there’s something about train stations in winter the interminable longing in too thin a coat sweat gone to ice around the neck and the men will never be there but then they are snow-silent in warmed cars moving through darkness towards something like home
my daughter in the bathtub
a plastic penguin in one chubby fist a plastic dolphin in the other i’m gonna be everything she says to the penguin everything i'm going to be E V E R Y THING i know what I’m going to be she turns to the dolphin everything i try to remember back to when I had that primal conviction a thin cognition in a blue bathing suit squinting into the sun and wonder the ways in which the intervening 36 years will whittle my daughter down to the exact approximation of her grown self the tortuous route by which she will be shaved into a woman
from the series: dead men i have loved #3
you came around when i was four eating coffee beans by the handful from a bag that sat wedged against the armrest of your Chrysler Plymouth filterless camels caftan and headdress belly dancers on 35mm taped to the bedroom wall baklava and leather loafers my best friend once i walked across South Bend to ring the doorbell to your apartment i was six you were dying your hair you mixed sugar on a plate of tahini i ate it with my fingers like some sort of stray animal until my mom came and got me
fall in a darkened room
the window that has been my window for five years frames wine dark pavement and a listing power line in this moment with this mind and water hazing the pane I see it as if for the first time more beautiful than anything
it’s like this
i think about you when i’m warming the car
at 5am on dark winter mornings
the green glow of the digital clock mounted on the dash
searing into my eyes like the sights
of some predatory animal
i want to tell you about things i haven’t thought
of in years like standard transmissions
and american spirit cigarettes and porch wine
and when i’m washing dishes in the sink
the window a black mirror
reflecting the dark grooves of my night face
back into the kitchen, i think of you again
i want to tell you about swimming in quarries
at night jumping from the precipice above
and plunging deep into its reservoir
finding the surface by the buoyancy
of my body alone
when I’m laying with my children
in darkened bedrooms breathing quiet
and waiting for them to turn their tired bodies
towards sleep i want to tell you
about the soft bed of my childhood
the popping embers and smoldering sage
my hair combed one thousand and one times
the musty books scheherazade aesop’s fables
the Iliad
i want to pad barefoot in my flannel nightgown
to your warm bed pull the plug of moss
from your ear and whisper everything
never knowing if you were awake
or what you heard
ocean floor apology
your grief was so big that when you turned up your palms to me i cracked on contact in an instant my lungs filled with water parenchyma turned to pumice and I fell backwards in a slow dive through the thermocline abyss the world was a tunnel of light first weak then mottled until it was gone for four months i drifted quietly past lost cities spying through unhinged balustrades tube worms growing on parquet floors the translucent skins of young girlfriends baking bread on tectonic plates wounds slashed in the volcanic sea mount so necrotic that they created their own weather patterns of rot and finally settled mute and decisive in the primordial silt an infinite pause a crypt-silent nautilus of waste pregnant with the heavy thing that hope becomes when it is dead in deep sea slow motion a ghost crab pads softly past puffing up years of gentile sediment with its fragile finger bones four days later it is gone from view having silently slipped past the curve of the horizon
Lost in a daydream
half asleep in a beach chair i imagine my body young and capable when we were children our mothers drove us places they waited read books knitted Afghans wore big hats to block out the sun they stood at a distance waiving their long arms for us to come back down the shore we had drifted too far my children are up the beach naked and rolling in the breakers a pregnant couple perched on tidy towels take pictures of their diminutive dog they don’t know who they are becoming so they set their sights on knowing their Pekingese our mothers were killing the currency of their lives in harlequin and back loop waiting agitated and petulant in the HOV lane for their lives to begin all the while watching their bodies decay at a rate slightly more accelerated than the arc of their children’s growth i doze the salt tightening on my skin hair crystallizing my children have drifted so far up the shore they are mere dots in the curve of the land
terminal velocity
squinting backwards at the sun my mind’s eye reconciles two worlds the one where we live and the one where we fight to find our maker they meet at sea level my body is compelled towards your body it’s a compulsion like how a stone falls to earth and the earth knows to meet it sediment and sulfur thrust faults and tributaries the nature of objects
The Cipher
you tape-record the exchange like we’re in a police precinct and you are catching me in a crime of words time is limited we whisper fast, each syllable coming like code everything is important and we forget it with urgency
napalm lava cake
cash app instacart pokémon walmart general manager boresight the greater Denver metropolitan area each of your seven children exploding in space a fistful of rocks pelted into dark water