Category Archives: Poetry

You taste like cherry frost,
bedroom sunlight raptured,
captured by subtle sepia crush,
a rush of blood to the lips
and tongue, lungs full of the
steam peeling off your flushed
and shuddering flesh;

We are threshed
together, separated and laid out
against sheet canvas cocoons,
writhed and tithed and tied
together because I cannot keep my lips
from scouring the valley between
your shoulders, cannot keep strips
of my skin from trying to interweave
with yours; lattice-like, enwebbed,
ebbed and seeping out of myself
and into you; shrike me on your
lancets, only kiss my pores again,
pour kisses on me again, take these poor kisses
and illuminate your lips again,
conjugate our mouths ten
times, twenty times, as many times
as it takes to swallow all the rhymes
I am seeping out of myself
and into you.

You kiss like
a thistle switch, like God’s sunlight
glitched and wavered,
flutter shrike, I am struck,
I am plucked and strummed
and humming for you;
I am sung and strung for you,
draw my tongue into you once more,
crack your kisses against my throat
like soap bubble lightning eggs,
til our legs shudder in time
to the twinkle of a hundred thousand
jealous white-hot stars.

I’d like to pluck a star out of the night,
peel away its rind, and sink my teeth
into the fruit flesh beneath its gleam –

I wonder what it’d taste like:
subtle sweet like persimmon,
sharp pucker of juicy lemon,
crisp apple, faint melon,

plenty of seedpods nestled in the pulp:
new worlds not yet birthed,
ready to be flung from their mother tree.

A heart cannot pull away from its veins.

At the corridor’s end, one step shy of snapping
the arteries that bind me to you, I turn and flee
to your bedside, my fearful heart beating its fists
on the white doors of your room, as if it might find
them locked and barred, but they open, they
still accept me, you still sleep, dreaming to the
hushing lullabies of your respirator.

Your hand is warm and I imagine your fingers curl,
just a little, around mine.
I’ll stay here until you wake up.
I’ll stay here until you wake up.

I finally have words
for the way I love you:

you are a red wasp
alight on the doorknob
of my front door.

I don’t dare reach out.
I don’t dare let you in.

Even when the whales
abandon their bones on seashores,
and red sunsets burn their ghosts
away to croon at the moon’s gibbous breast,
I will tend the harbor of my heart for you.

Open up your sails;
skim high across the frothy waves,
so fast your keel kisses their peaks
like an infrequent lover,
like my infrequent lover,
always dashing off to some new untamed cape
or blushing virgin peninsula.

Your infidelities and trysts are your own,
but I am your stalwart lighthouse.
I will draw you in to berth
in the harbor-womb of my heart,
or birth you back into the sea
when the harbor stifles your naked hull.

Call up your anchor and embark.
Open up your sails;
skim high across the frothy waves.
My harbor-womb heart will wait for you.

My belly has a glacier
crawling through it

and the only fire
that can melt it down
is miles away —

so far,
I can’t even see
the smoke of her
any more.

Today, you sent me a box
full of chocolate and poetry
and beautiful things.

You must have known
your gift was unwanted.
You must have.

You must have known
that I would read your name and address
with dread and a hint of panic.

That I would tuck the box
beneath the table and try
to ignore it for hours,
until its presence
needled me like a thorn
needing to be plucked out.

You thought you sent
love and affection in a box,
but you sent a reminder
of wounds and worry,
a reminder that
gifts and well-wishes
do not heal bruises.

I would send it back
full of wolves if I could.

If you’re going to love me,
love me like I might break.

Love me like I am a bird
and you are a highrise window,

like I am an amateur electrician
and you are a frayed live wire,

like I am a moving van
pretending to be a sports car

and you are winding road
above a mountain gorge.

Love me like I am frat boy
jumping off balconies

and you are a hotel pool
too shallow to jump into.