the kind who doesn’t sink
every time she lifts you up.
CHARIOT THUNDER
There’s a man inside of you
who you’re aching to become,
whose bones grow faster
than the skin they’re in.
A man whose muscles stretch
under the drumhead pressure
to exist, whose heart beats
in chariot thunder across
white marbled halls
while life,
the great sculptor,
chips away at them.
YOU HUNG YOUR HEAD; I HELD MY TONGUE
That day you coughed
curses into the earth
covered your mouth
with dirt-caked palms
saw your brown eyes
in mine (for the first time).
That day two F-16s
flew overhead, unseen
pulling smoke
from your lungs
in contrails.
You hung your head;
I held my tongue.
That day you finally
recognized my sorrow—
an abandoned house
with boarded windows,
derelict & dying,
a tomb
not even a squatter
would occupy.
A VICTOR, A VECTOR
To raise a good man, you must
begin by teaching him how to count.
But you jump from two to ten,
start laughing, devilish, clapping
all the beats you missed
like you’ve broken some
numeric law, found a wormhole,
traveled through space & time,
come out on the other side
a victor a vector a vivisection
of untamed animal.
Be patient, little one.
You have plenty of time
to race clocks,
but I
don’t have enough
to slow them down.
LOVE YOU BETTER
Let me find you
rougher.
Let me find ink
washed out & weathered
mementos you carried
for a man who is not you
from a time that is not now.
Let me find skin
well-worn & leathered
on hands calloused
by good intention
but rugged with regret.
Let me find nothing
left of women who
loved you younger
as I tend to wounds
they failed to dress.
Let me find you
rougher,
love you better.
YOU, YOU, YOU
Remember yesterday when you
swore you wouldn’t make it through
when you were buckled knees
& clenched teeth
when you wanted to fold up
into white flags dragging
from your feet
& you wondered
“where did all the magic go?”
so I told you
remember yesterday when you
swore you wouldn’t make it through
you woke up this morning
didn’t you?
WOUNDS LIKE MINE
How can you not be here,
while every motorcycle for miles
coughs your name in exhaust,
while everything,
every damn thing,
is drenched in White Diamonds?
Come back to me
the way the minute hand
always comes back to the hour.
We’ll let this clock unwind.
Whoever said time heals all wounds
did not have wounds like mine.
THE LOBOTOMY
Stop asking rhetorical questions.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m not okay.”
Thank you for wearing snowshoes. Be careful where you step, the ice is breaking up. Fall in & you won’t survive more than 30 minutes. That’s only if you can keep your head
above
water.
That’s only if angels decide to save you. (Spoiler: you’re not the saving kind.)
These are the glaciers that carved canyons in my heart. These are the auger-dug holes, the new cerulean calm waiting for something to come.
Do you know what her brain looked like before the lobotomy? Like a city at night,
like northern lights.
God,
she fucking glowed in the dark.
STARGAZING AT NOON
At the far side of the yard
my father is coughing sawdust
from his lungs again.
WILTING SUNS
“My favorite thing is the way he looks at you.”
I am listening to you make beautiful things out of the dust.
Lowering octaves, humming on the fringe of something.
Like mahogany.
Like paperbark & tree stumps.
Like wilting suns.
Voices warm the floorboards.
Stars twinkle acoustic.
You are always speaking honey & agave.
Dried mangos & magnolia. Lightning bugs.
We sing in cathartic harmony,
cardiac beats & flatline drums.
FINE IN THE FIFTIES SENSE
Just when I thought I couldn’t read
the warning signs, flashing tail lights,
he jumped out of his Jeep,
approached my car, motioned
for me to roll
the window down
& kissed me hard.
& it felt like February
& it was fine in the fifties sense
& I realized how foolish we’d been
to believe we could keep mapping
the terrain of each other’s bodies
without writing our own names
proper like our favorite places
(as if we weren’t pioneers
or the first to find God here).
So I folded up my love, stuffed it
in the glove compartment,
& drove away.
I WANT, I WANT, I WANT
I want
you underneath me
like a bed of leaves
above me
like a canopy.
I want
to explore every inch
from your lashes
to your limbs.
I want
your breath
so hot on my neck
my skin catches fire.
LIVE WIRES
& on the seventh day we don’t rest
because how in God’s name can you rest
when every breath is a beckoning
“Take me.”
So we wake & whiskey
& we make love
like we make coffee—
sugary, extra sweet.
That is what Sundays are made of.
By the afternoon
you’ve had so much caffeine
you swear you can hear electricity.
We speak in frequencies.
The sheets are humming.
Our bodies are live wires.
CERULEAN
Cerulean. Say it again. Ce-ru-le-an. Feel your breath swell up out of your lungs,
spill over your tongue in a soft, foam-bright wind, hum & roll with a coo, u n d u l a t e, then spread & flatten before gently crashing into the gums behind your two front teeth. This is not a siren song.
Sing along
while you peel pages from the Julian calendar
watch them fall like apples & angels.
“We don’t need dates anymore,” you explained.
The beaches have all turned to deserts,
bodies to salt. It is the dead of winter.
We cling to what is obsolete, like apricity,
like forgotten planets—a cold dead place.
“When we met Mercury was in retrograde & I could smell Rome burning from six thousand miles away.”
Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutant.
Charcoal. A smoke-stacked sky raining alphabets. They seeped through my clothes. When I was done taking notes, even my bones were soaked in poetry.
WEATHERVANES & PAPER PLANES
Rain tap dancing on a tin roof,
the rusty staccato of toe and heel,
a weathervane stuck on West—
who needs prediction
when you are the prevailing wind,
the constant, neither light,
nor variable, a migratory bird
who comes back
year. after year. after year.
We stare at the horizon
& wait for the future
to arrive.
We reach for the sun,
as if our hands could hold fire,
as if it were a copper coin
& the night,
a bottomless well.
I wish.
EMPIRES
I watch
empires rise & fall in your chest
the sun set in the east & rise in the west
&
I want
to describe the way I feel this morning
but the only word I can find is crumbling.
LIKE RAIN ON WARM PAVEMENT
Speak to me in Italian.
Voglio fare l’amore con te.
What did you say?
I want to make love to you.
Literally, with you. The shift is subtle.
I think about the last time he kissed me, really kissed me. I think about thunderstorms, historic floods & wonder when the fog will clear or the cumulus clouds will break up & finally leave his leaden eyes. I think about the past & ask if we will ever move away from there.
I hear the present is a nice place.
Some nights I can’t sleep, so I catalogue him in the dark, bury my face into his back & press lip to vertebrae. The heat of pimiento rises languidly from clavicle, musky, like rain on warm pavement. Zesty mandarin. Spicy accords of cardamom.
Pray that morning will be kind to us.
At the donut shop, indecision swirls in freshly poured cups of coffee. He pulls me close & tries to decide which flavor he’d like, or if he even wants to be with me. He speaks in L words; I never know if the next will be I love you or I’m leaving you. I just love you, he says.
We don’t see our shadows that day.
PEANUT BUTTER & MANIC SANDWICHES
This afternoon you called & asked where I was
because all you could hear was wind.
I just jumped out of a plane,
I said. I’m skydiving.
You found this funny, though you couldn’t have known
by my tone how serious it was, having already fallen
through so many lithium clouds.
Later, while I was making peanut butter & manic sandwiches,
you wanted to know if I’ve been symptomatic.
Well, I’ve been driving really fast,
I said. Warp speeds. You’ll never catch me.
You didn’t have to ask what happened to my shoes.
I think you already knew I had no use for them
on my firecracker feet.
Not today, at least.
BLOOD ORANGE & PLUM WASH
Burdens lifted. Blood orange
dripped from your chin. Night fled
in a plum wash above palm trees
fanning into dreamcatchers,
missing all the dreams.
You left Sunday
still sleeping in your bed,
curling slightly around the edges
of what was & could have been.
You kissed her on the forehead
& went.
III. quarter
WARMER WHERE YOU ARE
Somewhere beneath this glass ceiling,
under canopies of LEDs & cosmic
string lights, you are breathing.
The thought alone levels cities
in my chest. I pin you beneath
the Tropic of Cancer—
a shuffle, misstep,
collapse & a kiss.
You have to know that I can’t even look
at a Christmas tree without falling for you,
have to know that I still miss you on nights
so cold your name leaves my lungs in ghosts.
& if nothing else, you have to know,
I always hope it’s warmer where you are.
SLEEPING DRAGON
Maybe I wanted something easy, someone
who didn’t ask the hard questions, just
“Does this feel good?” & “Is this okay?”
Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes.
Somewhere in the grove of your neck, cardamom
& orange blossom, lemon & pepper. Somewhere
in the hollow of your collarbone, a depression,
a hot breath blowing over sand dunes. Somewhere
unbuckling Adonis’ belt, fingers like star trails,
telescope eyes adjusting to the light.
Wide aperture, long exposure.
Night is lifting in octagonal hues.
(Don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop.)
Ante meridian hours pass. You sneak out, careful
not to wake the sleeping dragon curling around
vowel sounds, still smoking, still swelling,
wings tucked between shoulder blades,
iridescent in the sheets. Beating.
Everything beating.
“Babe, go back to sleep.
You look so good sleeping.”
But there is a fire in my belly
& a world in need of burning.
GENTLE WAKES, VIOLENT WAVES
I’m going to come inhabit
the space against your chest
& listen to your heartbeat
with stethoscope ears
& hum what I hear
under my breath.
“going under, going under,
never coming up”
Gentle wakes, violent waves,
I will love you either way.
Hold you while the fever breaks.
Hold you the whole way through.
“mayday mayday mayday”
I said that I will hold you.
STRAWBERRY FIELDS & FADED FOREVERS
Sometimes you still wonder
what it would have been like
to love me.
Sometimes you blush sunsets, stay up
all night, moonlight spilling over
your lips, swallowing cities
by the spoonful, calcium quarries
crunching steel & concrete.
Sometimes we meet in dreams. We are
strawberry fields. We are faded
forevers, the missed breath of summer,
fire opal, watching cloud fo
rmations,
as predictable as weather patterns
& quantum mechanics.
& sometimes,
sometimes you still wonder,
don’t you?
THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE HERE
There is nothing to see here, just a lot of leg on a night too cold to be showing some. A head full of stars & a handful of question marks. A trumpet call at the back of the auditorium. An aura, or maybe an omen, flickering rose gold, among other inaudible hauntings.
I wonder if you know how beautiful you look in the shadows. I brush your hair from your collarbone & bite your shoulder. You laugh cherry back into your cheeks & we both break character. But it’s too late. Even the ghosts are blushing.
The rest is a fragmented blackout, a Giacomo Balla painting, velocity, drinking & driving, the brass glare of streetlights, some running fevers, all night blind.
“You don’t have to worry about me. I’m a professional.”
“I know. That’s why I worry.”
Hours from now, when my confidence has waned, when my mane is matted to the back of my head, when I’m staring at the mirror wondering who this stranger is, when I’m hating myself more than the smell of juniper on the empty side of the bed from men I’ve made love to but will never be in love with, that is when I will write again. I’ll use words like bright, wildgrown, forest-like.
I’ll cut the bullshit & stick to what I’m good at— picking poetry out of my teeth until my gums bleed.
SPACE & SEA, YOU & ME
Romance was man exploring space
though he didn’t know the sea.
It was wanting to discover you
when I still hadn’t found me.
THE TIME TRAVELER’S GUIDE TO PLANNING
FUNERALS
“Tell me you don’t want to be with me.”
“What?”
“I said, tell me you don’t want to be with me
& I’ll leave right now.”
“Don’t do it like this.”
---
This. Call it The Time Traveler’s Guide to Planning Funerals. Call it Exit Signs, Effervescent, Synaptic Failure. Call it All the Things We Thought We Knew, or How to Lose Yourself in
Fractions. Call it words I should have written before you stopped believing in the future—
the place where everything ends.
OLD MAPS
How much must you
know of my past?
How will you find me
with old maps when
Stargazing at Noon Page 2
