Poetry
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One Week in July
Aujourd’hui, maman est morte — Albert Camus
I. Forty Minutes to Goodbye
You drive the familiar roads home
but there’s nothing
familiar about them this time:
home is a fleeting place.
You drive faster, wanting to
put it all behind you
wake up 20 years later instead,
not knowing the…
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American Sunrise
The things we do in secret
to prepare for the Apocalypse
I have always known the ending
carry the same evil inside my body
injected by my ______’s penis
five or six years old
the same evil Uncle Sam
is pumping into your children
I demand awakening through the
gateway…
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Heaven is Blurry
Heaven is blurrylike the window far off in the porcelain’s reflection
promises of peace like the beat of your heart murmuring its song in my ear lulling the body back to life.
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A Living Sacrifice
You asked whether
All the king’s horses
And all the king’s men
Could ever put Stephanie back together again
Sometimes that’s the point of healing
And sometimes it’s not
Every system is different
They say
I run a boarding house for divergent emotions
Inside my body
No matches, sharps, or…
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A Woman’s Body
you think it will never happen again
you step off the shore
you are vanishing
while around you
the darkness coming down
a woman’s body
called spring
floating around in the darkness
your soul won’t listen
so you relax
you don’t fight it anymore
your throat swells
as it beats…
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Experience
to begin again
this time
knowing what we do now
a quiet hope
shards of light
in Mason jars
playing childhood
playing June
the scream always dying in your throat
when nights were long
lying at the top of the stairs
listening for it to be over
and then
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Portrait…
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But You Don’t
for Christmasyou can have a raincheckan IOU for the things we’d doif you felt anything at all for me.
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Portrait credit: Nelson Jaimes
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A Spinning Wheel
Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you’ve done, what you didn’t do, what you look like, what age you are, any of it. Nothing matters at all. You have no control. Your parents don’t love you. No one loves you, not the actual you, the scared child, the terrified adult. The…
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Placeholder
Only the wrens dare get close
land on the table
puff out their chests
observe and flit
flit and observe
Their activity contrasts your lethargy
soaking up the slanted rays of the
Autumn sun
different than before.
You are here now like you were then
only you guess at the…
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Soul Moves West Upon Death of Body
“In Abenaki tradition, souls move west upon the death of the body.”
You used to dream, big open spaces and the mountains stretching out forever. The west. Always the west. It was your first love. Where you got married. The ocean, blue expanse, the cliffs and switchbacks, Redwoods reaching high…