flowers for my mother, it’s nice to hear the voice again…

lift heavy mossy beds, our golden depth…

it’s today, it’s bright, its continuous summer,

thread tugged from hot wax.  

quilting leaves, gentle and warm home breath.



sounds of water rushes words on skin, evaporate in lungs.

windows sit in windows until they are opened,

until they are opened and swiveled and creased on the edges.  

moss on fingertips.



a rabbit entered my dream like the smell of rain –

thunderous rushing sound -

anthropocene buried in a new bed.  Pause.



painting water on backs of hands,

sun dried thoughts return to lungs and yield ferns in the yard.

the first tomato harvest of the season.

they stretch the shade, slow light down.  

last garden rows on a crescent moon.



dans un reve, tu m’aimes.

dans un reve, le ciel et rose

dans un reve, tu m’aimes

et je ne saigne jamais



hieroglyphics sing inside limbs, absent and changing, dividing, growing

why do they make the strange art?  When will time stop?

being lived and lived again, being told about stories

find emerald home reclaimed



within the final days, she said

the stars are unseen

an eye closing on sunlight water

in naked tenderness, humble and gardening open air

visible but cannot be touched,

plant into the earth.  resume.

profound and rich memories carved out in pen and pencil

moss grows newly made bed.

The desert during a heat wave,
Quiet browns and reds,
Sandy rock for miles and miles and miles.
We sit in havens of shade beneath hanging rocks,
Socks prickled with cactus needles.
This windswept planet foreign from rainy eastern green.

Waiting until the hostile angle of the sun lowers to the crux of the mountains,
Shadows extend as jackrabbits skirt around us.  
Les fougères poussent bien à l’ombre.

We climb on top of the tallest hill,
Backs on hard uneven sandstone,
Covered in petroglyphs, we look up.
The stars begin slowly, then all at once.
Salt spilling on black paper, the arch of Orion’s arm
Whirls near Sagittarius and Perseus.
26,000 Light years from her,
Swirling in the dark.
The wind said,
This is now the place for you:
Our galaxy, a heaven.
The stars, a liturgy.
My desert, a temple.

Walking trails my ancestor mapped,
Moss covers our sandals in the  
High sequoia forest.

On the crest of a ravine into a lake,
Inside a cloud,
A black dog follows our path.
Quiet gazes of deer meet us beyond rushing creek beds.
We’ve been awake since sunrise.  

I run off trail, alone.
Hiking up and up until there is  
No one.  
I take of my clothes and bathe in the cool water, the sun, the trees, the mountain, the air.

Waiting for no one who is coming, have I ever been more than anything but mortal?

I wish someone would have protected you,
I wish anyone would have protected you.

The sunlight warms my skin.
We will never be close again.
And I’d rather be here, alone, alone, alone, than hurt you.

here is an empty sky.







i can’t remember the rain________
a ghost softens my thoughts
on cotton horizon bedsheets
sun and moon eclipsed by rainstorm.
they watch me from the porch //

// lilac warmth sweetens air
grown from back porch memories
sun brewed tea with sugar
next to a withering green mailbox
and grassy hill
small painted hands splatter the garage
chalk covered red brick
i watch the empty sky.
_______it regards me delicately



and I fall sleep in the sun.

Self consciousness1, flowers buried under the dirt of the garden.  Stream through the house, a lover’s whisper5.  April mothers, remember medications.  Sleeping curls, sunlight vignettes8.  Every word, every note.


  1Handbook of I Love You, Third Edition

  5Community Studies on Letter Writing

  8Concise Guides to Roses, Polaroids, and London Fogs

I walk down the empty sidewalk, south towards the city light.  
Golden ice glass covers twigs and still born buds like a hypothermic glaze
Claustrophobic and sterile, preserved sacred artifacts
Your clothes crucify against me like hot water we showered under, unfiltered winter sun; learning what peace is.
She’s on the phone, paper cut thighs.  We slept in the same bed last night, warming the sheets.  I keep you close so you don’t have to.
Tattoos of bookmarks, her quiet voice gravitating the landscape like starlight silken water; keeps the planets pinned in place behind dust collected charcoal sky.
Rhythmical beauty of cluttered strange songlike beauty,
Luminescent trees bow to the collage of rippling temperate light
Wearing my clothes and memories like the stories that saturate the senses
Monuments of scraps on display,
Crepitating stiff fabric frosts over on the surface,
My voice permeates the stitches
Like the mild toxicity of long-lost lovers.
Sedated neutral placidity, a rare syzygy

Blackout night blackout poetry, streetlight washed porcelain
Scrubs clean the severity of tenebrous light and shadow
Tender rain delicately succumbs to snow
Absent cold universe of separation
Melts upon collision with wet stone
These fallen angels rest peacefully now in the empty dark
Adumbral and indistinct, illusionistic tame dreams
Have mercy... for I’ve just begun to learn to dress for the weather.  

So --- I’ll blow on your tea while its too hot --- the warmth spreading from my fingertips --- to yours.  Green leaves, translucent gems bobbing in jade water.  Make you warm breakfast in the morning, your half-sleep cuddling into my side, reaching through layers of warm blankets.
--- I had begun to forget my walk last night.

double exposed –
when the apple, pear, and azaleas bloomed
the shutter speed raced like a heartbreak
and we walked in the hills next to home,
the gold stretching after winter’s shadow
daffodil laughter, a time when you were where I am now –
and light twisted through sisterhood’s soul,
a perfume motherhood in turn.
We walked through the rubble of the school, the giant mound of rocks and twisted metal.
On the bridge of a fallen tree – through the scaffolding of an old parking lot.
Magnolia flowers pierced with a pocketknife.
Pittsburgh spring, lilacs and ferns. Memories overlaid like negatives in water.

I sit next to small crescent shadows
Delightful celestial fragments
Soak the ground under the tree

There are people in the lake:
Swimming into the obscured lagoon
Totality opens as crickets start to sing
  Awakening a brief transition into twilight
The lake is still as gazes draw upward,
Separating ourselves from the earth
Eclipse watchers float in the serene.

    



It was the day when shattered plate shadows spread like the root system of a tree
Across the country and onto my wooden front porch


I was 18
Our shadows sewn together on the earth.

shattered green on the gym floor, shells from the ocean pulled by the tides. staircases spiral down and down and until they wait for you. small windows open and close and an ocean flashes with black and white credits, zooming in and out and wrapped up in colorful patchwork quilts. air conditioning hums and churns bits of dust in the vents, pine needles shift in the reflection of sandblasted windows. the ocean is near now. I can smell the salt, the brine in the passageway of my lungs. the ghost of the ocean is my hands, the swaying trees, the circadian boxes of leaves. transparencies through water blend color memory, the recall of fossilized love. ancient creatures roam the depths of the hallway, far underneath the strata of the canyon we call home. they float and glow and survey the depths of rock, water, sand, and seams of light to resurface on a sunny day in the riverbed. carved by water, we enter light. and stretch the calcified seams from which we were woven.

It was nearing the end of the rainy season. Steady downpours muted all other sounds of the village, the time when everyone slept soundly through the night. The rain had not stopped for weeks, until today. Khadisa woke up before sunrise again, to the smell of cool fresh air, no humid chaleur. She remembered the dream, a girl standing behind a waterfall. She said she could hear her voice, but not make out the words. And the water turned into doves, their flapping wings like beating drums. She started dancing to their music, and blood trickled down her arms and legs in the moonlight.
She uncocooned herself from the medley of blankets, warm tangled sheets still playing hushed reruns of her dreams like seashells reciting ocean lullabies long after the tide. She untucked the mosquito net from under her mattress and silently pulled on her sandals and coat as to not wake her roommate. Mariama was still asleep. Khadisa looked over her shoulder to see her friend nestled into the warm pool of the missing body under covers from where she laid, burrowing unconsciously into her ghost. The amber light of the hallway spilled into the dark room like cream rendering black coffee lucid as the sunrise still hours away. She preferred nights like these, when her husband was away.

“Come back and sleep?” inquired a small voice from a pillowy soft, dream-like haze.
“I’ll be back. En bimbi, Mariama.”

Mariama’s birthmark was just visible from under the covers on her petite frame, an angel on her shoulder flying towards the heavens, to her curly bronze sun-kissed hair and constellation freckles. A memento mori of Icarus before the fall. She was not her blood, but she treated Mariama as a sister, a missing half of herself that had been long forgotten.

XXXXX

I wake as if underwater, neon light and sound blurry like I’m underneath a murky lake. My head throbs. Long tendrils of seaweed bodies sway in foggy currents of flashing, turning, strident beams of light. I’m ascending, body buoyant without weight, as I try to move my numb limbs. What did I take? I look at my hands, the smears of fluorescent orange paint and powder. I just wanted to be free, to fly. Feel the wind, soaring down the mountain path on the back of Mariama’s moto. I stretch my arms out, close my eyes and become the air itself: drifting, unattached.
XXXXX

Guided by light of the full moon and Venus rising, Khadi eased the door shut behind her into the latch with a gentle gratifying “click”. I’m never in the same or different places, but I am good company regardless. I depart as air, a constellation rising. She paused and listened to the morning. Epiphanic night colors divulged to her the secrets of sleep-singing crickets, dream-dancing of cassava leaves, crystal-painting of morning grass. She recited the symphonic canticle with her footfalls on the uneven gravel path to the well, the delicate sway of cotton as she walked in the occasional whistling paths of mosquitos. Soaked in tepid moonlight overflowing from the frame of the mountain Chien Qui Fume, she turned off the path into a grove of trees towards the river, and felt like she was disappearing back into the dark.

xxxxx

“another nuit blanche, huh… or should I say matin? The two must be the same at this point for you now. Just a perpetual, non-stop existence.” Mariam added skeptically, eying Khadi over a steaming cup of ginger tea. The wood from the fire crackled, as if in agreement.

“At least you have hot water for breakfast. Anyway, I am used to waking before sunup to prepare food for the family before the hospital shift.” Khadisah added, “I’ll be fine, habibti. No worries.”

“I know your dreams are getting bad again. Hunde kala e saa’i mun. Everything in its own time. Take care of yourself first, for once.”

She struck a match without reply, lit the candles, and poured herself a second cup of tea. Mango flowers unfolded outside the kitchen window, drinking in the early morning warmth with dusty yellow hands opening to heaven. She held the matchstick and watched the flame approach her fingers, remembering the countless needles she has sterilized to perform surgeries even the male doctors were too uneasy to attempt.

“So, what grand prophecies did I miss in the stars this morning?” Mariama put on her glasses and slid them up over the bridge of her nose with her index finger.

“The usual 3am omens, no bad spirits.”

Mari hummed a little hymn to herself and half-smiled as her green eyes flicked downward to her open book and wordlessly melted away any tension as if she were the effortless break of dawn dissipating a mere cloud of morning fog.

Xxxxx

A songbird starts singing a clear soaring cadence. And I am falling back below inundated shallows. I feel her soft blonde hair on my face, her colors warm and sunny. My name over and over and over. She’s shaking me, but I can’t speak. Her voice is perfect, it is all I hear anymore. Mariama with ivory skin, pastel hair. A ghost? No, a child. No more muted ringing in my ears. I melt into her as everything goes black.
My father was kind, unlike most from where we’re from. The kind do not live long enough. Walking in tall grass before a storm, the wind would whip at us in riotous orchestral gusts; I spread my wings and let the weight of air lift me away into the music. I closed my eyes, face upturned to the swelling rainclouds with pregnant bellies. “My Khadisah’s a little bird! Keep spreading your wings, and you’ll fly across the sea to America one day,” he said in French, the language for educated men.
xxxxx

Prep is the hardest stage for projects. Mariama starts in the cold shop, mapping out the light and colors, the size and shape she’ll be sculpting with. When it comes to the glory holes, something else takes over. She was a fote, of mixed blood. From a family who supported her education, her liberty. She thought of Khadisah’s upbringing, pushed the thought from her head as she focused on the heat of the furnace, the twist on the yoke, and the heavy grounding of the pipe. The sound of the port outside the open studio window grounded her, Conakry’s canoes readying their nets, bobbing in the sunrise stained glassy waters. Khadisah is sea glass, she thought. She heals others as she cannot heal herself, a polished stone ever-changing, and strong to the core. Shaped by something bigger, without choice. Although, the fact that there is no true place for us is shattering. But we’ve learned to live with jagged edges, smoothed them in buckets of the rains we’ve carried for miles on miles. Words can be shrapnel, written of the body, in perpetual ancient gestures. Looking down at the glass on her worktable, thin frames of women curved in dance like limbs of a tree in a whirlwind. ****** hieroglyphics speak of the writhing societal inconsistencies, the murky waters from which we fill our cups. The scars in their hearts built by the privileged, defiling bodies and souls without consent.

They are the ones who do the slaughtering.

xxxxx

“I have always loved mythology,” remarked Mari after perusing a chapter or two of her novel. It was a miracle alone that she knew how to read. “Shame that we lost so many of our stories, women.” Khadi had lost track of time, meditating on her morning rituals. She glanced at the positioning of the rising sun on the burning horizon through gaps of light through red kaleidoscopic trees.
“Next time bring me with you,” Mariama suggested, tapping her temple and pointing to me. “To your walking dreams, I mean. Wherever the night spirits guide you when all other men are sleeping, and the world is entirely ours for the taking.”

Khadisah’s gaze fixed fiercely on her friend’s once more, and the whole room erupted with the veracity of fracturing, interconnected, rampant red color. I try to keep my visions to myself, thinking about what used to become of them.

Glass is an extension; it exists in a constant state of change when molten. People change every second, in a constant half-light of who they are and who they will become. Like the lake between dreaming and reality, or a painting in constant interpretation. A word without formal translation, a feeling. Making stained glass, revelations of shape-cut fragments are painted with glass powder and fired in Mariama’s homemade kiln, fusing mirages of paint to the surface. Soldering joints with lead for stability, there is something meditative of puzzling together their memories. When glassblowing, she breathes life into her art, a revitalized self of otherwise secluded rights. Unveiling colored lenses of filtered light, she distills her life, betrays time. Creating is second to nothing, as concrete as petrified lightning in sand, and the fern-shaped kisses of lightning flowers on skin of raging energy.

xxxxx

It was dead winter, dead night. No shoes, no coat. I stopped answering Mariama’s calls. Too many glass cuts and bruises, empty nights. Walking up the snow-covered sidewalk to the chapel, Khadisah felt like she was buried in the new seamless blankets of fallen snow, fallen angels. Sometimes she forgot who she was. Because she cannot save everyone. A wandering ghost, an oracle without omens. Streetlight glowed through polychromatic windows, complex renderings of tall white figures preaching of salvation. Vivid crowns of gold, marbled robes, and flecked wings outstretching and draped by flickering light on the walls. It all reflected on her skin, histories of stories in light. Candles softened the hallway with the smell of incense and old books. Khadisah sighed and exited, reentered the snowy dreamscape outside, and looked up at the universe. The absence of light was beautiful, empty, and full at the same time. The window from a miniscule existence, what oddly calms and keeps us up at night. It was quiet, no wind, no moon. She laid down, a kite without a string. She started making snow angles and let herself cry about them. All of them. The pain when her husband visited, her daughter’s inevitable path like hers. The imprint of her body congealed to glass by the time the sun rose again, and she spoke colors to the stars. The seasons changed; the stars realigned. And more snow fell into her ghost.

“so, who’s gonna take you home, huh?”

I wake underneath Japanese maple, red leaves outlined in dark umber flaming against the clear blue sky. After a deep breath and regaining my surroundings, I evaluate where I am. The underdeveloped path from the reservation meanders back to site. I don’t remember what time or day it is, but I stand and jump across a trickling iron-red stream, I land on the other side a bit older, a bit wiser. Outlined in sweet grass and sage, I gather the herbs. Mint, sumac, elderberry, and yarrow. Sunlight guides me, and I thank the earth. Wah-doh, I say to the four Winds. Peace.
The mint leaves burn, and their ashes float towards heaven.
-----

Like tuning into the radio station from deep in the forest, she heard fuzzy, fragmented sounds. She felt light against her closed eyelids, but only saw a shoreline. She knew it was a dream. The trees aren’t right – the leaves were replaced by flowers, lending their neon petals to the dense sunset air. Standing in tall sweet grass, but there’s no gravity. She looked up, and saw the Japanese maple, the embers of leaves. And saw a reflection laying in the sun looking down—or up?—at herself. She wanted to fight the setting sun, become pristine like them. But she couldn’t hold her breath under the waters for too long. Spilling from the vase of an inviolate soul, sewing the stars like her scars. When the day is burned, we vanish in moonlight.

_

Working in the hospital, the color red. Panic attacks disassociate Khadisah from reality. She can still see, but can’t move, and only watches the violence as she crumbles under the skin. There were more angel marks, more places, less friendly. Stitches from infancy to womanhood, pedophilic ****** rights. A mother at 13, she cried for days and... feels the words rush back like water flooding all around her, rising around her body. This isn’t flying, this is drowning. So this is permanence, imprisonment from identity. A body collaged up and down, cut and fragmented on city and rural streets like vines salvaging mutilated walls and shattered windows. Being so stuck she was free. She saw a lost childhood in Mariama’s glass, and she was light as a feather in her father’s arms again.

The men say the seizures are from the Diable, but it was worse than that.

Even glaciers sculpt land and cut mountains over time with oceans of frozen glass. But earth was flooding once again.

And there was no blood on her hands.

layers of jackets hung over chairs, doodles on desks.   lingering nightmares, people sit statuesque.  the days and hours and minutes melt everywhere; smells of coffee and freshly sharpened pencils fill my wares.  a softness covers my body.  fluorescence illuminates the world in pixels; as time melts and space paints galaxies in your eyes, eternity drips onto my hands and freezes like ice.  

somewhere in the middle i hear a constant hum; calling me from somewhere i cant see.  reverberating in the lake between slumber and living i am overcome; the darkness is calling my name to be set free.  painful and deafening, i cover my ears but i can't hear myself scream.  louder and louder,

it was only a dream.

so i push open the heavy doors of my heart and let the cold air envelop me.  i don't ever want to depart,  your warm hand wrapped around mine is the only thing that feels true.  snow settles softly on the ground around me, the cold numbs my bones.  streetlights turn off like a tide from the sea, then the sun rises with pink and yellow tones.   stars fade away softly, from the opalescent glow of moonlight on your cheeks the sunlight grows.  light creeps on the world around us calmly, and into splendid color erupts the universe from an eternity of monochrome; everything reflects in your eyes, a deep brown that reminds me of home.  but here we're somewhere in the middle, between silent silver evenings alone and a golden spark that could kindle something more.  in the space between our intertwined fingers, the cold knits a thin layer of frost crystal.  your breaths exhaled swirl in the air between laughter and silence, your crooked smile with a dimple, and all of your perfect imperfections hide in a balance.  a balance between you and her, the effortless ways to assuage all that you challenge.  but i can count every time that you've saved me, lessened the blow of reality.  picked up my shattered pieces that crashed like waves from the sea.

on the quietest of days i hear the most epiphanic piano ballads.  every day with you is full of texture and music.  echoing in the corners of my mind and mixing like paint on my pallets, melodies so colorful, beautiful and acoustic.  playing my cassette of acoustic guitar, clear nights on the open road we quietly listen.  beams of headlights run along side the interior of the car, catching brief glimpses of your figure hidden.  without anything meaningless to say, you would sit quietly day to day.  but i moved beside you, and your arm wrapped around me.  i could feel every rise and fall of your soft breaths, fingers intertwined, my head on your chest.  if this moment lasted for eternity..

but would i still love you,
if i couldn't ever lose you?

sometimes when we walk through hallways full of bustling people, we don't talk much.  the space in between is so peaceful.  on your arm with a soft touch,  running to catch up as colors cascade behind me.  you turn around and suddenly i'm icarus, before the fall i feel like i'm flying.  a quick smile crinkles your face and i fall burning to the surface.  

i'm running to you in a dream, about to wake up; brushstrokes cast a blurry curtain around you, sitting in a painting of forget-me-nots and buttercups.  and yet your life is like a photo with every correct hue,
whispering 'come with me'.
in a picture of detail in stunning reality,

a reality where you

are separate from me;

caught in this in-between.

if my mind was an ocean
you are an oil spill
beautiful in your destruction;
colors dancing on the waves.

if i was a color i would be gray
if you were a color you would be all of them.
you are the feeling of warm clothes out of the dryer on a cold day, clean linens, hot tea.
i'm the the word you cant think of, the idea you lost when you didn't write it down.  ink that smudges on your hands.

i'm only temporary, and so are you.  
instants feel infinite in your presence,
hot pain trembles across skin.
the words hung in silence
like clothes to dry in the sun.

the colors,
all would fade
    all would fade
      we all would fa  d       e

hung in a drought of your touch

I cant remember my dream.
I cant breathe.

Her thin painter hands open the door to the stairwell, the smell of fresh paint replaces that of a spring rain.  Skipping the clean stairs two at a time, she reaches the studio.  Walls of glass flank the empty white hallways that weave in and out, remains of torn masking tape shrivel on the walls like dying flowers.  The door looks like it belongs to a prison, too familiar.  

The sun barely moved, if at all, outside the window.
Tracing the outline of his body, she let the colors tell the story.


A stroke of shadow

Walking to the center of the room, limbic resonance.  A vaguely masculine figure melts into the painting.  It's silent as he dies.  

Her feet hit the pavement.  From the familiar soft dirt path through the woods, she crosses the courtyard to the doorway of the stairwell.  Memories flood her mind under the dull lamplight amidst the rustling dead leaves.  

Moving a stone from the crumbling wall of the school, she places her letters to you beneath the rubble.

Blinding white

I'm holding the keys but I can't find the right one
and the sun burned itself down,
the rain receded into the clouds

nothing is the same


He lies down in the stream
water rushing over him
relaxing, water replaces air

everything is different now.

Blistering Blue

I can't remember my last dream.
Out of space, out of time.  Unnatural surroundings.  
Muffled screams float in from the hallway.
Golden seam of light from the doorway saturates illuminated stitches.
He couldn't remember the last time this had happened.   When he almost lost himself in the pain---
It's like seeing her for the first time, over and over.

Suddenly his hands were covered in their blood.

But I remember them,
telling me to be quiet, not to fight it.  


Blush of Crimson

I've lost concept of time,
time to be quiet
I need to schedule my time
need to go away
Ophelia covered in glass
veins like kite string
he breathed in the water
I never said goodbye.

You know that feeling like everything's the end of the world
Next to the campfire, stars carved into her upper thighs
crossed like constellations as she moved closer to the flame,
gaze drawn up
The flight before the fall

He hasn't yet hit the ground, green flannel still in suspension.  Dew collecting on the leaves slide down to the earth and surround his body.
His eyes are already closed, a moment of vulnerability.  Still on the surface, cold blue water saturates his cuts and seams.

For the touch of a vanished thought caressed the back of her mind, like birds balanced on a live power line.  Digital ripped walls, lights leading to the intervention of the other side of the ghost city, building brick school, and infinite nowhere.  She lit her candle in the studio, watching the wick burn down and melt the wax, a ring of liquid growing from the center.  Strange to drown in heat.  It seems there's a wall of glass between her mind and this supposed reality, without any sound but her breathing and the occasional crack from the slowly burning candle.  She mixes her paint and doesn't think about anything.  The sun sets and rises and sets and rises again.  Sitting in the same place, the candle frozen in perpetual burning.  The room was clean.  And she was painting.  And the birds on the wire gently cawed against a white sky.  The echo returned to the blank room.

I remember that night she stopped answering my calls.  She doesn't pick up anymore.  Curled up in the doorway scrawled with tick marks from when we grew extra inches overnight, phone clutched to my chest.  I looked up and saw old Chinese fortunes folded above the doorway, hot tears spilling down my cheeks.  A feeling of helplessness, guilt.  If she answered I would have driven up there, taken her home.
It was 2am when I left.  I grabbed the keys from the counter, my coat, some chocolate, and a book.  walking to the car, I could see my breath suspended in the air.  Frost coated the sides of the windshield but I didn't stop driving.  I forgot my mittens.  There was a foot more of snow as I ran towards the old door to her dorm, yanking the handle hard enough that the lock slipped and I didn't need an ID to get in.  Warm stale air enveloped me as I gazed over empty security desk under fluorescent light.

Muted Undertones

The painting took up a whole wall of the room.  There wasn' any money to frame it, so it would have to always stay here.
Sunlight leaked in from the window like a steading dripping faucet against a clogged drain.  Her hair was turning blonde again, like when they were younger.
Humming, she was
remembering his hands
as they gripped the wheel loosely
at 5am in the morning
reflective and
coated in glass
in the back of
his black pickup
the sun slowly
bled from behind the clouds
dripping like honey
illuminating blonde
eyelashes,
the dirt on
the windshield.
warm golden
air filled the truck
as he turned the heat on
one hand on
the wheel
the other
reaching backwards to
twisting metal,
broken limbs.
Connected below
the surface
of broken glass.

In between the falling leaves, she whispered 'see you' and kissed his eyelids as he fell asleep.

Neutral Tones

I knocked on her door.  Her roommate answered.  He hadn't seen her at all that day.  I've grown indifferent about my own problems.  So I walked in her room and picked up the scissors from the corner.  Put on her coat for her.  Walked her through the snow to the car.  Cecilia sat between the driver and passenger seat, hand in mine.  I wish I could heal her arm through our layers of jackets, taken some of the sadness away.   We didn't say anything as empty pavement and trees passed in every living moment.

I was thinking about him.

Occasionally we touch, but only in passing.  Shadows, we cover from the heat.  

Ridicule gnaws at these connection, scrapes paint strokes until the threat snaps, the pillars bow
And we take shelter in the cleansing water.  The clashes of flesh.   The segregation of interactions for fear of having ours be known by anyone at all.

(But still they talk, recite the script)
'Cecilia tried to **** herself and her clothes need to be washed'
(Look now, do you see it?)
'It looks like her soul
left her eyes'


Purple Haze

I knew it was a nightmare.  It's stuck to me.  These alien emotions; like a sickness or a burn, interdepartmental rhythms of my brain I'll never fully grasp... not artistic or poetic.  or anything fake and useful.  Just nebular, inhibiting, distressed.
I'm always trapped in something.  A heaviness.  A natural declining, dissipation, entropy.
A brutal and sterile resistance, inviolate and soft to the touch; a lapsing despondency.

He was the sea that he drowned in.  And he was the riverbed in the trees, too.
Swept in whirlpools and ripples and age rings, whispers of fallen leaves in the lucid water.  
Silenced by hushing rage of stone cut rapids.


Ultraviolet Love


He's not seeing normally.  Through the rippling surface her face is reflected into a million moving pieces.
Lines of tape surround his body, they shrivel in the heat of the sun.  This is not natural death.  There are no birds circling overhead, the stream continues to trickle over the rocks.

I drove her home from college started to run a bath.  The hot water faucet turned all the way.  I put my feet in, trying to avoid eye contact with the parallel lines.  Familiar to what i had stitched before.  Pale blue - green water kissed our skin as she closed her eyes.  

We are not creatures of visible light.

Underglazed silent hours, color gently stitch glow
On blue spinning wheels, mauve clouds pull like a sheet
Tumbling brushstroke breathing, pointing pastel beads sky and garden:
Seeing without seeing, life emerges
an empty third floor apartment with a cat, a girl, and plants
most occupancy – her hands that tell stories
turn the white canvas like autumn; the page of a book

a love letter from being small and being on the floor: the space is warm and monumental and safe.  

who doesn't value floor time?  

pine box creaks with raindrop footfalls, warping windfall feeds deer amidst haunting gardens like chipped ancient acrylic beads muddled with dirt, dusty glitter, stories playing make believe planted below thick tangled roots of suburban grass.  
grow older, shade expands.  mosses reclaim urban forest floor, the ground is delightful like down.  the children can run around like intended, no white lace sunday stockings folded down.  the kitchen is finally cool, 30 years after pregnancy.
wait for spring.  take caution with entanglement outside of yourself.  
the next dinner where i am not utterly alone yet surrounded by everyone I love.  gratitude is a basic human need.  the sky and earth hold us delicately, the mountains and forests, animals and plants are ancestors whom we have been silenced from teaching.

hold me close but not too; from the floor I see it - the oven light in the old gas stove that's broken more times than we can fix, leather car seats time entombed and petrified mildew, sedimentary factory line notes bitten by grease and rust.  the memory of every first, everlasting moments.  the narrow claustrophobic essence of spirits ooze from the wall, thread the building like a needle.  a large circulatory system forged in steel and fire.  they crack and sizzle, smudging the newly buffed floor.  all I smell is fresh white globular paint, all I want is to talk to my mother.  really talk.  not watch the news, the monitor, the phone.  start good habits, maintain and flourish.  how do I say how beautiful she is?

I fold amaryllis arms around me, a ****** bud retracting from early snap frost, ghosted, blind and blanketed in frozen crusts of half-melted snow.  a numb burn.  they circle around, a bed with no tenant.  a child surrounded by ladybugs, an open sky, a happy sun and warm foothills with anthurium-red tomatoes that dad loves so much to plant for the summer.  

closing my eyes.  repeating leaven hands spin in circles around clay, lavender buds and poppy seeds
piloting rabbit shelters, mustard leaves and paper airplanes, laundry fairies and scout who never left her side.
rose and violet lace the edges of knives, piercing light entering fingers like egg whites escaping a nuclear yolk.  sinewy and embryonic, baths of sound and light.  I've always loved baby's breath, so why does it petrify me?  Putting on my pack and not looking back, feeling the acidic rejection in my legs with the altitude, yet the mental bliss of absolute newfound joy in out-and-backtrails.  I will carry all of it, do not worry.  i've been taught to leave no trace.

I step on her forgiving body, like room temperature butter.  she is sand, curled inward, shifting and shimmering seaweed undulates in shallow water like lyrics.  my footprints erase with the swiftness of etch-a-sketch indecisiveness.
We remark how warm, how beautiful, how strange it is to be here, but have no mark whatsoever.  occupy residency in a mind, one mind only.  to colonize a mind?  co-tenant a mind.  a tidal portal into whatever the ******* want, the coral, the anemones, the iridescent shells who pause and breathe "oooooh".  press fingerprints in the clay, dig in your nails, make the ocean yourself.  we have never been so utterly disconnected that the answer has always been intrinsic.  in the silt, the peat, the loam.  the roots take hold of mica, ore, the return of bridges and steel.  the calcified skeleton of ancient fish pressed in limestone.

shallow water, warmest on the surface, honeyed sand smooth like suede under toes and fingertips. sand crystals resist pressure of fists, clouds of nebulae, and dissolves to the ocean floor stardust.  my hand passes through hourglass Ophelia ashes, unyielding in a buoyant world.  every cell in my body sings home.

hair becomes slick and warm, not soft like seaweed.  the ocean inundates my mind, my mind is the ocean.  the sand is white cotton sheets.  

reaching the sand bar, the woman sleeping.  the tide approaches and recedes.  dizzying and safe in sunlight, photosynthesizing, breathing,

creating in a dream, slowly (or quickly) eroding away.

Rain on the night highway
Like constellations  
Guiding me at sea
Agitated sleep in a field of asphalt  
Fluorescent ribs on the grey car interior

Crossing state borders,
Into purple 6am skies
The sunlight starts the engine,  
Warming me from sleeping town cafes

The state park is empty this early
As light tilts from under the bridge
Empty roads and seagulls  
I start walking to keep the image untouched
10 miles later, I’ve seen redemption
In turquoise water
And concrete caverns  

I spread a blanket on the grass under a willow tree.
This is a scene I will paint---






I open my book, regarding the glass surface of the water.
Century-old footsteps listen to the shoreline,
The ancient murmurs connecting  
freedom from servitude  

I feel the cool water surround their feet
As they leave all they’ve ever known
Into a new country,
Sending a love letter to their family.

As I look up from my book,
Where they once stood,
Strangers smoke under the trees.

I wonder what opaque transition of sight
Will allow us to exist?  
Upside down, lights up, sheets drawn,


Where you and I can meet halfway.


Lyrics of inorganic hymns emerge
Rationing daylight, resurrecting Eden in his eye -  
Sisterhood is a ghost of the seasons.

Written on your palms in
Smoldering greens to golds,
Bronze ferns purify  
Fragile angelic steps
As we step into the water.

Silver cotton grass frames the trail we walk.  
Sunlight adhering to skin,  
Condensing memories.





I do not want to remember us this way—

Toxicity hissing from floodlit walls

Filtering body and soul into—

how or when we love each other.




Masculine figures melt into the painting.  Silence resonates as they die.  

Dew collects on the leaves.  They slide down to the earth and surround the bodies.

A gold cut glows from under the doorway,
It saturates illuminated stitches.

The room was clean.  And she was painting.
I’ll always remember her.

eight and a third of a minute is all it takes: light is memory.  it is awake. it greens the forest. remembers energy.

     hysteric tenderness, hostile touch.

dilated eyes, bronzed flesh, i am painted in all colors unseen.  
     solar heat dilutes 8 and a third of a minute of memory.

eyes closed, i sit beside you with my bare sun-warmed legs crossed on a picnic blanket.  

     fruit shrivels under cloudless light.  

your silhouette burns red behind my eyelids: my image returns 8 and a third of a minute later to a dark room.  

     the iridescent path led to you.

a collective cognitive

Up all night until the sun was still below the horizon, I waited for the medication, the slow burn of anesthesia in the cradle of my arm, the quick sleep where it wasn’t drifting, but an expanse that deepened around my irises and low in my belly as the white room darkened to green-blue, the freshly warmed sheets from the dryer placed on me by a stranger, the blood dripped down my arm as I closed my eyes; here is where I am empty, where an eclipse of unseeing determines the wide inquisitive canyons of impact within a single point, sedated wildflowers hung still in the dripping silence, and sunlight slowed through lace curtains on winter landscapes of uncovered shoulders.

i want to sit next to my sister - we do not have to say anything --- do I recognize her as a near 30 year old? - i want to stop and curl and curve my body like a little conch shell - i want to hum like the ocean - the songs of infants - the hands of grandparents - i want to laugh on my death bed - surrounded by bugs and bees digging deep into pollen cradles, clawing and rolling in dust, rocking wind.

i want to braid my sister's freshly washed, cool, clean turquoise green hair.  it feels like it has been years since i did something so simple, so caring.  i want to sit and weave it until there is almost nothing left, but the silk aqua rope i can run my fingers down like water.  i want to thread the pieces over and under my heart strings.  she is the earth, the sky, the moon - the altars of rocks - the shapes we see in them.

///
i dreamt of a woman sleeping - she was made of sand - she was off the shore of new york city --- before the sky scrapers, streets, pandemonium --- with purple kelp for hair.  she was so beautiful - a sand bar, as big as a dune, beneath a thin layer of sun-warmed translucent water as open as day.   she was silent, laying like a fetus on her side under the waves.  i swam to her, held in on the loose sand like an anemone. \\

i want to sit on a warm rock in the sun - overlooking the valley, the lake, the blue mountains.  i want to be the Appalachian air - i want to do nothing - but to live.  i want to listen and dance and run and flow - join a coven, scale a cliff.  i want to talk to the night, watch birds and find mushrooms - follow magical, mysterious things.  oxblood berry juice runs down my fingers.

filling the bath up to the overflow drain - i want to fix the faucet.  spaces became smaller, memories overlap and forage in Michigan forests.  the sprawl and creep - moss inches glacially over our backs.  the spine remains on the island, the bogs embalm.  i sit sweetly, cross legged, twisting my hair around my finger - thinking of pebbles as road systems, sycamore and sumac houses.  the quietest, mildest evening sunlit place you could imagine bathed in green and gold, grace - lit and heaven - struck.  a place of peace, calm, warm.

i am thinking about the sound of the stream through the house, how we always can choose simpler.  i want permeable walls to the sunrise - to rain sounds - to the crickets and cicadas and spiders - to the smoke, the fog, the mountain laurel.  wild raspberries are wisps of cadmium red on raw canvas.  ducks fade in and out of graphite and watercolor drawings against the sky // buoyant on the pond, hawthorn and mugwort dreaming.

i want to see the flickering rainbow lights, sit on a fairy's wing.  sway and jump and spread my arms wide - wide - wider - up - up - and up!  iridescent, shining, on a beam of light.  i am lighter than air, i am the essence of light.  the memory of time.

a copper suncatcher eye, a fragmentation through a lens.  i want to sit - i want to rest and run backwards in my mind - upside down and through the channels of plants - tracing each petal of a daisy.  the circulatory system of green canopies.  i want to turn off and on again, i want to be shocked and taken to the sea.

the patterns take me, the colors soar.  i sit and feel the love from everything.  it is tangible, weaving itself between my fingers like yarn.

uncover my soul, tell me it is real?  i want to make - i want to remember - i want to plant, eat, grow.  i sit and revel at it all - my motherhood, my sisterhood, their daughters.  the womb, the darkness to light to the peat.

to live in a spiral bound sketchbook, in my great grandmother margaret's wooden, hand-painted pencil box.  i would make the memory of her love my home.  the piano keys float through open kentucky windows to the garden.

i tighten the knot, the bread rises in the corner of the kitchen.  i live in a place where i am but i am not - the story is told, i put together the pieces differently.  the forest shatters, i'm holding a piece of the mirror from 3 years ago.  it shimmers, cuts, fades, dissipates the bass neon jungle throughout the night - i find it all incredibly comforting and dizzying, being made of love to love to be loved.

the moon phases - arcs - dips - dives - toward you - through you - glowing, resonant, alive  //\||

i cant help this feeling, deep in my gut.
encompassing me, becoming.

night winds carry an abandoned kite
burnt and littered cigarette butts
scatter the ground as motorcycles echo in the night

here is where we stay.

time escapes
i've never met you before

i'm feeling your warmth
not of this world
foreign feelings,
recoiled touch.  

i know i'll meet you
i know i'll come home
i can smell the flowers on the table
and i'll be able to hear you
you'll paint our kitchen door yellow after old colors chipped

I can't escape you.
you came to cover me in the unseen.

down your hands the paint dripped
into the eternity of which i've not seen

so here i stay
in the dark of my heart

wondering
of your yellow paint stained hands

holding mine

I wrote your words on porcelain leaves
Petrified in lucid air
Shimmering like wounds
In true light, I paint  
Illusory rendered responses

Who’s to say the scene is not real – she speaks, breathes, walks in light?  My hands?  Her soul between the leaves?  
Belief in what?  
A reflective gospel.

Palette altars scatter the earth.  
Habituative, neurotic wildflowers  
Crawl from mirrored pools inverted in innocence,
Inviolate rhythms, hymns of absence.

Les fleurs suivent avec tous les pas que tu prends
et tout ce qu'ils fleurissent
Elle m’aime un peu, beaucoup, passionnément, a la folie, pas de tout /

The leaves are falling, they shatter form syllables of your voice.
















It is in itself,

[As I look at her ghost]

Love, I am already in the ground.

I write letters,
Painted during golden hour.  Dimmer in the trees.  I must remind myself of it.
Walking up the fire escape and looking at the stars, I knock on the window, he looks gentler.
The most beautiful day here yet; the colors break down from pixels to prayers.
In person, virtual, ambivalent depths of shadow.
Peaceful and sincere, I need the essence of it.



I hope you’re having peaceful dreams,  
Smoke from burning mint,
Shakey & slow
Push energy back in me
What speaks colors in you

An oil spill underneath the ceiling light,
When you close your eyes, I am sunlight on water.
The reflection of my tears were colors
Gentle reminders to love.

If you ever miss me remember I didn’t walk away,  
I laid on the grass in the sun & watched the clouds,
Building cairns in the stream.


I was painting on the floor in your room,
It was raining in the basement hallway outside.
The walls were mirrors,
Trees and vines grew up your white walls
A foggy night and a stream formed outside your window
Where I snow fall for the first time.

A few days before summer break,
We went cliff jumping and it was warm again.

It is always lightly raining with open windows when we sleep together
There will always be more growing and learning
In your absence.

a small kitten with one eye... sitting on the floor of a bookstore for hours.... a sunny day on an empty street in Baltimore... quiet gardens in glass boxes... warm desert bodies strung on the walls... in your hands... a ripe orange balanced delicately in slow light... shallow dark water with koi... a wall of orchids extending with ferns... we smell them on our tippy toes... the light was honeyed, indelible, embroidering our gaze...

pajamas in a museum... mirror mosaics on a wall outside the train station... frigid air removed our breaths... hot cider with cinnamon under colored lights... our fingers were close to thawing... her beige wool scarf... reminding me of my mother...

Soft brown bedsheets... canvases dripping with color... a memorial on the fifth... across the water, a skyline glitters as he holds the intimate illusion in his eye... without damage or harm... satisfied without seeing... we ran through tunnels of spiraling light like following the pen of a child’s drawing... an art that is faithful to yourself, not others, not the narrative...

Some days in crowded streets,
Loud restaurants,
Drunk wedding receptions,
Laying on the grass,

   I look at my hands.
   They move in light and shadow
   Trompe l’oeil religion.
    
If I see them,
Believe in them,
Or trust them?

The canvas,  
The beach,  
The borderline,
The liminal space where my body is  

[mine]

A pause in rain
A book as company
The beach full of families

Cairns on an empty beach
To remind the waves
The flat grisaille rocks,
Mosaic crushed shells
Of the steps I took to the lake.

From the beach full of families,
Through a driftwood jungle,
To the empty apartment fold out bed.
Blinds that cut the red setting sun  
Into striations of hunger,
Waning trees on the third floor  
An echoing chamber
Open apartment balcony.

wild blueberries sprout in houses I’ve never been -
dusty rose candles illuminate oak boards like cherry blossom spring -
childhood dogs nest into your side -
with a sister you’ve never met sleeping across -
so close your hands could touch.

dried babies breath spray the corners of collaged vases -
newspaper scraps of 1992 -
lives lived like perfect texts -
stories imbued in every tree ring from the wedding cake stand, the lace, the cotton, the wool and cashmere and canopies and love of orchids, living unapologetically, ferns clouding the periphery of the yard where earth worms and potato bugs and lilac and lily of the valley call native ground.  

it’s easier to write of them,
wanting nothing than to be had,
having nothing but to want,
wanting everything yet nothing at all.

the sunlight tilts, rabbits play at dusk.  follow the tunnel of ferns -
the scent of green lushness opens forest floor.  
crows gather, cicadas hum.  stars come out one by one by one.  rather - eyes adjust -
we tilt, sway under ceramic bowl sky -
the earth eclipses the sun
living in totality or utter absence

we are not alone :
life is - indeed - the exception.

Descend
Like a particle of dust
…
..
.
Landing on a *****,
A steep curve sharp as a knife.
A white car, backpacks, a guitar,
Sing life to the rims of the empty canyon
The sound returns  
It echoes like circadian drums.
A chasm, a fold in your bedsheets,
The space between you and your mother.
It divulges words of a great marble book,
Dialogue in dissonance
Pages upturned, eager to be read by the sun.
We run our hands along  
Stories carved in this valley of jaggedness,
Seeking horizon lines  
Under oceans of stone.
Mist falls
Through the sleeping cusp
between two gray shale wings
of the deepest river canyon,
Weaving strings of glacial waters
Like topographic canticles.

An internal breathlessness
Guides us by maps written
In shards of glass.
Rhythms of instinct
Pull me forward
Yet the blade on her hand
Collapses me in
profound solitude.
.

Eyelids lower,
the world turns dark;
breaths become slower,
an evanescent spark.

Thoughts fall like raindrops,  
I hear them bouncing off the roof.
Winds pull mist round mountaintops,
our hearts are not shatterproof.

Our minds are mirrors,
they reflect what we see,
a silver fragment of Reality glitters,
a broken image or a broken me?

Our souls swim in wanderlust.
Blood pushes in and out like a noonday tide.
From us our bodies turn to stardust,
a Heaven forever by the oceanside.

You are the Infinite in one being;
a dream with no beginning and no end.
In the lake between sun and moon sleeping,
stars float like lotuses to the riverbend.

Wake before the sunrise,
wait for colors to wash the sky vast as our love.
From fleeting darkness Light meets new eyes
painters dip  brushes into Endless Undreamed of…

Breathe the morning in,
my longing for you has eclipsed my heart.
The kaleidoscope sun warms my skin,
Every day we restart
...
Use my creation to start yours,
kundalini is the force.
The universe expands when every breath swirls,
earth and art born from one source
...
My hands have begun to shake,
like constellations all of us are connected.
If I happen to lose my grip we all will quake,
ripples of world within worlds are reflected
...
I will remember you in my glass mind,
crystallized and refracted, a consciousness clearest
Elements fade as nature undoes time,
in death be unified by mystical spirits
…

It's been four years
And I still wear our rings

But im forgetting about him
He doesn’t visit my dreams anymore
Melodies of his laughter,
his steady heartbeats,
his soft breathing
replaced by grainy voicemails on repeat repeat repeat
I     wish     I     could     touch     you     again

12% beer on her front porch planting flowers on valentines day,
Remembering the short-cut on the running trail
Heatstroke and search parties
Ravines swallow last goodbyes.

A new and empty house
Unassembled furniture
You died on a Wednesday
And I told you:
“you better not leave me to do this alone.  I can’t do this by myself”
I look at the disembodied, sprawling collage of wood on the floor.

“I can’t do this by myself”

All that responds in the empty house is deafening static before the voicemail cuts.

.

is a poem

deeply 40 years apart
1:54

< notes ...
remembering
a list of good things
like the grocery receipt thrown on your fathers empty table in a sunny afternoon of his early adulthood,
wondering about what his parents were thinking when they were his age ---
writing as re-experiencing his memories,
a million miracles drip from a faucet in the house he rented ---
reality is how we decide to read it
or what i've drawn behind cabinet doors, late nights, phone calls.
sleepless papers and chocolate chip cookies and words dreamt out of open windows
concentrating on the good things ---
a chemical, she interacts with us the same no matter your thoughts
waiting for coffee to bloom, brining you watre in bed, locking the door at night knowing everyone is home.
simple precious tangled moments
we are listening to muffled through the walls
hearing footsteps of your family on the old wooden stairs
these are the most healing

A small area of wooded shelter,
Hammocks in the sun, a warm fire with toasted sandwiches and beer,
It was where the rabbits chose to laze this evening.

The sky reflects in the muddy pools of our sticky footprints:  
The last mark of my being.
The air will diffuse into my body like a vaccine,
A warm bath,
Falling asleep.

Its quiet and her cuts have been cleaned.

i open voices
singing lights
photographs have strings
lingering loud and open

i ring the moon
hollow and bright ceramic fruit
guitar crickets linger
the night, the moon, a deep night read aloud.

strings and lights and drives
carve open your voice
hallowed stars swallowed whole

on his birthday, a trick of the eye
a chime, lime green glimmering dark
slowly, a harp being plucked.  another chord - a melody unfolds.
buoyant hum -- the first of seasons, the first of firsts.

climbing the rocky, root-laddered hill, Sylvia's blackberrying echoes on my breath.  she frames the bakery courtyard, the home hill (an old couple planted daffodils under them, every year we cut some for our mother), and the bushes next to our apartment.  my foot arches around the curve of a root, and an oriole beams last rays of sunset as he darts into the dark.  cinnamon, caramel, and chocolate waft off my clothes.  they dance with the open, earthy, and full scent of her, encompassing.

intertwined, woven in the basket that held my mother's ribbons, our gratitude, and the elementary playground (we climbed the fence behind the basketball hoops, stretching to reach and shake the pale purple, sweet berries).  coils of gold, glitter, silk, satin, the handprint leaves, the gradient of small white to full purple bumpy pockets of sun.  such of tangible happiness I could hold it - twist it in my hands... even braid it into my daughter's long blonde hair.

we watch the mother and her three fawns, so close.  I can be happy anywhere if I see my friends.  rabbits, deer, lightning bugs, blackberries, dawn redwoods, and birds at dusk.  If I close my eyes I feel the earth, the prickly grass, and ants' expedition across my legs.  I remember.  like the first time, being called home for dinner.  overturn a rock, mesmerized by the traffic of roots, bugs, the city underground.  every day is something to cherish, to fill, to love, to share, to learn, to explore.

we are reborn in art. where the forest swallows the city horizon, a cocoon of peace.  I am always transforming.  a cool stream carved the valleys of Pittsburgh, beyond the plateau of the meadow hill and through the winding trails.  sisyphus's stone is a pile sand; the rocks are smooth as I turn them over in my hands, no jagged edges in my pocket.  my footprints fossilize, collaged with clover, fern, daisy.  a resonance that opens your heart - bathing in belonging.  the sounds, textures, smells, colors, and creatures welcome you here.

the museum of outside.  it was one woman who wanted it.  now it is everything.  the pictures in the gallery sit still - i tell my children that we can play pretend.  jump in the painting.  take a deep breath.  what do you smell?  flowers, pine trees.  what do you hear?  rushing water, birds, wind, frogs ribbiting.  what can you feel?  splash the cold, clear water - woo!   can a museum be a place of joy, exuberance, noise?  can we see everyone represented in it - even the smallest of creatures?  why have we done so much to be 'industrialized', 'civilized', 'developed', if we have sterilized, destroyed, polluted, and erased culture - intrinsically related to land?  

I say thank you to all the beings.  I say it out loud.  Sometimes I whisper.  Sometimes I am too awestruck to do anything but gaze.
I wonder if my presence transforms them, too.  I teach in the museum the next day, waiting to surrender back to the blanket of green.  from marble floors, satin walls, glittering crystal, and hand-painted ceilings, to holding hands.  playing.  running.  being wild.  whispering I love you to all.

the lightning bugs love the tree - they almost seem to follow our path home.  

𓆣 · 𓆨 · 𓆤 · 𓆦 · 𓆑 · 𖦹 ·

sage green safe place, burning sage and mint to clean my bad dreams. sage green bedsheets, knitting a scarf the color of sage green eyes. I went on a walk in sea foam forests, every hue of green lifting me from my sleepless dreams. sea glass on the shore next to the sage green forest, an opal haven.   omens sent to me from safety, to my protected place, I light a candle on the green table cloth, a mirror reflecting trees, ferns crawling in the bright corners of the safe silent house.  blue green bottles line the counter next to the stove, where we keep our lemons.  mint smoke lifts in the green room, reflects in the green glass door.

endless tirades of drunken tea, 100% cotton or cashmere.  mahogany polished, spiraling printed hallways and open rafters, dry summer heat and white gravel driveways.  the love for the deafening, harrowing silent divide.  not a single measuring utensil in the kitchen.  write a letter, seal it, see it off.  the leader and only follower.  holding someone’s hand that isn’t a lover.  sleep in the same **** bed, thin and worn but the softest feathery pink threads.  earth’s pulse slows, a meditative house.  pluck haloed moon threads to braid ritual belief.  art is observing closely, within, slowly, away.  it is fast, fire, air.  it is every sacral deranged golden filament scattering in sun-caught beams and rays of listening acutely to ecological love songs. awake from dreaming, downstairs on the wooden stool before the early sunlight, the days and days for her and her.  brushing one head of hair became two, became the sisters she longed for.  the rituals we seek.

asserting sleepless wounds cut like a knife
indenting and pulling splinters from tables
it tastes of forest paths
fungi returning sky to syllables
acres of where
veils descend upon twirled twine
fraying between fingers
frantic
numbing
november rains writing cursive letters
fastening the earth
slanting struck match
l’épée of cedar within smoke
upon incense glow
they assemble reeds
in dying light, retreat, stories upon dreams upon memories within our never-ending

the wall fell away: sun evaporates landscape, the cars, the ever present concrete, orchids resurrect inside, clawing fern wallpaper flowering baby’s breath doused in illustrious orange light thick as down blankets
graphite illuminates curves of bodies, a womb and a heart, 1063 degrees of interconnected

living in a greenhouse, northern frosted January feathers wood paneled, southern carpeted floor
salt covered opaque film
musty smell of ancestral altars
pianos tuned in the last century sing Austrian lullabies, purple wood peeled back, smiling gaps of teeth veneer cinnamon hues
the spirits of those we never met
but share cupids bow, brown eyes, high cheekbones,
the hunt for the perfect wine cap

the daughter will have a daughter, the sun crests over the mortar, up delicate tendrils of transpiring verdant circumnavigators
it’s midnight and the sun hasn’t moved an inch —// it spreads between webs of fingers, behind my teeth.  pulsing red clay with fingerprints, rabbit tracks, deer paths carving the canyon as spirits float by ‘’’
attune to them, sulfur in the dark

winter threads needle’s eye
turning wheels again and daughter knows
what grandmother thought
of sumac and dogbane, oxeye daisy and lemon balm
crescent moons imbedded in palms,
striped shells from freshwater creek click against teeth
trusted within sand, ever-present spine, joining figments and childhood never-ending
sand spills through fingers, breath before the ocean, terracotta speckling periphery of view

I can imagine, now, what she sounds like

escape - Midnight grapefruit - hung like a light -

- caves of body - I think - shadows nearing - my dream was watching a war happen -

- Leaves of paper - tenderness of rain - beautifully redundant -

- In openness - safe - mirror moon - precious loft beds and tapestries -

- exploding light fractals of energy - looked at stars- nostalgic peace

- blue cold - under waves of color - whole cities fell -

- Intoxication of creative - fragile mistakes shape reality - so far, -

gently **** this mind
with the sweetest summer’s kiss
empty garden trails
riverbed buried with sun
in warm dirt we dug our toes

breathe the blades of grass
drink sweet constellation dew
wandering sleepless
capitulate to the night’s
pristine underground

X

i am all you need
i am the essence of things
sunlight through stained glass
sweet breath on lightning struck flesh
the caress of the unseen

x

in the mornings sarah bikes
on a meadow trail
sunrise saturated fields
gold amber and rose
l’heure d’or, la lavande dans l’air

x

in Guinean sun-kissed grass
seasoned by ages
of endless constellations
falls like dusty snow
in a black coffee heaven

i heard her outside
from the hazy veil of steam
streamed red on pure white
bones broken by brotherhood
what have you done, who are you -- -

shrouded youth in dreams
silent voicemails at midnight
complacent lovers
rewritten in scars of heat
where we cower from the light

all I remember
as distillation began
is this can’t be you
green eyed boy, brown curly hair
evisceration of souls

haunting these spaces
this house of sloshing stale wine
forgetting first loves
stitching bone and marrow
until time grows clean unharmed.

x

this must be the place
where no softness will reach us
all you have is now
the pool between our bodies
stillness in the night

brouillard dans la crepescule
ever temperate
inviolate aching bodies
fragility in balance
my skin painted on the night

green eyes false blue in moonlight
tu m’a donne la chaleur
opalescent smoke murmers
memories of resonance

X

X
horizons envelop you
grass blanked hills
overlooking the city
wildflowers at your feet

we both came alone
panorama sky unfolds
the sun and wind breathe sweetly
melts the sky and my senses
plays harmonies on my skin

watercolor clouds submerge
into starry realms
an infinite dome above
this small corner of the world

it’s all hung so carefully
no redundancy
fifteen minutes of silence
just breathing slowly

i had a dream yesterday
that i was dead but
you couldn’t see or hear me
im still kind of there
but i touched you and you knew

needle and thread in my hand
it hurt just being with you
it was a warm mess
stitching ****** sunset skin