Month: April 2021

I.

I cannot write your name
without tearing the paper
and now there are piles
and piles of torn pages
and nothing of substance
written on them.

II.

Your name, spoken,
is to lick a lit candle:
fire and light and
the taste of wax melting
into the haze and snap
of pain.

III.

I would christen ships with you
to sink them. I would make
reefs of them, teeming with
the life of the sea, and then
I would slash myself open
on the coral in the deep,
conjuring sharks
and the teeth of sharks
into the blue-red-blue.

IV.

I would chisel your name
into foundation stones
to bring castles to their knees.

V.

I would bite your name
into the skin of my lover’s wrist
to break the bones beneath.

VI.

Whisper it;
scarce out,
to tear tongue
from the cave of mouth.

VII.

Think it;
aneurysm
and burst.

My love for you is an ocean,
fathomless fathoms
of blue black sea,

but if my love is an ocean,
you are a shore of crags.

You are a snuffed out lighthouse,
a vacant tower on a beach
of rocks, lightless and hushed.
You cast out no warning
that I should not sail near.

You shipwreck me.
You claw my hull open
on the sharp corpses
of dead coral, on shark’s teeth,
on the glass knives of obsidian
islands belched up in smoke
from the volcanic deep.

All my treasures have spilled out
into your treacherous shallows,
swallowed by surf and tide,
to sink and whirl in the eddies
among the hulks of others
who ran aground you before me.

My love for you is an ocean,
and you have a mad captain’s graveyard
where it meets the earth of you.

I need you to kiss me
like my mouth is a timebomb
and the only way to defuse it
is to clip the red wire
of my tongue with your teeth.

I’m teaching myself
to love broken things.

Books with loose bindings
and misplaced pages.
Coffee cups with chipped
lips and snapped handles.

The rusted old tractor
in my grandfather’s yard
that hasn’t rumbled in years,
and the sparrow nest
in its belly full of eggshells
a tabby cat tore open.

A burnt patch of grass,
a pile of glass taken in
by a family of gravel.

An old red oak,
opened and weeviled,
that becomes a home
for new and varied life,

even if it cannot stand up
any longer.

In the movies, when your lover
is about to board a plane to a place
they may never return from,
you are supposed to jump barriers.

You are supposed to dash through
security checkpoints, knock over
the guards who stand in your way,
damn the consequences,
and tell them you love them,
and then they will stay with you.

When I tried that,
they pinned me to the ground
and you still went to Afghanistan.

I drove past the old
skate center today.

It’s been closed down
since we were children,
the door tagged with graffiti
and the parking lot
full of wet pot holes,

but I remember being ten
and begging
my parents to take me.

I never skated a day in my life.
Wheels on my feet have
always terrified me,
and I was good enough at falling
without a free pass for gravity.

I just went for the arcade,
a fistful of quarters jangling
in the pockets of my shorts,
for bad nachos and diet cokes,
and for you,

a gangly girl
with bandaids on her knees,
with red braids and braces,
pirouetting to pop music
on rented rollerskates.

The only things in my refrigerator
are two packets of duck sauce
from the last time we ordered Chinese
and a wheezing bottle that
smells of yellow mustard,
but doesn’t have anything left to give.

It’s been this way since you left,
four weeks a famine
preserved at thirty-eight Fahrenheit
and in the middle of each night,
I wake with hunger pangs
gnawing your name into my belly.

I’ll skulk into the kitchen
and stand in my underwear,
my corrugated ribs
gaping at this rectangular
portal of empty light,
this eggshell plastic, these shelves
of bare wire.

Truth is, there seems no point
in an offer of nourishment
to limbs that can’t hold you
to lips that can’t speak to you
to the brittle teeth
in my mouth
that just want to chew on the bones
of a relationship I left out
to spoil.

Maybe if I growl and gurgle
at myself for enough nights
without you,
I might can starve this
hopeless optimistic brain
that still believes

there may come a day
when you will billow back in,
fog from a freezer door.

The rivers swelled that spring,
rose three feet an hour
until the front porch
looked out onto a sea
of muddy water.

There was nothing to do
but wait for the swell
to recede and wick back
down into the earth.

No way to reach town,
no supplies or news,
no power, so we scrounged
what we could
from the back of the pantry:

cans of white beans
and tinned meat
and a mason jar
full of last year’s
apricot preserves.

I lit a candle, and that night
we sat on the porch,
wrapped each other
in your grandmother’s
old hand-stitched quilt
and ate those sticky
sweet gold preserves
on slices of crusty bread.

Listen to the water rush by,
watch the candle flame flicker,
your mouth is sweet gold, too.
Let the waters never drop.