Stories

My hands only knew. The painkillers in our mothers’ cabinets.

I want something warm that won’t feel shame lying over me.

On a scale of 1 to 10, the pain dissolves like a Eucharist wafer.

It’s been a rainy, relatively windless fall, the aspen leaves clinging.

Let me tell you stories about lands far from here where you are absent.

I make peas and argue with a wall. Something gets stuck like that.

Toe over toe we went, arms held out like tightrope walkers.

As you watch the picture and begin to notice more, the nothing grows less.

The baby won’t sleep until 2 a.m., not until he poops and throws up.

Today brings a blue hour, but the jasmine has been dead for weeks.

The notes must be crying inside me falling from their proper octaves.

A grin of bitterness swept thereby like an ominous bird a-wing.

I am desperate to love myself, to tolerate myself, vanity is fine.

Some days are stretched so taut it feels like changing might break us. We feed the baby bitter melon, flower pepper, bloodroot beet. The first snow comes in January, fresh gauze over an old wound.

I walk across the fields with only a few young cows for company.

Some goals: stop buying jeans. Stop being angry at mom/dad/sister.

Anchored off Biscayne Bay my father’s wooden skiff swings easy.

We spit out the black seeds, bits of night glistening on the grass.

i stored away in my mama’s empty perfume bottles smells and stories

Gotta watch them damn sorry folks he sez they leave the best stuff.

We wondered at their habits and gave them little poems for names.

I’d wager a cicada is fond of a high note on a synthesizer.

We called for the dead dog because toddlers do not understand death.

Your jumps are numbered. It is better to be a bird without altitude.

Here’s the world, sweetheart. One word as small & large as a father.

I’ll leave a trail of crumbs as I descend into god knows where.

I’d make a tub of mud to keep live crabs. I’d refill it daily.

Music that tells of how things stand in the troubled world you now have.

I hear pleasure ringing, and I wonder what led us to this moment.