest on someone's resting place.
I come here when I can't breathe at home.
And sometimes I'm awed by how
beautiful it is here.

How peaceful it is in this moment.
Then I remember why I came today.
A hundred yards of hundred year old
headstones that have since been
weathered illegible.
A few, I can still make out.

Six feet under,
the bones of people I never knew.
Sometimes I wonder about their stories,
the things they might've done
when they lived.
Bow my head for the ones who died young.

On my way to the back,
I look over one I've read a dozen times.
"Jonathan Alder
First white settler in Madison Co.
Taken by the Indians in 1781,
Returned to his mother in 1805."

So much history here.
People who were buried here
after death.
And of course there's her.
The girl who died here
at the hands of a very bad person.

Incongruously dead among
the dead who belonged here,
she was gone before my birth.
I never knew her,
never knew she was here before
I found this place by accident one summer.

Took the second time I came to notice
the wooden cross wired to the fence in the back.
"KILLED HERE MARCH 17, 1991"
It makes me sick to see it.
But still, I lay down the bit of life
I plucked from a bucket in the store.

I always come a month after
the anniversary of her death.
I imagine it might be sufficiently awkward to run into
her family, who may wonder
why a girl who never knew her
would lay flowers in her memory.

There was some rumor years ago
that she haunted this place.
I don't know about that.
But if her spirit still roamed here,
tormented soul, I'd like to think
that she is glad for the company when I come.

For I come more often not in April,
but when I'm angry
or can't clear my head.
I find peace in the beauty here,
and wonder in the extensive history,
and a reminder.

She reminds me that
she never had the chance at life that I do.
She reminds me to appreciate
the life I was given.
Reminds me it could be taken
from me any day.

Some think it strange to find peace
in a place of death and tragedy.
And I must agree.
But this is also a place of rest.
A quiet place for the dead to sleep,
or maybe wait for company.

I don't always do right.
Don't always say the right thing.
I can be volatile and childish sometimes.
And I come here when I know I need to be humbled.
And I wonder to myself,
Isn't this a strange place for peace?