Category Archives: Poetry

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.

I have never understood
why you abandon books.

You leave them hewn half-open,
peaked like the homestead tents
of tiny lost settlers

trying to build a life in strange lands:
carpet, coffee table, the open wilderness
of the kitchen counter.

Sometimes I pick them up, just to meet
the detective you left nursing a beer
and a knife wound in a shady Boston bar,

the frightened farm boy hiding
under thorn bushes from goblins and wolves,

the tired mother with hair like sunset
and her finger on the trigger of a gun.

I have started to notice a trend:
you put down stories as soon
as their central conflict is revealed

and this explains why you are not here now.

Sometimes, when you and I are sitting
at the breakfast table, drinking coffee
and eating toast with strawberry preserves,
I am struck with the sudden and irrational terror
that an alien might claw through your sternum
and burst shrieking from the pale valley
between your breasts.

I imagine the scene in slow-motion:
your head flails back, mouth agape
in a soundless O, your slender fingers
fluttering on the table. Breakfast scatters.
Strawberry viscera splatters my cheek.
Your chest and my mouth are screaming.
You comment, gently, that today is a pretty day,
which isn’t really what most people do when
extra-terrestials are wriggling out of their lungs,
but you never do predictable things and that
is part of what I love about you.

I watch too many movies, but you are still lovely
and I want to take you into the bedroom,
press my ear to your chest and listen to
the reassuringly singular beat of your heart.

I was eating Cheetos,
so if I looked surprised
when you asked me
if you were doing the
right thing when you agreed
to meet your ex-boyfriend
for lunch (he was ten
minutes late and anyway
he had cheated on you
throughout your long
relationship), if I looked

surprised, it was only
because it is very difficult
to give a wise and profound
answer when one has
orange crumbly cheese stuff
stuck between your teeth,

and guys like me
who write poems are
always looking for
wise and profound answers
to questions like that.

I still don’t have an answer.

I know only this:
the sunlight through the window
wrapped your sadness in a glow,
and your smile,
brief though it might have been,
showed me your heart:

a book with a damaged cover,
asking someone to turn the first page.

The old man at the end of the road
has staked a big red sign
to his front lawn,
and the sign says NO.

Just NO.

Stark white letters
on a red field so angry
you can feel it like a sunburn
hot on the neck of the street.

I don’t know what he protests.
The meetings of men’s lips, maybe,
or the sweat on a busy immigrant’s brow.
Coffins coming home with flags
draped over their lids,
or the debt draped on his grandkids’ backs
just so they can learn something.

Maybe he’s just angry
at the inexhaustible creep of age:
the aches in his hips
and the grit in his bones
and the pills that damn fool doctor
tells him he ought to take.

Whatever it is,
he makes sure everyone
who passes by
knows he disapproves.

When you were at work,
I picked up your journal —
a slim book bound
in soft brown leather —
I snuck it out
from the bedside table,
I held it in my hands,
I felt it over and over,
and finally peered inside.

I want you to know
it was not to look for
anything written about me.

I just wanted to learn you
in a way I hadn’t yet,
in ways I couldn’t
suss out on my own,
and this is what I learned:

You wrote about
your mother’s hands,
about her white hands
wrinkled, her nails chipped
and unpainted, pitted
with soap and work.

They smelled like laundry,
the kind that is only clean
because you’ve knotted
and kneaded and soaked
and swished and wrung
until your elbows ache,
until your fingers ache.

You wrote about
the green glass earrings
your Aunt Callie wore
until the day
her last hard husband
was put beneath the earth,

handmade teardrops
hung on wire —
even cracked,
they caught the light

and you wrote about
the river full of stones
she threw those earrings into,
to grind them down to dust,
to grind them down,
she told you.

You wrote about
your sister’s girl,
this straw-haired kid
who digs for earthworms
with her fingers
in the silty muck
beside Moldhauer Creek,

about their fat
wriggling bodies
in her little white hands,
the way she pinches them
and laughs.