forgetting

The train behind me always leaves first.

You tell me you would be late to your own funeral

and I pretend I don’t notice the way your throat catches on the word.

I speak in hide-and-seek, as if the word would paint itself on my mouth, cyanide-blue.

I dreamt about you last night: the broken ATV throttle –

but that is the you that isn’t you, the one who pulled thorns from my fingertips in the feverish light, the you who wants me back, who exists only in the memory of someone else’s body.

My life feels vague and far away, like I haven’t existed for quite some time now, like it happened to someone else;

I am always the brave one in my dreams.

I brush my hair for hours, and the water splashes out of the basin, dish soap bubbles on the bath mat.

we walked into the sea, shedding our skin as we went

our hold tenuous at first, eyes stinging and unseeing

but the sand molded itself to our feet as they fashioned themselves into claws

our lungs flowered and burst

and our eyes turned milky white as the ocean floor.

they fear us now,

weave bloodied stories of us as they mend their nets

but we come back at night and teach our children how to become monsters.

stigmata

We were five when the marks appeared on your body

Twelve when you tried to escape it

I found you

Held you as you shook and vomited

My fingers slick with bile and undigested pills

Your mother’s faith burned through you

The answer to her prayers crucified within your body

We were fifteen when I kissed you

I wanted to devour you, tie you to me through your hands and feet

You told me it was wrong

But kissed me back

And later, as you slipped into my bed

You told me you loved me the way Jesus loved John

October 1994

After Sharon Olds

 

I see them standing on the hill where they were married,

I see my father laughing,

tripping through the flower-covered arch, the

grass blooming with wildflowers like burnt

sugar on a fingertip, I

see my mother with a crown of flowers on her head

standing on front of the cake,

pieces of it skimming her face, and she is smiling,

the browns of the suits behind her unable to dull her delight,

she is pregnant, they are getting married,

they are kids, they are hopeful, all they know is they are

doing what is expected, they are obeying the Lord.

I want to go up to them and say Stop,

don’t do it – he’s a liar,

she isn’t like you, you are going to go places

you prayed in your secret hearts you would never go,

you are going to raise children that hate your god,

you are going to suffer through the life you said you wouldn’t,

you are going to want to die. I want to go

up to them in the autumn breeze and say it,

her city-soft model-white face looking for me,

blankly beautiful in the broken sunlight,

his lake-tanned rugged face looking past me,

deceptively charming, the relatives of both of them listening with godly ears,

but I don’t do it. I need to become. I

put my hands inside their organs, bleed them dry

from the neck, vampiric, as if to

absolve them before the sin, I say

destroy the house before it’s built, and I will write it.

 

This is an imitation poem of “I go back to May 1937” by Sharon Olds

The original poem can be found here

Ode to a swallow

there is a lightness in cancer

the gifts that flow so unguardedly now

the waves slumping onto the pebbles in the yard

as if a new mattress

bring with them pieces of the beast

that I know lives in the mud at the bottom of Hayden Lake

I didn’t know that it was a feathered thing

that by the weakening of the old man in the house

the shedding would begin

the swallows drank of the water

and never returned

 

loosely inspired by Wallowa Lake Monster by Sufjan Stevens

For my grandfather

lotus eaters

green glass jars pressed with herbs from her garden radiate

indifference of the neighbors

so we pickle the vegetables, allow them to linger overlong in the cellar

lose ourselves in their tartness

 

maybe the vines underneath my fingernails will be meaningful someday

or maybe dirt is just the end of all of humanity compressed onto a napkin

maybe we missed the weeding

 

This poem was published in the University of Northwestern’s literary journal, Inkstone, in April 2018.

empyrean

We make our own holy water in the quiet sacred spaces of time we had to carve out of this city for ourselves, our knuckles bruised in colors you never even thought existed within the range of a human body, nervous system connecting the dots like stars. We are smaller than a grain of rice and just as pure, infinite in the wild wide sunshine-slick heavy hungry air, bottles of stardust never leaving our fingers.

Winter comes just as suddenly and your mother has died, left behind her own collection of stardust and breakable things that you can’t take with you, bitter when you touch them. She brought the fog, and now the sunshine won’t leave you alone.

Saint Peter was a martyr and he comes into your bed, teaches you how to breathe through the Holy Spirit’s lungs, flowers sprouting wherever he touches.

Forgive us oh Lord for we have sinned against our mothers

Forgive us our debts

Forgive us for the sin of unforgiveness

You inhabit a good dead skin that bleeds when it’s touched, fragments when given tenderness and all you ever wanted was a little bit of tenderness but now she’s dead and she’s taken her tenderness with her and all she left you was her stardust

 

A version of this poem was published in the University of Northwestern’s literary journal, Inkstone, in the Fall of 2017

luxate

My father flipped our house upside-down

with his lungs

we slept on the ceiling

 

haphazard home unblinking

I tried to escape through the attic window

ruined my hands

 

brother growing sunflowers from his throat

sister eaten by highway

sister eaten by backseat

 

he promised us a treehouse

it shattered with the shift

nails splintering the roots

 

My mother didn’t seem to notice

tended to the tomatoes ripened on porch-planters

and dusted the carpet

 

 

absolution

my father burnt his hands on a fantasy

dissolved into blank flesh his fingerprints

 

so I know the way a heart can sit rot-bitter in its cradle

parturient, burdensome

and my tongue doesn’t taste like anything at all

 

My sister cried when our cat killed a squirrel

its paper-small heart oozing

she was there when it stuttered out

and she buried it in a shoebox in our backyard

 

all my poems turn to chalk in my throat

 

This poem was published in the University of Northwestern’s literary journal, Inkstone, in April 2018.

untitled

She becomes limen, a great winged beast with two backs and no body. She becomes fists, worrying his hands into cerebellum; love song, abrupt. She breathes herself into memory, softness of limbic system devouring until there is nothing unspoiled but fingernails that still catch the light unattainably, sleep-heavy. Salt-erosion a map from here to home, an uncatchable whisper somewhere underneath the ice. This body has inhabited the earth for 20 years, sprung forth from my mother’s body of its own volition, wrong somehow the way it moves, a pile of bones in the chimney. Her garden frozen over with a sigh. The stutter of a breath, or hips when there is nothing left to say. The lotion-slick legs the selkie sheds with a shudder, frigid ocean pulling her tongue back first.