Why save something so sad

I wish I could turn invisible but
I have to wear my pajamas and
show up at your doorway crying,
three in the morning, full of shame
and wishing I could give you
something more worthwhile
for your time. And you say, "I hate
to see you upset," like I hate to see
the sky grey on Halloween and like
I hate other things that I haven't
learned yet because I don't know
myself in this place or anywhere really.

The Mathematical Language of Cats

On the night we met in the studio, the open window

sang late summer love songs to the purr of the street.

Honestly, you intimidated me: the coolest girl in school.

All I could think to say was, "You remind me of someone else."

As you laughed you set your cigarette to smoking

and handed me a beer off the sill; we waited. 

That winter, you went into the convenience store while I waited

on the sidewalk, warming my hands in the glow of the windows.

My brain reeled from the drink and the cigarettes you'd smoked

like you were trying to melt all the snow on Main Street,

like you'd burn enough matches to be somewhere else

where the wind wouldn't howl like cats on the way back to school.

The next summer we tried to grow up. I taught middle school

while you worked at the grocery store, read novels, and waited

for the boy you loved to treat you like someone else. 

But at night we could sit on the porch, eating dinner by the window

and watching the stray cats run the length of Oberlin Street.

We laughed through our self doubt, the cigarettes smoking

between your fingers just for the sake of watching them smoke.

Then the year when I slept on your couch, a year spent driving streets

and drinking tea in your family's kitchen after school,

a year that we wrote each other out of what we were waiting

for, a year that we sat in my living room with no windows,

and we never said what we meant, talked of anything else.

The truth is that every cat I've ever owned lives with someone else

now. It isn't that I don't love them, but they always dissolve like smoke

while my back is turned, onto the sills of other people's windows.

Eventually I knew I could never go back to teaching school.

I wonder what you do when we don't talk, whether you wait

for me to show up outside, howling like a cat in the street,

whether you remember that May-purple night on Oberlin street

where we ate dinner on boxes packed by someone else,

two people who couldn't be us. Or maybe you think of how you waited

for me to disappoint you by never getting tired of smoking

in your parents' attic even when we knew there was school

in the morning. Maybe you just sit, reading, in your window.

This summer, before I left for good, I parked on your street; we took up places and smoked

on the porch, each wishing outselves someplace else. You might teach school,

I am just waiting for what's next, while your cat curls on the sill of the open window.

August 23, 2016

The dogs burst forth from their cage only
to settle on the sofa: auburn heaps of
sleep, premonitory visions of autumn.
Somewhere here there are childhoods,
but having lived mine elsewhere, I see
only a quiet stretch of questions and
singularity like the whirring of a quilt being
washed again and again in another room's
laundry.

Vacant

I. When we returned to the house, spiders had shored up the entrance.

His fingers tore through their handiwork, mouth opened: "Ah, just there,"

a round yellow pearl beneath his bootheel and then key in lock, opened.

II. Having been to the roof, he tells me there are sparrows nesting in the attic

and counts the obituaries he's read since last winter, "She was only fifty-two.

How many years do I have left?" His eyes search heaps of grey insulation.

III. Under the rotting garage, tree roots have slithered and heaved their way upward.

Squirrels are tunneling in under the eaves. "They'll get in eventually," he laments,

recounting.

IV. The basement is dry and full of empty corners, propped up pine, a century's

carvings, and a rodent's beginnings of electrical fires to come. In the backyard 

someone has placed clusters of smooth golden stones, and the plants grow.

Sublimation (June 30th)

It was Spring and I was fourteen when I learned

the word "catharsis," a word like a flower bud.

Later, seventeen and wreathed in symbols, it

was a pair of pretty eyes sinking to the bottom

of a prettier river. But tonight, it's my car, open

windows, the radio (was it on or off, each was

worse than the other), the illegal parking space 

across from your parents' house, the sudden 

knowledge that I could not contain my feelings.

To stare face first into the sublime is to confront

terror, to lose oneself in the torrential swell of all, 

become only waves. This isn't what we want,

better a seashell, something to hold to the ear 

and listen to the hush of distant times, at most

a map stitched from longing and struggle.

The truth: it is my smallness that allows these
floods to throw my slivers of floatsam about
the surf, but it is my smallness that ties me
to you. I am no more a masterpiece than
a photograph is a painting, than a leaf is a tree,
than a memory is a memoir. And yet, I am here,
my car with open windows, the thrum of silent
radio, and the never ending scratching in the
insufficient cage of my ribs. There is greatness
in this world and now this thing inside of me
can feel it.

Four lines for July in West Michigan

Cherry pits, a basil plant on the window sill
in a pot a size too small. I ring my eyes
with liner and try to shake my fear from
my shoulders like a moth shaking the dew.

Eggs at a Funeral

"I've heard that the woman made wonderful deviled eggs,"

you tell me on your hazy afternoon porch as I alternate

between sniffing the breeze and sipping iced tea, "but,

at her funeral, the eggs weren't very good." We watch

a cherry red rock mite navigate my fingertips and plan

what we'll be with 800 miles wedged between us.

When we met, I had brighter hair and you had less 

tattoos and we ate instant ramen with ribbons of yolk
swirled in it, shared pop culture discoveries, smoked 
cigars on your roof, exchanged stories about love. 

The human condition of binary thought: With an end

in sight, who can resist a brief sojourn to the beginning?

Better to ferment a memory, crystallize a moment,

eulogize in photographs and words, document, preserve.

Today, through the kitchen windows, the tips 

of asparagus fronds catch in the grey wind.

Inside, we scoop custard from cracked shards 

and weigh out salt and spices. You fill a jar

with raw beets and boiled eggs; covered

with vinegar, they hiss softly as we talk about

the future until the dissolving of their shells

bursts our attempts at the unnecessary seal.

The Cave (You Can Always Go Home)

Another side of the same coin I keep forgetting

to bring you when I come out to curl up in the

shelter of my nostalgia. Almost seven years and

what I've learned is that I am the existential crisis

that swells up in me like a rain speckled wind

through the streets of Worcester, Massachusetts.

Once, I felt every detail of this place etched into me.

I ran the streets at night, alone, hopped the fences,

scrawled "ART WITHOUT SHAME" on the factory

walls. Malt liquor and porches, ping pong balls and

poisoned mouse holes, poetry and power lines. 

What there is now... a book with the same title
and the names all changed, shadows identified
by muscle memory, ghosts that speak in Latin
and don't wait for a response. Here, in this place,
in this moment that I think has happened before--

Yes. It has happened before:

We laugh the clock around, sip from the bottle,

delay the inevitable. In the dark we stand, brazen,

on the roof of our mutual alma mater, scraped

and scratched with trespasses, and drink

the yellow lights of the city, breathing vapor trails

and avoidance. I am not me, yet I will always be

this, and when we wake, it will be with aching

backs and a void within us: black like

the summer night and drunken with stars.

Fractals

"Not to go all postmodern on you, but

that's assuming that there's such a thing 

as a stable or defined self." ES, June 25, 2016

I.

You are a fractal burst, an ever-spinning gyre. 

The wild blueberries are still hard and green,

but it is summer. Dusk sifts downward, pollening

the landscape. Woodsmoke, tobacco, pine.

II.

We perch atop the lichen, so exposed
that songbirds stop our speech. In the hum
that follows, we compare notes on art
and humanity, our minds rushing in our ears.

III.
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer--
Flicking filters into the underbrush, I come home
with singed fingers, then watch the fireflies
speak in fractals, floating in loops in the dark.

The Life Cycle of a Star

They say I could only sleep when wrapped in your arms.

I was small, chocolate eyed and wide mouthed, and

I soaked in every warm thing just to pour it into you: 

skinned knees, heartaches, and flushed fears turned

movie nights and popsicles and what once was truth. 

When you told me of your life before, it was always

exotic lands and brash bouts of bravery, laughing,

lithe, and full of light, a novel of novelties. No man

nor city, nor night could hold you. You were California 

sun made solid, lipstick and perfume and 

I believed in you. But--

there are things I could not see with a sunbeam

for a mother: The way you can only glow if 

you have someone to burn. The way you shrink,

terrified, in the promise of darkness. The way you

will always choose supernova, even if I wrap you

in every shred of leaf and bough I've grown

for you. The way I can only watch you do it

from a million miles away until my tears soak

all the fields of this scorched earth, knowing

that the California sun, all lipstick and light,

it hasn't shone for years, only slipped silent

through space too slowly for me to stop.

Electric Ghosts

In the crowded restaurant, we eat fried capsicum and watch each other's eyes:

"Beauty is something that helps you understand the world outside of you;"

cups of tea sit in puddles of crimson oil on a black resin tabletop,
your chopsticks clatter to the floor, I remember something I know is lost.

Later, drinks, and later, thunder. Lightning forks over the city and
we don't so much "duck from doorway to doorway," but
"march through the streets," arm in arm and silent with understanding.

I am made of shared cigarettes and windowless drives, mirrors

wrapped in soft scarves, the promise of fireflies, eternally ephemeral.

You are steam on summer sidewalks, an echo in the chambers 

between my ribs, electric flash of photons and feeling.

Lost Time Leading Up to My Twenty-Ninth Year

I.

When last my eyes were open, I was twenty three and most everything was the same.

At twenty five, my pens all ran their ink into the rivers and washed out four years in the flood,

days scattered and gathered and scattered again without thought or remembrance.

With no one to mourn, there are no new gravestones, only femurs bleaching in the grass.

II.

Somewhere, it was lost, a scrawled note clutched too long in numbed fingers.

Years slipped, wandering the pastoral, more of Bacchus than Diana. Abandoned,

blackened doorframes; within: only mouse paw and moth wing.

In absence, one's smallness flares. Bright beacon of something forgotten,

garish and brash enough to call out predators. Then the ripping and feeding.

Later, the ashes.

III.

What remains: a definition with no reference, a word with no mouth to speak it.

I am but a child asleep in the dirt with a knife in my fist. I still dream of ink, 

more often of teeth. At dawn, the ghosts soak into my flesh, new pink scars:

something has grown where nothing is living.

To call forth the hero is to conjure the dead, but the bones lay salted and burnt to dust.

Shutter Snaps and Smoke Rings

You tell me to take a mental picture so
I stand in the middle of Oberlin street,
bathed in egg yolk sodium streetlight,
arms held in front of me, framing
two lean bodies between L-shaped hands
and I press myself into the shutter,
feel something inside of me close around
this place, fill the three of us with light.

Through the lens of time, I was young
in this place too. From separate balconies
we could sit and watch each other's ghosts
swallow summertime and smoke. On the roof,
the sky holds us close; any higher
and our electric skin would show stars.

But, we are built of soil and concrete,
singular, momentary creatures not made
for eternities. Like my memories, your home
smells of cobwebbed stairwells, cat fur,
burnt resin, swells of linoleum, clouds
of fruit flies, mountains of spent glass
and aluminum. We once were seeds,
but now this land is rich for growing
and so we do.

Springtimes

Like coming home from a night of drinking,
out in the still air of late June, smelling like
Worcester triple-decker porches, all beer
and pomade and the corners of living rooms.
Like cranking up your car stereo; the blurred
moment of backseat, mix CDs, sharpies.
Like sediment.

Like the town pool at night when you took
all those photographs with the people you knew
you would always trust but wouldn't always
speak to. Like the barn that you painted, like
the house that he pressed you to while crickets
screamed wild in the grass, your blood rushing,
hungry, in your ears.

Like Allston in the summertime, all crust
punks and tattoo parlors. Like creamsickle
vodkas and soft mouths and quiet. Like pasties
and panties and punk rock and pride in moving
as much as anyone. Like being most still.

Like the echo chamber of the social network,
the still closing of a door in another part
of a house that is not yours. Like tortilla chips
and learning your own scent again, like journal
pages and digital graveyards.

Yes, like that.

The Triangle at Edison Green

I think that you are me sometimes,
a sentence without end, but two
beginnings. We two, sprung
from forgotten bottles left
to bead with condensation
on faux marble, faces matched
like twin photo frames, shaking
on the plaster walls.

Phantom siblings, I grew up too.
Triple deckers and the sounds
of other people's feet, conversations
on the internet, shared orders
of french fries, grades, and novels
about dystopian futures. Now
we live our old journal entries,
while our parents age. We hide
our embarrassment and feel
the things we do not say through
the decade between us.

Tonight our shoes slap the sidewalk
in another city where we are both
from and are not from. The trees
shake the rain and we gather speed,
because the minutes move quickly
and we want to move with them.
We are more than ghosts who visit
the memorial in the triangle
at Edison Green and I think we both
might know the ends of all the sentences,
but just like you can't write
down your thoughts, I can't make
myself more brave.

The dream was about a dog.

The dream was about a dog that was a person that had died in a long ago war. The dog was a ghost too, like an interpretation of its original. It was older than anyone left in the known world, but it couldn't die. When it was mortally wounded, it would disappear. To make it reappear, you had to activate a piece of white quartz that the spirit was tied to, using blood or saliva. I discovered all of this bit by bit in the hollowed out belly of an old mansion in the European countryside where a group of us lived. The stone was found on a beach on the way to this shelter during the exodus that followed the oil fires. Maybe I should fill you in on that first.

After the 2024 global economic meltdown when the "terrorists" set fire to the world's oil stores, those with power seized what they could and ran. Former government officials, along with their financial backers who managed to get away, took everything they could carry, including engineers and scientists. Left with little in the way of order or technology, countries imploded. Standard forms of ground, air, and sea transport were rendered obsolete, most being too heavy to be moved easily without the help of fuel. Some of the more organized gangs gathered flammable materials and attempted to rig up alternate fuel sources, but infighting and competition from other gangs only led to further destruction.

Now, in the year 2045, there was a new war. Every human of fighting age that could be rounded up by the feudal lords was sent to a 24 hour training in what was left of the jungles of Vietnam. We were told only to bring one bag of gear, which we were forced to scrounge from the rubble of the cities, if we were fast enough not to be caught by street gangs.

We were not to bring animals, but surely the enemy battle droids, owned and run by the terrorist militia, made up entirely by former world leaders, billionaires, and their kidnapped scientists, wouldn't be able to sense a single quartz pebble tied to some ectoplasm...

The night before we were to leave, the dog and I were practicing battle drills in the basement tunnels beneath the old mansion walls. It was warm here and no one could hear the echoes of her barks as she lunged at me over and over again. She was a black, English shepard and she did not speak, but she knew what I needed at times. I had become overly reliant on her, I knew, but with little to rely on now, I could not help but to become attached. I knew there was something of a human in her, but I'd known humans with animals in them too.

The small, rough chunk of quartz was lodged between my lower gums and the inside of my left cheek, where I had become accustomed to carrying it throughout the day and night. Recently, I had become troubled by strange dreams of fire and gunshots, though even this was not particularly unusual. What was unusual were the voices. The others never heard them, but I knew the dog did.

All at once, the dog's ears pricked up and her legs seemed to melt into the long shadows on the floor. I waited for the voices to start up again, but within moments, I heard instead the wail of our alarms. The droids were attacking in the night. We would have to leave earlier than anticipated.

We boarded the boats silently in the blackness, knowing that a shift of the reflective coverings that shielded our body heat from the droids' sensors could be potentially catastrophic. What the other civilian soldiers, most shaking in the ankle deep water around their feet (both from cold and fear), didn't hear was the laughing. And at once I knew, it was him: the man that was once the dog.

I had believed that my finding the dog was a great boon, as the dog had proven loyal, steadfast, fierce, and gentle. The others in the mansion had become accustomed to her comings and goings and they shared a kind of wary trust with her. However, it appeared that these qualities were at odds with the original creature, at least insomuch as he was now. His words were arrogant, boastful, and most of all racist and horrifically rude. The dog ghost itself, though aware of the man's voice, did not change its behavior when he chose to speak, only listened intently until he went silent again. When the laughing ceased, she dropped her head to my lap, sighed heavily and went translucent, her eyelids showing through to the hollows where her living eyes would be.

Our first night in Vietnam, I had pulled watch, as was to be expected. The others believed the dog to be good luck. Here, we did not have to worry so much about hiding our heat signatures because the radiation storms in the upper atmosphere were such that no sensors could be trusted. My limbs were beginning to weigh me down with sleep when a cracking branch woke me.

The dog was returning from her night vigil, the sun still a flaming glow on the horizon that might have been mistaken for fires if there was anything left in the east to burn. She had brought something back, and it glinted between her jaws. Dropping it at my feet, I could see it was a shell casing, rusted through on one side.

Before I touched it, I knew it would bring trouble, because suddenly his words rang out louder than usual. The blank spaces of missing eyes in the dogs head widened at the instant my fingers scraped the wet metal and he was there. His boot kicked out at the dog who yelped and vanished in a puff of smoke. Before I knew what I was doing, I spat the quartz into my palm alongside the casing, silently pleading for the dog to return. Red streaks ran down my wrists into my shirt cuffs.

The man smiled and adjusted his helmet. One of the other civilian soldiers, awakening in the dawn, cried out in fear. The man was dressed in a manner the likes of which we had only heard about in stories, the fires having decimated the majority of earth's books. His clothes had once been green, but now were almost black with blood and in his hand was something none of us had seen for a long time: a gun.

"Where did you send her?" I breathed, realizing that the quartz was still pressed into my bloody palm.

"Well, that bitch sure ain't necessary now," he drawled out, and as he closed his mouth, the yellow of his teeth shone in the morning light.

Then I woke up.

Haikus for Winter Dreams

Oh to be buried
neath layers of maritime
snowflakes and seagrass,

The beaches at once
white hot and riddled the same
as a bent knuckle.

I dream of black dogs,
quartz crystal, and Vietnam,
wake to only cold,

chase footprints in shades
of blue and white, but never
find what morning took.

Here, we salt the streets
and wait for our loneliness
to bloom when spring comes.

The Headless Horsemen: Doeeyed

How dare you. How dare you do this to me, make me your ideal, your idol, your perfect seventeen-year-old romantic daydream. You don't know anything about me. Don't know that I've played this role before, in the drowsy truth between the sad dreams of my own youth. I have meant too much to people -- to men -- who have given me much too little in return. You, like they, do not have a right to my joys and fears and passions, because that is what this is about. My body, my face, my eyes, my lips, they're overtalked and dull and they were never at the heart of what you wanted anyway.

How dare you smile that smile as I mention Leopold Bloom. I am not available to you as some kind of psychic reflection of who you wish you could be. No part of me wants you to intellecutally relate to me. Your martyrdom is sickening, gut-wrenching, embarrassing.

Stop reading books that I've mentioned. Stop recommending bands that I'd like. Stop raising your eyebrows like we're sharing some kind of perfect secret. Nothing about this is perfect. Nothing here is good. If it could have been, it's too late. You and I made our decisions and your vascillating behavior disgusts me. Offends me.

Christmas Two-Step Cooking Lessons - Rewrite from January 2016

Today was a Harry and Hermione day and so we made Chinese,

talked about thinking, and played Blood and Roses 

until the mirrors of our idealism flared. I afforded myself 

a few lapses into the childhood of my language,

trying to remedy current events with a warm glow of nostalgia.

Here in this den where I feel comfortable and vulnerable,

my velveteen ears tucked beneath paws and feet,

even my failures are only small failures. 

Outside, the snow sugared the landscape and I was at once 

every wintered version of myself, doubled in the polished chrome 

of my ice-sugared innocence where that greater thing lives,

curled like a molten promise at the core of all our seed-like planets, 

hung in the great evergreen boughs of the human universe

where we can reflect the lights we can manage to catch.