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.