Wrote your name on another bridge today,
the second one since I left a month ago.
In another world, maybe,
I keep doing this until I die.
In another world, perhaps,
you do the same with mine.

when winter comes and you're not here to warm me
I'll go find the patient
and gracious sun, waiting,
like always, to kiss the parts of me,
hands,
eyelids,
forehead,
that miss you most

I wonder how no one else stops to look
at the perfect, untouchable vertebrae of the clouds,
the illuminated flies and gnats and mosquitos
hovering like snow above the grass.

How no one cares to talk about october breezes
between their toes, in the curve of their ears.

How no one hears how earnestly the squirrels
run across cool pavement and up oak trees
where they'll spend the next four, maybe five months.

I hope I'm not the only one
who notices these little magics.

I spend five minutes trying to catch
a mosquito between my palms
I forget all about my book,
about whatever I'm writing,
just to avoid a bite
as if a bite would be too much to handle
as if I didn't already wake up
without you this morning

It’s not that
You don’t deserve poetry
I daresay that you deserve more poetry
Than could fill an entire book
It’s just that I have ignored
The rest of the world
For so long and
I owe Her
An absolutely gorgeous apology

I killed the spider living in my bathroom this morning. I’d left it alone in the corner for days while it ate stinkbugs it caught in its web—it’s October, 90 degrees, and my home has become refuge for anything hiding from the heat.
I was in the shower when I saw it out of the corner of my eye, sleeping I think, in a fresh web stretching from right beneath the shower head to the opposite corner. I was going to leave it there, squishing myself against the far side of the shower, the tile wall freezing cold against my back. It was just a spider.
But then it was an awake spider stretching its tapered, spindly legs. The spider looked at me and I looked at it. It must have interpreted this as an invitation and not a warning because it moved towards me across the invisible bridge it has spent all night building.
I immediately cupped water in my hands and threw it, drenching the web while the spider fell further and further down the yellow tile with each handful of hot water until it reached the tub floor and circled the drain like a cyclone before it disappeared.
A new spider moved in this afternoon, bigger than the previous tenant. It’s fixed itself back in the corner near the door and I think I’ll let it stay there until late autumn when the stinkbugs leave.

I write love letters
in a language I don't understand
delicately etched into the leaves
outside your bedroom window
traced into the sheets of a bed
I haven't been in for months
The sentences, the stanzas sound stranger written
than they do when you speak them
mixed and matched
my pen tripping like my tongue over
words and sounds I've never been able to speak