because i don’t have the energy for anything longer.
walking in the cold
even as i feel my hands
slowly turn to ice
oh how i love you
telephone
if i told you your
voice was comfort to me, you’d
laugh; that’s comfort, too.
insomnia
it’s just two different
kinds of dreaming: are your eyes
open or closed?
all of portland knows how much i love you.
even the guy at the sandwich cart,
putting together our grilled cheese and turkey on
organic rye, grins at us like he’s been a teenager before
and he understands that i am
so much body and bones,
that’s why we need to eat in a near-empty square
with our napkins on our knees,
honest and simple and silent,
even the people who interviewed us for their documentary
know how much i love you;
in the way i flicked my eyes up to you with every question
my lips chapped, we had our conversation on camera
i never looked at the lens and they didn’t request it,
caught on film flicker flicker, i imagine myself moving
in pixels, and in every single frame,
i’m looking at you,
even the trees lining the streets
with their hair all in lights and the wind blowing high,
how they shivered with affection as we passed,
even they know how much i love you.
post-poem commentary: i had this idea in mind… i don’t know if it’s the same shape as i envisioned it; it’s a different child than i was expecting to bear. but i like it.
they tell you you’re older,
and it becomes more than a day,
but also the period of anticipation waiting for it
as though there is some pocketwatch in the universe’s favorite coat,
saying, wait, you’re not seventeen yet—
and here you are tapping at the world’s elbow,
murmuring hurry up
but not too fast as every day carries you closer to the earth,
as though a day could matter, like the difference between a tree
with all its leaves shorn off, haircut for the winter months
and one with one last lock of gold
but does it feel different, to age?
to realize, maybe, i have been breathing all this time
with occasional stops to dive and swim and wish in tunnels,
breathing for seventeen years
now that is a birthday,
to hear people you love come to you with their faces
all warm and soft like leaves just unfurling,
wrap their arms around you so tight you can hardly move,
can’t drop your bags to the floor and hug back,
i am happy you were born,
and unspoken, maybe even
not fully understood like a light just before the switch comes down
i am happy you still exist
sometimes i fear i am nothing more than the haze
of fog from your breath
smeared on the windowpane
of winter,
your carbon and ache to oh, your sighs,
maybe i could drag a finger through my mist
and spell your name.
i’m picturing myself as a crevice
slowly filling with seawater
so that it turns deep blue
and reflects the light darkly
i hope i don’t reach the bottom, there’s more to this soul
than these gasps,
i’m more than air and shadow,
i’m more than a hearbeat, you know,
and i will not dissolve in the ocean i am not
the breathy grains of salt and dust
leftovers from a glass
that sat in the sun too long
and evaporated,
oh, you’re so sublime.
& in time, i’m filled with something intangible
like water in a glass, the reflection
shimmering clearly almost to the rim,
threatening to spill over, don’t tap it, don’t touch me,
it’s like how i imagine the moon must feel
right before it begins to wane,
before it makes the march toward gibbous,
lady luna, you and i are not so different
can’t you see i’m as raw as the apple
which you are holding in your hand and peeling
can’t you see i am all nerves, i am all
sensation, i am salt and grit and the flotsam of the sea
& now the moon is pulling me, holding my wrist
between two fingers and gently, gently, pulling me away
in the tides, in time, i’ll come to empty out, shivering;
you’ll cut your finger on your knife, and hold it in your mouth
tasting the bitter tang of blood, iron and salt,
like the flotsam of the sea.
if i were to cut myself in half, carefully,
and then look upon the pieces
i would find i’m asymmetrical
like the way a smile
curves up at one corner.
*
if i could see myself so closely
that all my cells were magnified
i’d see a million tiny engines
holding a million tiny books
with pages like double helixes
all saying the same thing in nucleotides,
adenine and guanine and thymine and cytosine,
saying over and over again what makes me me.
*
if i unwound all the veins in my body
and spooled them onto the ground
perhaps i could get halfway to the moon
and then, i suppose, i’d stop
in the vacuum of space
with my bright red blood flowing behind me
*
if i could pull my eyes out of my head
and float them behind myself
i would see a girl, standing slightly off center,
one shoulder maybe raised higher than the other,
her hands clasped together
smiling at you.
a slightly grisly love poem, if you will. it’s long, but i like it.
nor are our elbows;
our circles are getting smaller
or maybe merging into one,
when did this happen?
you’re home, home in my mind
which means here,
and it’s as though
everything has slipped into focus
like waiting for the cherry tree
in the front yard to bloom
when it did, suddenly,
and then it was like it had always been covered in flowers
and the petals were falling into our hair
and staying there, so gently
like whispers,
like snow.
oh no, oh no, oh no.
i could dissolve into crypticisms,
take baths in melancholia
and cry quietly throughout the night
with an embroidered handkerchief pressed to one cheek,
i could even put on a pair of
nonprescription glasses
or lay languorously on my bed,
gazing at the painkillers in my hand,
which i wouldn’t take anyway, because i don’t like medicine
and i am not self-medicating,
except with poetry, which i could write,
badly,
i could make literary allusions to books i haven’t read
and talk about songs i haven’t heard
and reminisce about the streets of istanbul
which i’ve never visited,
and wear a velveteen coat
and not brush my hair,
and drink my coffee without any milk,
i could wake up only after two p.m.
and stay out late gazing at the pines until dawn blushed the sky,
i could write you love poems,
hundreds of them,
and never show you one,
that is, if i were a romantic.
post poem commentary: well, at least i wrote something. it’s a little different, a little more coy. i kind of like it.
for a multitude of reasons. i think poetry is a multitude of things.
catharsis, yes. to understand things— that might be more apt.
to take those feelings all roiling and surging and threatening to turn you inside out, to take those feelings and slide them into neat beautiful lines, that’s something.
i cannot always understand my emotions. but i can understand words, i own a dictionary, so do you; this is how we cope.
i write poetry for the one beautiful line that will not leave my head. for the burgeoning willfulness in my brain that demands to be set upon and tamed and turned into something quietly magnificent.
poetry is linebreaks because if i were to put it in sentences i wouldn’t know where to stop. poetry is analogy because if i were to try to say it outright the words would die in my mouth. poetry is secrets plain as day. it is truth so pure we don’t know what to do with it and so it fills us up like water. it is essential. it is necessary.
and that is why i write poetry.
(ode to the bottom of the ocean)
dearest, if i slipped into the sea,
i could fall for hours and never reach
the bottom of the ocean.
but you’ll be there soon, so i wonder.
i can’t imagine it being nice.
there’s not much light there; certainly not enough
to read by, or dream by, in the inevitable darkness.
yet i hear there are slurries of warmth,
broiling up through the trenches and the vents,
curling around the spires
of the lost city.
well— it does not seem so bad.
perhaps it could be beautiful.
worms wave their heads, and i try to imagine how it must feel,
the cloying heaviness of the waves,
lumbering over your body, as you drop
meter by meter, down and down and down.
will you try to convince the ocean
to share her secrets with you?
will you make measurements in that ineffable night,
sealing yourself into a covenant with the sea?
will you discover remarkable things?
i know this will not happen, but i imagine you,
my friend, walking along the bottom of the ocean.
in my mind’s eye you are smiling,
notebook in hand, hair aflame,
exploring a lost city,
and even in the darkness, you dream.
if i close my eyes and breathe,
so quietly that i lose track of myself,
i can hear the trains
calling to each other in the distance.
i don’t know what they wail, mournfully,
like mothers at dusty graves,
keening softly in the night.
they moan and my ears, sympathetic,
send prickles of guilt down my bones.
i don’t know where they’re going, the trains;
my eyes still sealed i imagine wheels,
turning in their tracks,
churning up dust and rust and ash.
on my window knucklebones rattle,
dry leaves stirred by the wind,
tapping a staccato rhythm,
chorusing, rasping, singing to me,
farewell, beloved,
farewell.
about his face (it was an assignment) and i was like, huh. i want to do that too. well, not about his face, but my face. so here i go.
the swell of her lips is almost like
the swell of the ocean
or the moon, nervous and full,
or maybe both, because they’re tied together
like the way her eyes fall open and shut
always in tandem, lashes casting shadows on top of shadows.
she winks. it doesn’t suit her. wrinkles her nose, that does.
she doesn’t sleep much.
this is a face you could tell stories to, you might think,
and she looks at you like she’d listen, maybe,
could even be someone you might care for,
or not. look at her blink, smile slightly, dart and dare,
she could slide out of your life if you let her,
her lips are chapped from the glass in her mouth,
the cold glittering piece inside of her
and maybe she will, maybe she won’t,
this isn’t a careful face,
this isn’t certain, none of it.
in the silence of
our in-between pauses
i found i loved you
//
it’s always us at
the end, together at the
end; don’t you ever?
//
i could dream or i
could write. behind my
eyes wait patient sighs.
two drops on the slide.
one lake-water, one wet earth.
i slide a piece of glass inside your mouth,
and you pour fog into my eyes.
grey and yellow. fuzz.
focus, focus. i twirl my hands
and shapes manifest,
blurry outlines, like people seen
moving slowly during a rainstorm,
or maybe like fingertips at night.
and finer: i stop, slow down,
open the aperture to let in the light,
carefully, as though it will run away,
and like moving a hand
through a pool of cold water,
that magic moment when we are changed
irrevocably,
things become clear.
and when i jumped in,
my toes touched the bottom
of the deep end.
if i stood on my own shoulders
i might be able to see,
unsteadily, over the surface of the water.
but i realize, imagining this,
how frail i am.
my little shoulders under my feet,
bony and narrow,
arching obliquely,
my skin oddly warm, like backs and necks
and shoulders are,
i would wobble, resting
on the me below,
i’d have to hold my ankles,
the narrow straits of me,
and hold my breath
to see.
