Category Archives: Poetry

You wear your father
like a hand-me-down suit,
threadbare grey and worn.
He clings too snug,
too clenching at the shoulders.
He digs in at the waistband
he rides up at the wrists,
there is no space for you
to move and breathe.

You are larger than your father
could ever have been,
but you keep trying to fit
inside the shape of him.

Now you walk down the street
and see these people comfortable
mingling colors and fabrics
in ways you know your father
would have thought unthinkable.
If only you could take him off,
and one day, maybe, but not yet.

Your father’s pockets are full of holes
but you still fill them and wonder
why you cannot carry change.

Cherry stems tie knots
around your tongue,
and that’s a fancy trick,
sexy in some ways,
if you were making love
to a cherry tree,

But I’ve got a better one:
I can tie you in knots
with a thread of secrets
and whispers.

You wake up one morning
with a great black splintered crack
through your belly,
edged out hard,
and chalked over.
This is what happens
when a crust of ache forms
on the froth white of hurt
and then breaks:
it sunders and splits
down the middle of you.

But listen close,
listen quiet,
listen
to the sound issuing
out of it:
the hush-shush of sea
blue notes, the whale-whispers,
from your conch belly hollow,
the sour tired song
of a cold choir,
it scrapes back its chairs
and slaps its chests
with numb slabs of hand,

the mother rock wren
flits in with dead grass
and tangled hair
to nest down in your gut
and sing her dry trill song
among the spotted eggs
she’s laid.

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.