Category Archives: Poetry

Cotton

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I spent days trying to write
the perfect letter for you.

I wrote and scratched out
a field of words. I crumpled paper
until my floor started to think
it was a cotton field,
and I thought of inviting you
to come pick through it,

to see if you could find
the softness I was trying
to tell you about

but I was too afraid
your fingers would wear raw
on the bolls, that you would grow
tired of stooping
to pick up the things I’d grown
in my head

so I put an empty envelope
in your mailbox, and wrote

     Love me, please,

on the outside,
instead.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

All Blue

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I am happy
when I am with you
and also sick sad.
I am all blue in the middle.

There are rainstorms in my belly
and my mouth is full of fog.

Wet moss
creeps into the spaces
between my cobblestones,
but I love you,

and you make the rainstorms
the kind the sun shines through,
and you make the fog
the cool mist of morning,
and you make the moss
bright green and the softest
I have ever felt

but I am still all blue
in the middle of me.

Bottle of Sadness

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Your little red mouth
is a bottle of sadness
and you think you keep
it stoppered up,

but the cork is cracked
and the seal is loose
and you drip
little splashes of sorrow
every time you speak.

In the morning,
I wake next to your wet sheets,
your pillow soaked through with it.

It smudges on the rims
of glasses you drink from,
it tastes of salt and dusk and blue
on your lips

and even when you laugh,
it boils away and steams
in the air —
the room fills with fog,
you stop laughing again.

I used to think
you had only liters in you,
but some days I think
you have the whole deep sea.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Cryptography

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I cannot talk to you right now.

I can’t part my lips
and spill conversations out:
the sentences grow barbs,
my mouth doesn’t work,
my tongue seizes up,
and the words catch.
I am choking on them
and I can’t spit them out.

The only way I can speak
to you is in code.

I have to tell you
that I am growing moth wings,
that the deep blue Atlantic
is writhing under my ribs,
that the butterflies in my stomach
are trying to bite their way out
and I am swallowing bottlesful
of hornets to sting them quiet.

That I have stopped being a man
and have started being a pillar of salt
trying to learn how to rain dance.

That I am eating smoke.

I am trying to tell you something
but I think the cipher is written
on the marrow of my bones
and I don’t want to know
what you’ll need to do
to crack me.

 

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.