I want to know
what it feels like
for reconciliation
to wash over
my fault lines.
Take my cracks
and paint them
with gold.
Let me glimmer,
                   gleam,
                           and glow
redemption.
Illuminate my mistakes
and let my skeleton
frame out a museum
of triumph

I am standing in the waiting room
of the Coronary Care Unit
and I am counting because numbers
are the only things feeling real to me today.
Ten steps from the door. Nine hours into the day.
Eight times I have already said ******* under my breath.
Room number seven. Six ways that a heart can step out of rhythm.
Five people in a family that might soon be reduced to four.
Three cardiologists that cannot tell me what the hell has happened.
Rumor has it that two of those six arrhythmias are fatal. You have had one.
One door separating me from one person
laying in one room with one ventricle
that does not, will not, and cannot
pump.

We all carry someone inside of us—
someone that climbs up our spine and sleeps
on a hammock stretched across our rib cage.
Carry me and day after day
I will be your second heart,
beating outside of your chest,
reminding you of all the reasons you have
to cut yours out.

Romantically speaking,
I am not very romantic at all.

My spine curves and
sprouts forth a
humerus that holds
to a radius and an ulna
with metacarpal bones
dangling
downward
reaching for something to
anchor themselves to.

I am not very romantic at all,
it's just that my bones have flourished
curling around you.

Feet hanging from the deck
of the bow, sitting shoulder
to shoulder and thigh
to thigh. I can’t help but wonder
in what ways the salt air
is dancing off of the sound
and over our taste buds,
changing the way we read
the Prosecco between us.

I almost didn’t bring this bottle.
The thought of opening the cage—
six half-turns forward,
wrapping my palm around the
wire frame, twisting the bottle,
by the base, off of the cork—
it all seemed like too much.

There are too many ways
to mess it up, and I know that
I don’t have a grip on anything
when I am around you, but
I no longer believe that bottles
should be left
uncorked.

“20 ways to repurpose a light bulb”

It tells me I need to start with a good grip around the bulb,
give the solder point a twist and free the brass contact
from the wires leading to the filament. If I make it that far,
I have to break the insulator and pull the filament out
from there. Grabbing the fill tube, I need to empty out the bulb
and wipe it out to get it ready.

I guess I could channel my childhood and turn the bulb
into an aquarium—dropping a little bloodfin tetra in with
a sprig of sea-grass or even make one of three small hanging vases
to put on my wall in the kitchen. If I want to get crafty,
I have directions for a glass sculpture, a holiday ornament,
and seven different size centerpieces.
The real surprises on the list are the light bulb necklace
and the concrete molds for light bulb handles.

Here I am, 4 A.M. on a Saturday morning planted on the couch
peering at the screen through my Jim Bean bottle eyes
and all I see are ways to repurpose this broken bulb
for something new—something it should have never been—
and I wonder why I can’t just grab the oil and a wick and
turn it into what it always wanted to be.

There was a
lone light
hanging above
the butcher block
in the kitchen and
when the wind would
blow too hard
against the cedar shake shell,
the house would let out
an exasperated sigh—swinging
the bulb hanging beneath
the metal lampshade from
the cord where it sprouted
from the ceiling.

condense my brilliance
down to a single switch
because you were raised in
a world that taught you to
use me before you ever thought
to learn to understand me

The stars, the ones
hanging in the night
behind your irises,
they dance for you
every time that
you smile
and they teach me
over and over again
that I shouldn't
be scared of
the dark.

We all want to be someone
carved into stone—
assured in our identity
by the admirer taken enough to
etch our jawlines into eternity
from the heart
of a marble slab.

If you work on me as Michelangelo,
I will proudly stand as your David.

She is lying in bed–
        tucked under her duvet,
        wrapped in freshly
        washed sheets, breathing
        into the phone that I know
        is on her pillow–
97 miles from me.

It is her asthma, acting
up right on time, that
is keeping me awake
so I am lying, under
my own duvet, holding
onto my own phone,
thinking
        about the airways
        carrying every breath
        into and out of her lungs–
        inflamed, muscles tightening,
        narrowing paths
thinking
        that maybe breathing
        in the same cells, oxygen
        mixing with carbon, me
        mixing with you, you might
        be able to breathe
        a little easier
thinking
        that I know
        I breathe easier
        with you

right now, everything good is so difficult
because every step I take
towards my better tomorrow
reminds me of the future
that I'm leaving behind–a future that
I was completely in love with,

even if you were never
in love with me

In 1968, she poisoned her father,
1970, her mother-in-law
and 1971, her husband. 1986 was
her boss-turned-lover-turned-boyfriend
and by 1989, her attention was
focused on her second husband.
Exhumation became so common
that the local cemeteries were
renamed as her landfills.

She sits across from me–shoulders
squared and gaze relaxed–waiting
for any question I might come up with.
     What ran across your mind the very first time?
Her breath flees from her lips
and she says to me
     freedom.

I look her in the eyes–
     see a monster.
She looks me in the eyes–
     sees herself.

After a hurricane,
the air is different
and so reverberates
the sea. After a hurricane,
the water is dense.
I lay floating—
carried by salt—
thinking about weight
and the lack thereof.

After the hurricane,
nothing is right.
The weight of my body
on the waves
does not compare
to the weight
on my chest
in your
absence.

The duvet is disheveled—
hanging onto the mattress,
half draping the ebony stained
floor. Admiral Blue walls are illuminated
by two brass pendant lights
that have sprouted from the ceiling
and are growing off of
the bitter ends of
the anchor rode.

My attention is pulled down
by the locket
weighing from my neck
as the silver braid bites
with chill and I stay on the bed
and focus on that brightwork
laying on my chest and
I keep trying to ignore
the far corner of the room
by the vanity because
I keep trying to ignore
your blubber-skinned suitcase
painted in barnacles, sitting on the floor,
mouth wide open, like it is just there waiting
to swallow you whole and
spit you back out at the next harbor—
I swear, I think it is trying
to rename you Jonah.

Tonight, like every other night before
that you have stepped from my deck
to throw yourself into the sea,
I will find myself,
after the moon has risen,
after the tide has shifted,
and after the town has fallen asleep,
wandering aimlessly down the hand paved
roads that weave along the port to sit
with *your life, your love, and your lady.

Thursday night is game night but Hasbro
has never had this one right. Operation is not
a game for ages four and up–maybe four,
multiplied by four, add four, and up.
Surgical mask on, Cavity Sam prepped,
and tweezers waiting to the right of the operating table:

I like to start with the Adam's apple–
carve away any trace of my origins
and they will never figure out who I am
because, like my mother used to say to me,
who is Eve without a blameless man.

Then I move on to the butterflies in the stomach
flittering and fluttering for a home that feels far more familiar
but they cannot be caught, only drowned.

Naturally, the broken heart follows
but the problem with pulling that out is
the never-ending-silence,
white-noise-science, black-hole-giant,
You know, the absence that predates writer's block–

writer's cramp, sliding a pencil up your wrist like it's the
(best kept) secret IV of an author.
Is that the price of filling up your bread basket,
going  to bed full on recognition and reward
and maybe even a Pulitzer Prize?
Be careful not to trip up on your own ego
or you just might end up with a wrenched ankle
and water on the knee.

I still have to deal with the wishbone,
the split-in-two-gravestone,
the only-one-of-us-is-leaving-here-happy zone.

And finally, I have the spare ribs
but I just might leave those there
because we see what happened when God
bothered to remove those the last time.

The Elders took me to church
and planted me on the back row
to squirm and fidget
while they filled my head with stories
of women like Delilah,
          who seduced Sampson
          and used her body
          to weaken a warrior,
and Bathsheba,
          whose nakedness upon her own roof
          made David falter
          from king to killer,
but told me that I will lose
value after I grant a man
permission–should he even ask–
to lay his hands on me,
as if the priest and prosecutor
could preach purity
into my dry bones
and watch me rise up before them
without ever having realized
the power I possess
within my own rib cage.

*"And the serpent said unto the woman,
'You will surely not die."

Something happens
when your eyes
catch mine
and I have yet to
figure out if
they truly do
glisten or if
I’ve just been getting
drunk off of your
incandescence
this entire time
and seeing stars.

Fortify me.

If you came here
looking for a fight,
know that you will not
find one with me.
My white flag was raised
and I surrendered myself
to you completely
on day one.

I want to know
how it feels to be
so connected
to someone else that
you do not want
to live without them.

Please god connect me,
connect me
to myself.

It seems like the entire world knows
how to dance except for me.

There must be a metronome
that ticks the tempo
right out of the torso
of Mother Nature herself
but I cannot seem to tune in.
Everywhere around me
I can see a rhythm that refuses
to run through me like it somehow knows
that I am always going to be that one kid
left standing with my back against
the gym wall and the beat is just another club
that cannot afford to let any losers in.

I see the leaves—crisp hues of
yellow-bleeding-into-orange,
orange-bleeding-into-brown—
being directed by the air that they cut
as they learn to dance the American Waltz
left box, right box,
underarm turn,
hesitation step
spinning to the ground
and swell approaches the shore
carrying forward a small roar,
energy circling from deep to shallow,
waves shoaling, rising up,
moving along to the Foxtrot
feather step, three step,
natural turn,
hover cross
uncurling onto the shore.

But still, after all of these years,
I am here with shoulder blades pressed to cinderblocks
trying to tap into the meter while I tap my toe
inside of my shoe so the mountains will not shed rocks
like tears that come along with steady laughter.

Girl says no.
Girl says I said no.

Boy says nothing with his mouth but
moves with hands that say let me start my
cross-examination of the witness and
looks at her with confused eyes that say
may I remind you, ma’am, that you are under
oath. Would you like to change your answer?

Girl says no, I said no.
She is jury,
she is judge,
she is verdict.
She is gavel banging against sound block
on a case closed.

Boy still says nothing but sheds
his clothes like last season’s skin
and when his jeans hit the floor
they say Your Honor, I am asking
you to recuse yourself.
He is still confused because
buying dinner is just a more polite way
of buying a ******* her knees
so he wrongfully believes that
his libido has the right
to stand in as a judge in appeals court
to overturn her ruling.

This is the only trial that she will see
because prosecution does not want
to press charges with a case that they do not believe
will result in a guilty verdict and ****
is still widely accepted as
just a he-said-she-said civil case.



*According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports out of every 100 rapes, 32 get reported to the police, 7 lead to an arrest, and 3 are referred to prosecutors.

History gets bottled
up, shelved on
its side, and put away
for a day you might
want to recall
all of the vivid
details.

I don’t want
us to be put
down in the cellar,
covered in dust,
as just another
overlooked year.

Days begin
somewhere under
the height of
the sinking moon

and the tides that dance in and out
with it; I drift among
the crests—resting among them—
wondering how to catch a fish—
how to catch myself.

Alice said "eat me" and I complied.
I dined on her dreams
and got drunk on her laughter
and grew to be too much for her in the end.

I wish she would have warned me
that the ways in which she changed me
would leave me alone at the bottom of
the rabbit hole–

I think one time I used to call it home down there.

tips of my toes
pressed own
to the chill of
ceramic, i sit,
        shoulders barely
        peaking out
        from the thin film
        of what hours ago
        were bubbles,
scared to drain
the tub because
right now,
i feel so ******* small–

small enough to
circle the drain
and slip right through
the holes
in the grate

Leaves singing their mourning song
beneath my weight after the betrayal
of the seasons' petals –
falling as men
falling back in my hometown
from the top of the parking deck; men–
falling as petals
falling from their places amongst the roses
in my grandmother's greenhouse.
        Both calling home to ground.

I forgive annihilation.
I forgive eradication.
I forgive termination, cessation, exhumation,
and I forgive myself
for ever being foolish enough
to believe that death owed me
an apology in the first place.
        *Ashes to ashes, dust to dust

I tell them about the way you laugh
when you're being tickled–with you chin
tucked in and to the left.
They have no idea that my tricuspid
stalled out the second your fingers danced
up my right leg by the water.
You renamed my aorta home
when you whispered your secrets
into my ear and the damnedest thing happened:

you spoke as if you weren't a
miracle in disguise.

If I lay back on the sand today, I know I will just disintegrate–

        degenerate, deteriorate.
        The wind, coming in strong
        from the south sweeps
        grains of me and grains
        of sand through the air
        and, somewhere along the way,
        we pick up grains of salt
        spraying off of breaking waves
        collapsing toward more grains
        that get churned up in the surf.
        Everything gets mixed together.
        The spin of the Earth mixes molecules
        and we are all really just atoms any ways.

        But some of us, well,
        some of us are just atoms trying
        to find our way
        to you.

the needle scratches
on top of the spinning 33
and it just seems easier to play
with the electromagnetic pulse
of a cassette tape until I can pick song
by song, light by laser, what to put on a CD
but what does that matter when MP3 holds playlist
on playlist of mixes in the palm of my hand,
a hand that, seconds ago, had thumb on
edge and finger on label and now
the needle scratches
on top of the spinning 33

When I lay my head down

on your chest, I can feel

the comets shooting through

your veins. Stardust dances

across your skin and I swear,

the freckles on your back

mark out the most captivating
constellation that I have ever seen.

It didn’t make sense to me

how I could sit under

the vast night sky and feel like

it was suffocating me

because it just wasn’t enough

anymore, after I had your arms

wrapped around me.

I guess the universe was trying

to send me a message:

you are one of hers.

It's hard to
explain
how it feels
when you
realize that
your place
is really just the
absence
of a place.
To make a door,
you must first
reduce
part of the wall
to nothing more
than a hole.
Maybe they just
need me to be
framework

Some days it all
seems easier to
just walk away
because pride is
a hard pill
to swallow and
love is only
a game for two
because one
person has
to have someone
to beat before
they can win.
The thing is,
the heart
only knows
how to beat.

And it does so everyday,
not just some days.

I don't feel like I have any right
to write because words feel so empty
when the weight of the earth is nothing
compared to the weight of the burden
on the chest in a world blinded
by such irrational hatred
on both sides of a blood stained line.