Tag Archives: gabriel gadfly

I need you to kiss me
like my mouth is a timebomb
and the only way to defuse it
is to clip the red wire
of my tongue with your teeth.

I’m teaching myself
to love broken things.

Books with loose bindings
and misplaced pages.
Coffee cups with chipped
lips and snapped handles.

The rusted old tractor
in my grandfather’s yard
that hasn’t rumbled in years,
and the sparrow nest
in its belly full of eggshells
a tabby cat tore open.

A burnt patch of grass,
a pile of glass taken in
by a family of gravel.

An old red oak,
opened and weeviled,
that becomes a home
for new and varied life,

even if it cannot stand up
any longer.

In the movies, when your lover
is about to board a plane to a place
they may never return from,
you are supposed to jump barriers.

You are supposed to dash through
security checkpoints, knock over
the guards who stand in your way,
damn the consequences,
and tell them you love them,
and then they will stay with you.

When I tried that,
they pinned me to the ground
and you still went to Afghanistan.

I drove past the old
skate center today.

It’s been closed down
since we were children,
the door tagged with graffiti
and the parking lot
full of wet pot holes,

but I remember being ten
and begging
my parents to take me.

I never skated a day in my life.
Wheels on my feet have
always terrified me,
and I was good enough at falling
without a free pass for gravity.

I just went for the arcade,
a fistful of quarters jangling
in the pockets of my shorts,
for bad nachos and diet cokes,
and for you,

a gangly girl
with bandaids on her knees,
with red braids and braces,
pirouetting to pop music
on rented rollerskates.

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.