Suicide Notes on Stationary

She sits there writing suicide notes

on stationary, lying 

stomach down 

on the trampled park grass,

personalizing each note 

with a name

an address

and no goodbyes. 

When she rolls over (because her arms

are starting to fall asleep 

from the elbows down) she examines

the imprints of the blades 

on the fronts of her thighs, 

the little mazes 

of pressed flower skeletons

forever worn onto the tanned satin of her legs.

She thinks if she were a flowers she’d be

a weed–

the pretty, understated kind 

that pushes its way up through sidewalk cracks,

chasing the sun,

until a foot falls down 

and there is no room left

to grow. 

Days of the week

Every Monday I miss you.

The longest day of my week and also always seemingly the coldest

and grayest. We talk about you in workshop every week, but without

them ever knowing who. Every week they talk about “I,” the “big loser,”

as my poetry teacher calls I, and I is me, and I always loses to “he”

or to “you,” which is you, of course, unnamed. I know who’s who.

 

Tuesdays are softer, the memories of yesterday

and you begin to blur around the edges

but the center is still clear, defined,

me without you, me without you.

 

By Wednesday I have written a new poem.

I try to keep you out but you manage to worm

you way in every time. It makes me sick

to see the pen ink you out again and again,

shaky, in different shapes.

 

Thursday. The first acceptable day

to get drunk. I while away the daylight

until starlight whistles and knocks, falls

in through the window. One drink. Four drinks.

How many more? Stagger them with water,

my aunt advised. I always forget this

somewhere around drink number two.

 

Friday repeats Thursday and Saturday repeats Friday

but more, and more and more.

I forget things. I forget to think about you,

too busy balancing on curbs, or holding my friend’s hair back

in the grimy fraternity house bathrooms, or sitting on couches

with the weight of a boy’s arm resting on my shoulders.

The heat of a hand on my knee also serves well to distract.

 

By Sunday morning I remember.

The lack of you punches holes in me–

the stomach, the lungs, the chest, cut clear through.

How long will you make me live without you?

I reread the poems. I itch for the phone.

I think your voice could cure the hangover, could heal

the wounds you left all over me when you took yourself away.

I prepare my papers for tomorrow.

 

Every week I think the days will change.

The pattern will change. It will change.

I will change. I keep writing.

August Baby

We went walking through the arboretum

at the end of our last summer together,

admiring the plants as they inhaled

and exhaled in the August heat, caught

up in the squint of eyes in deep slant sunlight

and the simple solace of being palm to palm.

Through slats of honeyed light and shade

I saw motion in the flattened grass up ahead,

beneath the scabbed branches of a dogwood tree.

The gentle fidget took the form of a baby bird,  

damp with bluish feathers, fallen

or pushed from its nest somewhere above.

It looked skyward through the slit

of its narrowed eye that bulged, half shut

and dark, like a bruise from its head.

The repeated shrug of a broken wing

almost raised it from the dirt, but could not

shake the ants, which crawled on over its body,

feelers prodding at the soft, bald places, unbothered

by the shudder of a fast infant heart beat below.

What do we do? I asked. I let go of his hand.

I dropped to my knees and watched

the ants stutter over the bird’s skin.

The chest rose and fell, as if moved by a tiny

accordion breathing silent music inside.

I felt his hand on my back and heard

his mouth saying I don’t know and more

people came to watch the slow show

and none of them knew what to do, either.

I ached, I ached at nature’s strange patterns,

the helpless gape of the bird’s open mouth,

the simple origami of his fingers

when they folded into mine, the lines

of light and shadow drawn in the blades

of grass. The flesh beneath the feathers

was as pink as sherbet. It looked like it had been born

that day, a summer baby that would not see the brisk

umber evenings of fall.

I had never seen a thing so young.

And still we left it as we found it, alone

with the sunlight, and the birdsong, and the breeze.   

 

For Silent Ear

I wonder what you do now at night,

at the height of the very hour

when heavy violet used to hit

us in the eyes

and drove us into the arms

of one another. We were so

generous with mouths

and music, food

and words.

To you I gave

myself away

with every kiss

and conversation.

I imagined you

were collecting the sweetest

pieces of me, storing them

in some deep vault

to be savored later,

when it came time

for remembering.

But in the blue arch of my dream

I saw you burying them

in the backyard,

like a dead pet.

I felt the dirt slap

again and again

on the parts of me

that I thought you swore

you would hold dear.

The space between us

grew darker, denser.

The dirt rained down.

I heard it like a thousand

hands applauding,

deafening, deafening. 

In the hour of dreams

Tired in the hour of dreams

when clock hands slow to hold each other

and cigarette smoke unwinds

blue signatures in the air

Warm in the embrace of sunlight

the ground begs change

uproots itself from winter’s sorry smile

and turns its back to the sky

until April unfolds flowers

in places I thought life would never

grow again.

Watching the light slip out of the room.

I have been lying in bed all day since the dream

ended, waiting for it to begin again. The silence

that gathers in the room sounds like your name.

 

My head full of dreams my mouth tastes like wine

left over from the lips that I kissed last night.

Vines curl around your throat. Blue starlight filters in

from the outside, falls in stripes across the floor.

 

In the dark my room begins to smell like you.

My heart crows, my insides wilt, I know you are not here.

The dream must have begun again, an invisible bridge

crossed without my knowing. Classical music waltzes in.

 

The stars look cold and small, smoldering in their solitude.

One eye open, one eye shut, half the brain wakes and walks

in small circles, cycling the corners of the room. The other half

sighs, calculates your scent, allows the hand to touch a ghost. 

2-8-13

I think that this is the time of year to be sad.

The thin light, the frail dustings of snow.

Everyone is sick with something, love or death, a lack of magic;

it shows up everywhere on the body:

gathering under the eyes,

cracking the bottom lip,

softening and scratching the voice like strep.

I am sick with you,

sick without you;

somehow I finally understand

and it seems so unfair that it should happen for us this way,

staggered, at different times, on opposite sides of the coin.

Soul mates is a heavy phrase. I am afraid that you cannot

take the weight. Pain and love. Single syllables.

Sharp and poignant both, like shined knives. We had to set

our time aside, and it was like breaking a bone

just to watch it heal.

Ghazal

Lips spit out syllables, mouths meld

around words. It feels good to say dirty words

sometimes. The dirtiest word I know is your name.

 

“There’s a criminal escaped from jail,” he says. Mug shot mug shot

flip the channel, mug shot again. Black and white. Some numbers.

A man’s face, two eyes like shallow holes. “Al Palmer. Some name.”

 

They had made the appointment together and had thought

long and slow about the unwinding of it all. They had made it

together, but she went alone to tell the receptionist her name.

 

Cars night traffic wet roads reflecting light shiny and black

slicked like oil a sea of shadows shatters into blinding bumpers

tires leave a dead dog on the yellow line with no name.

 

We met somewhere in the dark; a poorly lit alley, a smoky basement,

the bouncer’s shadow. I forget. I let him touch me and bathe my skin in the

basin of him mouth. Soft animal sounds. Skinny hips. I forget his name.

 

Graveyard graveyard, a place where time slows, souls suspended

like insects trapped in amber. Storm clouds bruise an old October sky.

One headstone stands slated, anonymous; rain erased the name. 

The Dream of the Dance Floor

My tequila lover,

I first saw you through the earthquake shakes

of the heart rumbling music that night.

I thought it was my own thirsty

heart doing the work, but

I thought wrong, I saw you

and I saw you

and my mind still loops back

to the picture of you–

tall, slouchy, patchy in splashes

of neon light and holding a drink

and drinking and dancing

and touching, me touching you,

I think this is how it went.

Our bodies kissed but not our

mouths and my face swam

in the pupil of your

eye as it spun, searching,

ravaging my features

for some echo of the girl

you had once dreamed of

meeting on a dark dance floor.

But I knew, you see, I knew that

I was not the girl of your drunken dreams,

no matter what you told me.

the dream of the living

Every day, every moment, without knowing it,

You dream the dream of the living.

You yearn to piece yourself together,

To turn halves and quarters and eighths into wholes,

To fit the myriad parts of yourself one to

Another, like some puzzle of traits and attributes

That when complete will spell the perfect version

Of a you, glimmering, shiny and wet like a fish.

You will be what you always wanted,

How you always envisioned yourself,

Golden and pirouetting like a miniature

Ballet dancer atop a chiming music box.

You know that you are now but a fraction of

What you could be, that you are just

Unmolded clay, a lopsided face, a chuckle

Instead of a laugh, a head of unbrushed hair.

To dream the dream of the living is a cozy, easy thing,

As natural and latent as breathing, or moving.

To dream the dream is to keep your head down.

But what should happen if you were to raise your head,

To look your own quivering reflection in the eye,

To acknowledge that maybe the hair looks better a mess.