Single haiku for summer

Opened the A.C.
Layers of summer's sweat and
my grandmother's house.

Old poems in a new setting

I don't lie now, but
I said I didn't love you.
We'd never have stopped.

Facebook. You posted
on her birthday event wall,
"Making time at last."

We walked in blizzards
too, fleece hands held. The photos
are identical.

Crossing out plans with
you: more nostalgic than face,
voice, or poetry.

Phone calls. I still have
one of your voicemails. Mourning
is not optional.

Your hands have always
reminded me of birds, and
now I can't catch them.

Alliterative Allegory

With my chest all net,
what you drag must seem worthless.
A half-devoured dolphin,
more bone than breathing,
and riddled with roundworms,
rosettes of remembered teeth and tongues
and love, the color of dirty dishwater
and infants' fingertips.

I am all dorsal decay, slipped scales,
silvered silences, froth, fronds, and fintips.
A bottomfeeder's graveyard grotesque
of old flames, fondly drowned in my dread.

But you, with your hands,
tightly wound in the weft,
and she, with hers, turning twine
to recover the rest,
never set me to sinking,
drag me up on the deck.

My man at the maw
and my girl at the gut,
the two of you pull porpoise
from rot, wrench
cartilage from kelp,
    and as sun strikes your shoulders,
    she gasps, grasping the gulping gills
    of a puffer, pulled from the slickness of sea.

Its eyes the circles of sighs,
it flaps its tail at your fingers,
cradling its curve, and she sees it,
the way it sees her, and she breathes,
the way my net should, and all at once:

You are tide.
She is ocean.
I am fish, and
    I will never
        stop
            feeling.

Tree Buds and Afternoons

Nine or so years ago
my hands were stars,
convinced they were
waxed paper, folding
over and over,
like moth wings, bent
on shaking all their dust.

When I remember you,
there are smells, the way
spring smells, like apologies
and lamplight through early
morning blankets -- or --
there is a hum, like laundry
and the breeze in my skirts
-- or -- there is a glow,
like your fingers on my
grandfather's guitar,
like tinnitus, like the space
in your voice where my name
used to be.

Tell me again how to say
goodbye to something I
forgot instead of forgiving.
You were always under
something, the trees, my
shirt, a lie, and I never knew
you the way I wanted to,
the way you knew my hands,
the way my hands knew
your ribs so well.

Sonnet I (Petrarchan)

If all the world were softness of your arms
Then never would I need for comfort more.
The vastness all of sea and sky and shore
Turned calm, with serpent veins that swim, though harm

No creatures 'neath the milky film and form

Of skin that swells in shallow waves. The roar

Of torrents falling 'pon the land may pour
On ears of bird and beast, yet leave all warm.

For life without your forest glen of chest,
Should prove too harsh, too granite-like, too dark.
The silence there, devoid of heart in breast,

Too empty to sustain a shoot or stalk,

And missing lungs and breath, leave winds too stark
For me, now loving more, to live with less.

"A Girl Named A" - Part I

            A let out such a loud sigh as she snuggled into her bunk that L rolled her eyes and sighed back, melodramatically. A could almost feel her roommate’s criticizing stare from the other side of the tiny room, but she couldn’t make herself care much at the moment. Nothing had felt right since January, when the simple, clear life she had lived for centuries was ripped away from her. Sometimes, she still had dreams filled with the scratching of pens so loud she could lose herself in them, with the togetherness of language, warmer than any fire, with the comfortable solitude and singularity of articlehood.

            “Your brooding is so loud I actually can’t focus,” Lelayne exclaimed suddenly, her voice like little bells… aggravated little bells. “Would you please lighten up already?”

            A rolled over and watched her roommate’s face in the mirror on the opposite wall. Despite her protests, it didn’t seem like Lelayne was terribly distracted. Her slate grey eyes were locked onto her perfect oval face, one graceful hand sweeping wheat colored hair behind the tiny circle of her ear and the other painting her pouty lips a deep green. With her long limbs, slim frame, and seemingly endless hair, Lelayne always reminded A of the sea: beautiful, proud, and dangerous.

            “I can feel you looking at me,” Lelayne sneered, turning her emerald mouth into a gorgon’s sneer, “You know, it’s only four thirty and you’re in bed already. I hope no one ever finds out about this kind of stuff with you. If one person breathes a word of this to Dr. Wurden, you know…” She shrugged as if the possibility were none of her concern.

            A shuddered, “You know, L, most people would take that as a threat.” Her words were muffled twice, once by the thick blanket and another by her thick tongue which never seemed to obey her, but the way Lelayne stiffened at her real name proved that she had understood.

            “Lelayne,” the blonde girl seethed, drawing her shoulders up to her neck as if a single letter had dropped the temperature of the room. Whirling from the mirror, she spat, “And if that really was a threat, and if I were you, I wouldn’t be using any monosyllabic monikers for those of us who have moved. On. With. Our. Lives.”

            With a final sigh, A tugged the blankets from her face and arms and slid her feet out onto the brown Berber. “I am the shortest word in the English language. I am descended from the ox and the aleph and the alpha. I am the beginning. The beginning.” The mantra filled her mind with a comforting hum, but her heart wasn’t in it.

            “Anyway, dinner?” Lelayne asked cheerfully, the bells already returning to her voice as though they’d never left, and turned back to the mirror and her makeup once more.

            “I’m not sure If I’m hungry,” A replied, burying her right hand in the cloud of black curls that floated about her face. “Maybe I’ll just have some soup or something.” With this, a hint of a grin touched her face, brightening her eyes to an obsidian sheen.

            “God, you are so creepy sometimes. I’m going to fix my hair. Hurry up and put some clothes on, will you? And please, try to dress a little normal.” With another sweep of her hair and a click of the door, Lelayne seemed to evaporate into the hall, leaving A face to face with her new reflection.

            “Hey, weirdo,” she greeted herself, morosely, waving half-heartedly. Her reflection waved back like a human-sized smudge of dirt – at least that’s the way L described her. N always described her as chocolate; skin like cocoa, he said, but that might have had something to do with his obsession with the stuff. A didn’t think N had drunk anything other than chocolate milk and hot chocolate in his life, short as this incarnation of it was. A had a sneaking suspicion that chocolate might also have had something to do with N’s enormous crush on Cici too.

            A forced herself to her feet and tripped over to her dresser. She still didn’t understand why people like L – sorry, Lelayne – could so easily become accustomed to arms and legs, running and walking, while A still had trouble even enunciating certain words properly. Dr. Wurder claimed that speech and motor skill mastery were only a matter of time, but A found it endlessly infuriating to know over half of the words in the English, Latin, Spanish, French, and countless other languages and not actually be able to say them properly out loud. The irony was certainly not lost on her.

            She could hear voices in the hallway outside of the door, so she rushed through the awkward shedding of her pajamas and threw on her standard black t-shirt and black pants before messily ringing her eyes in black eyeliner. Thankfully her fingers seemed to be working moderately well today. The first time she’d tried applying the stuff – a gift from Lelayne – she’d almost blinded herself.

            “Are you coming or what?” Lelayne shouted from the hall, followed by a strange hissing, and A knew her friends were getting impatient. She gave her round face one more check in the mirror. Well, she wasn’t going to be winning any beauty contests, but it would have to do.

            Outside in the hall, the windows at the end of the dorm showed pink and orange over the tops of pine trees. The dormitories were actually the east and west wings of a repurposed hospital that Dr. Wurden bought years ago as an abandoned wreck and used thousands of dollars to slowly rebuild into something habitable. At least that was the rumor. There weren’t many facts about Dr. Wurden that anyone was sure of.

            “A!” N wasted no time in throwing his skinny arms around her neck and squeezing her until she thought she might pass out. “Did you finish your Egyptian homework yet? I felt like my arm was going to fall off, I swear. No offense, Djet,” he added to the dark boy standing quietly behind him.

            “No offenssse taken,” he hissed, his forked tongue slipping between the gap in his front teeth. Djet had attached himself to N after the first week of classes, when, in Alphabetic Evolution, he had learned that N had, in a way, come from him. He could just have easily befriended Jay, but when N asked why he’d been chosen instead of the taller, more athletic boy, Djet had replied, “He is too dessseptive,” and closed his bottom eyelids as if the topic were no longer up for discussion.

            The Egyptian kids weren’t like the Latins, Greeks, or Phoenicians. They weren’t much like the Koreans, Mongolians, or Thaanas either, though, A had to admit, she hadn’t had many opportunities to speak or interact with these or several other types of kids at the school.  A had discovered early on, while trying to ask directions of a very slight boy with a strange series of lines on his face, like a birthmark, that it was nearly impossible to communicate with kids from alphabets outside of her direct alphabetic evolutionary lineage. More often than she liked to admit, she sat in her Syllabic Studies class and silently thanked Dr. Wurden for not bringing any of the Syllabic languages here. She didn’t think she could stand feeling any more culture shocked than she already did.

             But the Egyptians, they were from an old alphabet, almost as old as the animals, and closer to nature, at least according to Dr. Sonja, the Egyptian teacher. Their alphabet was born for sacred purposes, and because of all of the use it got, all of the chanting and hushing that surrounded it in the early years, the Egyptian kids somehow inherited bits and pieces of this energy. “They aren’t gods,” Dr. Sonja told her Egyptian Studies students, “but they are closer to the grandness of the universe.” Most people thought Dr. Sonja was a little crazy, with all of her “grandness of the universe” talk, but A couldn’t help thinking that there was something grand out there. Something that connected users like Dr. Sonja and the other teachers, to the kids in her classes and dormitories, to the world, to nature, to the older things.

"Imagine you are 75 years old and you have just been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Looking back at your life, what do you think of it?"

X: "Mister, this is mad depressing! I don't wanna think about that!"

J: "Yeah, come on, man, don't torture us like that. I don't ever want to be that old. I want to die at the age of 40. That's like when you're starting to get old, right?"

K: "Whatever. I think I'm safe, but I'm sorry to say, once white people get old, they just get less and less resilient as they get older. They get sad, that's why they get put into nursing homes. We tried to put my grandmother in a nursing home and she said she better start packing all her guns too, because she's gonna go out shooting. But white people are just like less resilient. They stop being able to move around and stuff like they used to. That's the thing with some of us being field hands and some of us sitting around on our hands in our houses, it starts to be like a genetic trait."

J: "It's cause of all that white people food they eat. But not you though, Mister, you be eatin' like those platanos and beans and stuff, you be legit."

K: "Black people age like cheese. Cheese and fine wine, we get better with age, ----. You know Mr. Z, he's like 40. You wouldn't be able to tell he was 40."

J: "Look at Arnold Schwarzenneger, he's like melting."

K: "Look at Morgan Freeman compared to like Jack Nicholson. Look at Jack Nicholson, he looks depressing. He scares me. I bet you any amount of money he dyes his hair."

The lines of friendship

When people stop talking to you, there are a few lines that can be crossed. First is the courtesy line where it's like, "Hey, maybe your phone was eaten by a bear or you have amnesia and forgot we had like a ten year friendship, so I'm just calling to say hey! Miss you!"

Then there's the awkwardness line, where you're pretty sure they actually don't like you anymore or found out about that time you borrowed their shirt and accidentally threw up on it or something where it's like, "Hey, did I accidentally do something to you that you are upset about? Whatever it is, I'm sorry and I want to be friends again or maybe replace your shirt."

After that, you have options. You can pack up and go home and try to ignore your crippling social anxiety which has just been exacerbated to the point of believing you will die alone and that everyone who talks to you only pretends to love you while they ignore your hideous social defects and make new friends.

Or you can cross the stalker line, where you know for a fact that they don't like you, but you just can't let it go where it's like, "Hey. So I noticed you unfriended me on facebook two months ago and clearly haven't been getting my constant friend requests, so I figured a voicemail would do better, right? By the way, have you gone blind or something, because I totally saw you at mutual friend's house and spent like twenty minutes waving at you, but you'd never just ignore a friend like that, would you? No. Of course not. Because you're loyal. And disloyal friends usually die in my basement, painfully, alone, in the soundproofed box they never knew I installed because they were too busy ditching me for people they actually liked where no one can hear them scream. So anyway, hope you're doing well! Talk soon, yeah?"

Don't cross that line. You end up in jail, people don't really invite you to things anymore, it's unpleasant.

and i don't wanna use capital letters.

I just wanna wear my favorite torn up, safety pinned jeans, paint my nails black, chew up my fingers, listen to Finch and Dashboard Confessional (on a mixtape in my cassette player, of course), and write shitty poetry about loneliness and the enormity of beauty in the world. Anybody up for filched peppermint schnapps and seltzers? A few clove cigarettes? A Godard film? Meet me in the Old North Cemetery on Pantry Road in Sudbury. Wear a scarf, bring a camera, don't be alarmed when I show up sixteen.

Maybe afterwards we can do 95 on Rt. 2 with all the windows down and the music so loud we can't hear our laughter cracking out of us.

Okay, okay, and then you quote Rimbaud or Baudelaire or Rilke, and I'll quote Salinger, and we'll think we have everything all figured out, and we'll know that we finally found someone who really sees us for all of the other people's words we've memorized. That's what makes up a person, right?

Paint me a train station, cover me in subway tokens, tear open another hour, kiss me like there will never be another me or you or us or kiss or love or warmth or now. We have nothing but time, ennui, and the gaping maw of youth in which to fall. Do I feel alive because I am or because of the caffeine still coating our mouths? You are a cafe Americano and I've taken enough years of French to understand what that means.

This is not a Tarantino movie. It is not a coming of age novel. No amount of curse words or carousels will give us what we need on rainy nights in January, but we can do it all anyway: hire prostitutes just to talk about growing up too fast, watch sunsets until our eyes mirror the fading red ball on the horizon, plaster ourselves to the walls of social outings, feel things like they've never been felt before by anyone and scream them into ourselves until we really believe them.   

Tales from the Copy Room

"Why do you guys treat me different?"
"We don't treat you different."
"Yeah you do. I swear one time and I get kicked out. Other kids swear every five seconds and they never get kicked out."
"That's not true."
"Whatever. I'm just here until I get accepted at Voke."
"Well, they're not going to accept you with this kind 'a record."
"I don't have any kind 'a record. I have better grades than anyone else in that fucking room."
"What about a discipline record? You don't think that counts?"
"You wanna know where SPED kids go? You wanna know where they go?"
"No."
"You wanna know? They don't go nowhere. They go nowhere. None of those kids in that room are going nowhere."
*Silence.*
"I can't wait until lunch."
"You can't go to lunch until Mr. X talks to you."
"I don't fucking care. I hate him. He's mad slow. He talks slow. He's a fucking asshole."
"That's not true."
"It is true. I hate all 'a you teachers. You're fucking retarded. You think we're the retards, but we're not. You put us in that room all together and you just wait for us to fucking drop out. Well fine, I'll drop out. If you want, you can expel me, but I'm not doing this shit anymore."
"You can't go to lunch until you talk to Mr. X. He said you have to stay here."
"Well I'm definitely going to lunch, because I haven't eaten anything except those frickin' tater tots and a banana."
"Did you see the doctor about your nose?"
"No I didn't."
"When's that appointment?"
"I don't care. Don't talk to me."