you
painted
my head
white
soft hands
planted roots
on my scalp
spring warmth
cherry blossoms
in your laugh
petals
on our tongues
(originally published in Gnarled Oak, Summer 2017)
2016
My Smartphone’s Fingerprint Sensor Cannot Detect Me
Do not forget me:
I have struggled to break
through my own absence
of field. Let a helium balloon
float to where it disappears.
We have not spoken
in years. The phone you gave
me I replaced to return
my sense of self-place. Still,
send me a signal you sense me,
and we will come to static
where we cannot hear
how we wish to be heard
but we will know
we are there.
(originally published in CultureCult Magazine, 2017)
Maggie
After you invited me to your brother’s jazz
concert you said you liked me too much
and I couldn’t handle that, the thought
of our togethered trombone slide into an infinity
accompanied by spacetime’s deep sound.
I avoided you the only way I knew how:
my absence for your words a dangling CO2.
This, another failed online dating experience,
a week and (it was electric for a time) the zap
of each other in a cold January condo over and
over, a thousand volts then whole note rest,
a singed week’s limb removed by blizzard wind.
(originally published in Postcard Poems and Prose, 2017)
Warmth
I want to fold the dog
into an origami pipe
smoke it
and forget this
was ever a dog
later I will want
this dog nestled
next to me
asleep
fire lingering
instead I
fold creases
into blanket
wrapping
out the cold
I can’t shake
but for what
it takes
to sleep
through dawn
(originally published in Succor, 2017)
A Date with Doubt
You look around the room
and rate singles from one to ten
in terms of melancholy
but don’t know
how to rate yourself–
Pacific waves flow through
you almost drown
in the sea of your thoughts–
the scisms between pen and mirror,
heart and mind, these are thieves
who will lie to you ‘til the Greyhound
leaves for Cincinnati at 11:30.
Until then we watch superheroes do bad
stand-up comedy in the conference room
at the new Mikey’s, eating mushroom pizza
with too-hot sauce. Bass pounds from the stage
so loudly we walk to 16-Bit next door
to drink water and pretend we are drunk,
our mouths rocketships exploring the universe
of each other– the rotation of stars
confused with physics. In the end all you want
is chocolate cake. Your blue eyes curve away
in that soaring flyball-to-left way. The way
you sway me back to simpler times
when buying CDs was a holy act
of personal preference
and I stayed sealed on a shelf in plastic,
waiting to give the world my music.
(originally published in Zingara Poetry Picks, Summer 2017)
An Oncoming Train
We waddled over grates along train tracks
on a bridge above the river until a trembling
warned of what would come: soon, one of us
will leave the other. Running to safety in flip-
flops, it would not matter how it felt when
we held each other after stumbling off rail into
field because you said you finally found a thing
I’m scared of: the in-between of tracks. Heart
beating odds with brain. As the train passed,
horns blaring, you spoke something I could not
hear when we hugged as each car blurred forward
until we became a quiver, a silence, a kiss of
faded smoke dragging steel beyond the hills.
(originally published in Four Ties Lit Review, Fall 2017)
Weekends
You said it was your best birthday weekend ever.
You sang on stage in a large bar surrounded by friends.
When we turned our bodies into rhythm, pulsations,
and streamlines, the physical elements of snow and rain–
of kisses outside in blowing wind, and people honking,
winnowing by, I wondered about unicycle riders, the way
they wheel tall along sidewalks, straight-thin razor
cutting sound– their legs in cycled motions suggesting
let’s drag this out until we can’t
(originally published in Home Planet News Online, 2017)
Real Shit
We’re eating Thai food, like we were supposed to do yesterday,
and I tell you that spice level, I couldn’t handle but next I know
we’re walking through alleys shoulder-to-shoulder when you ask
when you gonna talk about the real shit? And we keep on, sun
dipping to avoid the real conversations and I know this box of Stella
in my hand isn’t strong enough to make me start, but in my house
there’s honey whiskey, and I ask if that’s real enough but no,
too much sweetness. We drink anyway, ice falling from freezer
to floor as I reach for Old Crow to hurry to some kind of real talk,
the kind we couldn’t find on our walk to Giant Eagle
but there are bonfires too hot for our hearts in the real world,
a tinder of paper and logs we decide not to learn the names of
and we’re drowning whiskeys, beers, and slow small-talk
telling each other about exes to the flame’s orange humming
and that’s real, I thought, but not real shit and so the hanging lights
are unplugged and we’re searching for stars through clouds of smoke
and we talk about how little we know, how far we want to go
but beside you those stars don’t seem so far and in the swirl
of darkness we kiss, realize that’s the real shit
until we open enough to tell each other.
(originally published in Cease, Cows, Fall 2017)
Alarm Clock
we woke from something beautiful (kissing
finally alone) only two hours of sleep when melodies
from the other room infiltrate our ears we wonder
where it is we want to take ourselves / where we can
believe in magic that isn’t ours / laying on a pull-out bed
with harsh spring coils like relying on the several bottles
we drank hours before to help us wake up honesty
(originally published in FORTH Magazine, Fall 2017)
My Ford Fiesta Gets Around Forty Miles Per Gallon
Wish we were as patient as my car.
To drive four hundred miles not
needing to stop. To go seven hours
over grayscale roads and want
to talk to you still after.
We drove a long way but got
stranded on the side of
a southern highway, scared
from too many October horror films,
from lasting even this long.
(originally published in CircleShow, Summer 2017)