How She Loved Me

After she broke her neck, the diagnosis advised her to
avoid all moving when she could.
Once she agreed, three vertebrae were fused together,
and a cushion braced her instead of us.
We were not allowed.

Days passed. Weeks passed. Maybe three.

She sat in her chair and rocked and rocked
and rocked – until the hinges snapped, too.
The repairman repeated those two words:
Don’t. Move.

I avoided her after that – ran right past her when I could –
let my legs leap and fly and bend and breathe.
But even my knees knew how she watched,
how she waited for me to look.

I only did once.

On the day the sky became a lake,
she walked onto the deck like a dock,
threaded the wind with her fingers,
rose her chest when she breathed,
and bounced onto the trampoline.

She stretched and sprung and skipped into a flip
only stopping to giggle about her favorite rollercoasters.

And I stood still to listen.
I stood still and watched.

The French (History) Teacher

You’re not actually French. You just brought in a French textbook,
told us you wanted to bring in a World War I pistol instead, but this will have to do.
They say we didn’t help them during the war, that Paris was never taken, that we may, in fact, have lost our minds between the trenches, the gas, and the bombs.
N’est ce pas?
I only touch my face to remind myself that it is still there, and – beneath it – is a mind that may not be my own. When I say this to the class, you handed me the gas mask, right in time for a smile.
It was old paper in my hands, and it was easier to ask when I put it on,
but harder to hear when you responded, au fait.
My French grandmother never believed in that.
But I finally understand Bogart in Casablanca when he says his German is rusty.
Oh, mon ami.
If I kissed you for the last time, I knew it wouldn’t be written down.

Fukushima Daiichi

You told us about the samurai ***** that day,
why the child-emperor drowned, how folklore affected the shore.
The thinnest male I’d ever seen pulled out a blunt and smoked.
Everyone else focused on you, Kasa Professor,
but I trailed over the class with his breath, kept
my eyes on the clipboard you passed around, “For
relief efforts.” You never spoke. Only explained.
As an English major, I knew you would be an exclamation mark.
As an English major in the History of the Samurai, I didn’t know you would be studying the I.R.S.
The swords were scarier than the men, yet their ghosts were on a crab’s back.
I imagine my ghost as cigarette smoke flogging over an enamored classroom until I leave – only glancing back when the clipboard is returned.
We both knew it would be empty.
We both admitted it when we smelt the smoke.
The sinking ship already burned, and your dying wave is the confusion behind betrayal of a tradition to quench approaching starvation.
That final bite – the moment we are full – is where all history is lost. In the future, they will wonder where the ***** came from. But I won’t wonder about you.
You are not an exclamation mark. You were a question mark all along. But a mark, nonetheless.

To the thunderstorm I used to love,

you pounded me, beat the windows with your fists,
brought the rain down with your thunderous roar.
rarely, it would hail, and the melting ice would
gleam down the streets, still soiled from the
summer day before you came and took over all daylight.

A severe thunderstorm warning went into effect around
2 a.m. - estimating to begin at 4 and
end at 9.

You came at 5, and it never ended.

While the rain once glistened, it now stings my skin,
crushes my thighs, squeezes my hip, compressing
pressing presser tightening twisting the calf, stabbing
the spine.

I am not in control.

The purple crush of your swirling eyes is
a rush of wind - a cold front in the summer
mist - the shattering of a two-hundred-year-old tree.

I saved butterflies from you only for them to suffocate in their cages. The rags indoors, the frames, they never stopped you - only the rain
prevented your fire.

You are right when you are gone.

The road is a blurry mirror, aging eyesight in the wet darkness.