Month: April 2021

You abuse the word.
You have never measured its weight.

You say it with a lightness
that ignores my
twenty-nine year old sister
playing with Barbie dolls
and unable to run her own bathwater
for fear she might scald the skin
off her thighs.

You say it with a lightness
that ignores my family’s celebration
when years and years of work
finally paid off and my sister learned to read
the year her brother, four years younger,
started high school.

You say it with a lightness
that ignores the woman who
would not let her daughter
be near my sister because
she thought my sister’s brain
might be contagious
and you say it with a lightness
that ignores my sister’s furrowed
brow when she overhears the word
you think she does not understand.

You say it with a lightness
that ignores every stare
my fearless sister walks under.

You say it with a lightness
that ignores the boy in my sister’s class
who bruises his temples with his fists
because he is frustrated hunting words
his tongue doesn’t understand how to form:
words like “toothpaste” and “basketball” and
“I don’t know how to tell you my body hurts.”

You say it with a lightness
that ignores the boy in my sister’s class
who dies at twenty-two because his body
was born stamped with an expiration date
sooner than yours and
you say it with a lightness
that ignores my exhausted mother
trying to tell my sister what death is.

You say it with a lightness
that ignores everything else my sister is:
her love of rocking chairs and dancing,
fleece sweaters and Mexican food;
her fear of thunderstorms
and the sound of people fighting.

You abuse the word.

You do not know better
than to disrespect its weight,
but I hope,
after years and years of work,
you too will learn.

touched. Like magnets
on a table, edged closer
and closer, but never enough
for their fields to intersect and for
their arms to seek the other’s flesh.

Almost.

Like live wires,
unclothed, held near enough
to know the existence of the other,
but too far apart for the spark
to arc from lip to lip.

Like the moment has everything
it needs: right person, right place,
but —

I.
I would like to be the dust,
stowing away on your fingertips,
when you pull a slender volume
of seldom-read poetry off
the oak shelves of a nearly-
vacant library.

II.
The library doesn’t need to be
nearly-vacant: it could be full
of school children, of politicians,
of artists, and I would still like
to be the dust your fingertips
glean from poetry books no
one has read, but you, since
I last read them.

III.
I would like to be the dust
on your fingertips, and your
fingertips, gliding along each
rhyming line, and each line
the poet never rhymed with
anything. I would like to be
your fingertips, touching
poetry, and the dust on your
fingertips, touching poetry.

IV.
I would like to be the dust
of poetry you are touching.

V.
I would like to be the dust of a
nearly-vacant library, rhymed
on your fingertips with every
word you read.

VI.
The dust does not have to be
that of a nearly-vacant library:
it could be the dust of school
children, of artists, of politicians,
and I would still like to be dust
rhyming with you.

VII.
I would like to be the dust
of poetry you have touched.

Even when the mornings are cold,
I enjoy watching you wake: I enjoy
your spine, its stretch and curve,
your arms reaching out so far
you might be trying to grasp the air
and pull it on for a shawl to clothe
your bare and goosebumped shoulders.

Your round mouth greets the world.

I enjoy your naked legs, heels to hips,
slinking out from tangled sheets,
across me, smooth and straddling
and then I enjoy watching you walk,
every morning, as if your small toes
are excited to touch the ground again
because they have been too long from it.