Lips like shards of broken glass
like bittersweet Narcissus and
the remains of a once-proud Egypt.
A faulty cupid’s bow
a sinister smirk of Himeros—

I mistook you for Anteros.  A
simple mistake;
three letters off
three words lost in translation
a declaration with no apparent meaning.

New age romance, my dear,
is all for naught.

I could never date a smoker.

Flowers in the house don’t bring beauty,
      only death.
Aesthetically pleasing,
a platonic seduction that is
tempting yet entirely depressing—

I will not watch you die.

He never wrote me
love letters like
Heathcliff and Catherine and
all the other grandiose characters
in those old, Victorian Romance
novels.  In fact,
he never wrote to me
         at all.

Not a single word,
a single letter;
not even his name
on an otherwise
blank sheet of paper
roughly shoved into an
already used envelope.

Maybe he took my words and
burned them like my dog’s
ashes like Auschwitz and
Californian forest fires.

An abrupt end to
an abrupt start
created and destroyed
by the sure hands of God.  Mother,
you were never one for words.

I thought perhaps I’d
have a dream.  See
your face in the mirror;
feel your presence walk
through a door.  But
what childish hopes to hold
in the frigid face of reality.

Cold like the snow (you loathed to shovel)
like a can of Diet Pepsi on a hot summer day
(your favorite)
like global warming seasons
and the chocolate bunnies you
used to put in the fridge
(for Easter).

Cold like corpses
your corpse
six feet under—
tombstone in the sun,
no light will ever warm you.

Dearest mother,
I have not heard
a single word
from you in
over four years.

Dearest mother,
dearest mother,
dearest mother

what do your wings look like?

The inadequate bookshelf that sat near the door
that my sister used to call her own was
mostly made up of adolescent reads,
books better suited for preteen girls rather than
intellectually budding young ladies—
juvenile vocabularies and simple, non-complex
plot lines do little to craft and create
worldly, knowledgeable women.

I thought I must spring clean the
naiveté away and replace it with
the works of great authors like
Sylvia Plath
                        Simone de Beauvoir
                                                              Virginia Woolf
                        Margaret Atwood
Betty Friedan;
ingenious femme fatales that cut down
to the brittled bones of the misogynists
and burned their marrow along with the
ashes of bras and aprons and 350 degree oven heat.  

Growing up, to me, seemed like a wonderful epiphany
chock-full of ideas and opinions and
clever, ironic remarks that chased satirical witticisms
like felines to rodents and wolves to deer—
being an adult would guarantee me a say,
a vote
           prior 1920’s America
                                                  play dress up as a suffragette
           women’s rights
femininity personified by dolls in plastic houses.

To be eighteen-years-old,
the goal, the legality, the bright light at the end of the tunnel;
the official womanhood it would bestow upon me
seemed like something almost tangible
with the way that it loomed over my head.

Get good marks
graduate high school
travel back in time sixty years
meet a nice boy
become a “good wife”
have dinner ready by five
bear two beautiful heirs
clean up the messes left in the kitchen
fast-forward to the twenty-first century
go to a good college
find a stable career
settle down if the fancy strikes you
live non-docile and full of passion—
the parallelism of times are severely
di
    lap
          i
            dat
                 ­ ed.

1950’s America would never be a home for me
because I am much too wild to be contained.

the edges of his cupid’s bow lips quirked
up with the rising sun and I thought that perhaps
I had been shot by one of his arrows—
young love, young cherub,
how reckless we are.

slip me on like a sweater
I am your second skin
            let me protect you

I want to put my head on your shoulder and
melt into your pores; we can be
yin and yang as we swirl and intertwine
in the most beautifully tragic way,
like water and oil in a clear ceramic bowl

It was on a crisp autumn night that I
sat alone beside you
for the first time in nearly four years.

The shadows of the looming pines surrounding me
seemed to press and pressure my eyes to slip
down six feet under along with

the bleeding sun as it continued to
decamp from the sky.  It slid so smoothly
past the towering pines while the
silvery fist of the moon
shoved it roughly back to the west;
I thought about how you mustn’t like the night
because of the chill that often comes
hand in hand with the darkness.  

For a moment, I considered
the slight possibility of my body heat
leaching down through the earth
and into your bones.

I wondered how cold it is to
sleep underground and then I
wondered if angels felt the
creeping chill of the
foreshadowing frost in the first place.

I thought that everything significant
must happen on Thursdays because
your book began and ended on
                  the fifth day—
born on the same day of the week
you and I compare and contrast
like long
                  lost
                             twins.

Sometimes I half-expect to see
your ghost staring back at me
when I look in the mirror and to be
completely honest, I’m not sure
what I’m more afraid of—
the possibility that you might not be the same
or the chance that you might be so
disappointed in what you see in me
now that we are separated.

The divide between us runs deep
into the earth and creates a whole
new fault line, rent and ruptured
beyond all forms of repair.

The breath I breathe is the
bridge between us;
the bed you sleep in is the
total distance.

And in the grasp of
the moon’s tight fist
I thought you looked like an angel,
like Gabriel—
        an Archangel.

I thought that should the
sun come up in a few hours
that you would perhaps fade away
into nihility—
        into stardust.

I thought you were the
most beautiful thing I’d ever seen
and I thought that you weren’t even real;
completely artificial—
        a mannequin.
        
You looked so childish in your
sleep and oh how I longed to
push aside those stray
golden locks—
        your halo.

But like a Seraph—
        you burn.

There’s a picture perfect
moon in the sky and
all I can think about is
        you

(which doesn’t make sense
because the moon in the heavens and
all the stars in the galaxy have
nothing to do with you and I).

I think it’s because it was you who I
told all my secrets to,
you who I confided in—I think it’s because
I trusted you.  

Sometimes I look up at the cosmos and
wonder what type of angel she is
and then I wonder if I ever told you
my deep, dark thoughts about
what happened.  

I can’t remember.

My mind is as thick and heavy
as my tongue feels—
        fog
everywhere and I cannot see
where I am going, much less
where I have come from.

There’s something inside of me that,
like a caged dog, is awaiting to be
unlocked from its restraining bars and
I don’t know where to start talking without
sounding like an absolute madman.

I think that this poem has transformed from
a few lines about you to
a few lines about her and to be honest,
I don’t remember the last time
        I wrote about her

(but I guess I should try).

I was a child when I first went to bed
and a teenager as I turned in my sleep—
we could be twins, she and I,
with our closed eyes, and
visions of stars at night and
        pale complexions like
the sand on the beach basking
in the glow of the hanging moon.

I wonder if she met Samael.
I wonder if he was nice.

They told me how much I looked like her;
they gushed about how we had the
same personality, same sense of humor,
but I didn’t want to hear a word they said—
I don’t think I could stand to look
myself in the mirror if that were true
because it would be a constant reminder of
        her
and I don’t want to be reminded.

I think that we all start off as angels and
that somehow we end up here,
bound down to a life full of interactions
and paths to cross and plans to make;
I think that we all finish as angels and
that somehow we end up there,
no longer a single form and single being,
we become infinite once more.  

But then I remember that even Lucifer,
himself, once wore white wings and I think
that sometimes we’re no better than him—
that I’m no better than him.

I hope Raphael can fix us and
I pray that Uriel can set us straight
because in this aphotic world, I want
to be able to see straight down into
        into the abyss.

I want to see you through unbiased eyes and
hear you through impartial ears the way
that I used to be able to until that night
outside your house.  

I want to tell you all of these things I think
about the two of us—
all these things I think about my
        mother
and that night and those days
in which it happened.

Just please don’t clip my wings.

There’s something about you that
makes me want to write
        bad poetry
and half-assed short stories.  

Something about you that
makes me want to take all my
unspoken words and turn them
into something beautiful,
something worthwhile.

You make me want to be an artist
like Van Gogh or Sylvia Plath;
you make me want to create.

Maybe it’s that blue wave
that crashes down like
an incoming tide on the beach—
        your eyes
when you look at me in
a certain way, in
a certain light.

Or maybe it’s
the way that you say
my name and then say all
those horrible things that make
me want to rip something
        open.

Those words that rip me open.

You make beautiful stanzas get stuck in my
head like lyrics to a bad pop song;
I can’t erase them and the
only way I can think of to cope with it
is to write them down like a schoolgirl
with a well worn diary.

I think I might as well have hypergraphia.

I am an unprofessional
medical doctor with
a pen, paper, and
Word Document
suffering from a form of
verbal ***** because I
can’t possibly think of a way to
        speak my mind.

I think I would make a very good mute.

I wish I lacked a voice box
because then I wouldn’t have to
be the one that has to
say all the right, comforting things
at the all the right times
and all the right places.

Sometimes it feels as if I’m
being eaten from the inside out
by some sort of paratrophic organism
that sits atop my frontal lobe and
dictates my life and fluctuates my
anxiety and I can’t even think about
some things anymore because of this
nervous clench I get in my gut when
I let my thoughts get too jumbled.

But you—you make me want to write
the most heartfelt and sappy sentences
and you make me want to
be more than just ordinary.

You make me want to be extraordinary.  

I guess that what I’m writing is
an apology in the shape of
a few stanzas and a few metaphors.

And this is an “I forgive you” for that night
that we spent outside your house
arguing over the stupidest of things,
so stupid that I can hardly
remember a single word I said to you.

Nothing gratifying is ever
painless to obtain
and I want to be a fighter like
Hercules or Alexander the Great.

I want to be extraordinary with you.

I woke one morning feeling like
I didn’t belong in my own
        body—
that the skin I saw was not my own
but the flesh of a cadaver;
I thought that the bones within me
must be made of balsa wood and
the deteriorating muscles were surely
thin strips of fabric with
no actual value.

I decided that it was not me on the inside,
but someone else.

The sky outside my window was only
a meager, pale shade of grey, like the ashes
of what her body used to be, and I
watched as the pale pink ribbon of
the horizon began to bleed with the birth
of a new day and I thought about how
all those words you said to me
were actually time bombs because when
you first said them, I brushed them off
but now all I can think about is them and
my brain has been blown
        to kingdom come.

I think I might be brain dead.

But your school picture is still on my
bedside table and when I look at it
a fist grips down on my heart and
I wonder how you are and if you’ve grown,
I wonder if you’re even still alive anymore;
my anxiety is a yew tree bending in a
new formation influenced by the passing
of time and minimal communication—
I become someone I don’t know.

I think that we’re all born with
a different destiny to follow but
when you get right down to it,
no matter how much you’ve changed, or
how much I’ve changed,
on the inside, we’re all the same—
        skeletons.

Except for the fact that I think I might be a
barely surviving Hiroshima victim;
a charred skeleton with no other
contributing human element.

Sometimes I compare you to
        Chernobyl
and I wonder if you ever
draw that connection
too.

I wonder what it’s like to be nuclear.

I wonder what it’s like to burn alive.

There are dark clouds churning in the
early morning sky and I wonder if it
might storm again like it did on that
night when I drove home alone and
that one song was playing on the radio
over and
                over and
                                over again
and I couldn’t possibly shut it off because
who was I to end the life of a beautiful,
(highly relatable),
song when it was just growing out of its
babbling infancy and into its
crescendoing teenage years?  

If I were to write you a letter now
I wonder what I would say,
what I would tell you that I haven’t already,
(accidentally), spilled to you in those
rushed visits we had every blue moon—

I think I would tell you how you
        broke my heart;
I think I would tell you how he
        shattered what was left;
I think I would tell you how
I don’t believe I have a
soul
                        anymore.