Category Archives: Poetry

The weekend over, we left your parent’s house,
and drove home in the rain,
tense and tired to our bones
from your father’s opinions about the government,
from your mother’s mild but persistent interrogations,
from your little brother and his dog Cheyanne,
both joyful, but barking desperate for attention.

Neither of us said anything,
you with your arms crossed in the passenger seat,
me with hands white-knuckled on the wheel,
weary to be home, but with miles to go.

The sun went down, and drove darker
until we rolled along County Road 23,
past a dairy farm and a Baptist church
with a parking lot full of farm trucks,
even though it was getting late
even for country preachers high on hellfire.

Those were the last lights we passed
for miles, until pine trees nuzzled close in the dark
and we hit a patch freshly paved:
new asphalt so dark, so smooth it seemed like
we sailed down a river of night,

a slick of black glass that stretched
to the limits of the high-beams
and seemed as if it might crack beneath the tires.

We were both startled
by the tiny tree frog that popped into the road,
by his little jubilant leap into the rain,
his dance in light and wetness, his happy transit,
and your hand flew to my thigh
as I pressed the brake and slowed to let him pass.

Neither of us said anything,
but your hand settled from tension to comfort
and I eased my grip on the wheel
as the small green wanderer landed safely
in the pine straw piled on the other side of the road,

and then we continued on our way,
but your hand never moved,
not for the next fifty miles until we made it home.

What have you done to me?

Morning wakes light
in the window.
I pull away the covers
and lift myself up,
but my bones fall out
between the sheets.

You are still asleep;
the sun creeps across your lips
and my skeleton beside you
cups your breast in his hand,
his bones fat-yellowed
and marrowed out with desire;
I leave your side and leave my love
beside you, I leave all
the white osteology of my love.

Is my love macabre?
My love rattles.
My love clatters and clacks,
my love snaps and pops at the joints.
I cannot quiet it.
I can try to bury
all the raw cartilage and calcium
of my love, I can try to crack it
and mortar it down
to so much grey dust,

but my love must be bone:
it wrestles under the muscle
and blood of my love,
under the skin of my love,
the bones of my love are what
the tendons and tissues of my love
bind to when I love you.

My love is lunate and scaphoid.
It is vertebral, sternal, my love
is cranial and pelvic and hyoid.
My love is two hundred and six
bone white statements of my love.

I watched a bat snipe
summer bugs
from their streetlight haven
and thought of you:
your artful lips
the sharp clip of your teeth
beneath my ear,
a target never missed,
no matter how I move,
as if my whispered name
allows you to echo-locate it.

In a few minutes,
I’ll be home:
I will take you by the hand
turn off the light
dangle together
upside down
off the edge of the bed
with you.

Shh.
Just listen to the place
where the air from my lungs
starts kissing the air from yours.

In the hall outside my apartment
the tabby that haunts the building
has killed a giant moth: the debris
stretches from my neighbor’s door
to my doorstep, a sea of brown
flecks of tattered membrane, like
pieces of shredded airplane fuselage.
The main body, sans left wing,
plows into the thick grey carpet,
panicked sensors shrieking alarms;
the engines splutter, flutter weakly,
then silence, as the beast slinks
away. Tower loses contact with craft.
Expected survivors: none.

The parents are sitting
behind a glass wall
on a brown leather couch.
Not black.
Not a black couch.
There is nothing black
in the room at all.

There is a glass coffee table
with shiny chrome legs.
There is a ceramic vase
holding red flowers.
There is a window
overlooking the hospital yard,
green grass, oak trees.

There is a mother, wringing her hands,
there is a father, grinding his teeth,
and there is silence.

There is so much
ready to break
in this trembling room.

I broke your grandmother’s vase.
The blue one, patterned with lilacs,
liberated from a secondhand store
in Czechoslovakia in 1939.

Like your grandmother,
it came with stories:
she talked a German officer
into buying it for her
in exchange for a date
she never showed up for,
the year her brother
put her on a train with a trunk
full of dresses and a little sister,
a hundred korunas sewn
into her underwear, where she knew
no one would find them.

I broke your grandmother’s vase.
I knocked it off the shelf,
dove to catch it, missed,
and watched it shatter into
thirty-nine pieces, patterned with lilacs.
Thirty-nine, because I counted
every piece as I hid them
in a drawer in the shed behind
the house, beside the hammer
and wrench, where I knew
you would not find them.