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Poetry


Dumpster Balloons


As I opened the dumpster
to empty the week’s trash, birthday balloons rose
to greet me, as if bonded to the lid,
charged with anticipation.
I scrambled to shut them down
yet they kept rising, obedient to unseen forces
brazen they squirmed toward
the black open air.
How vast the continuum of emotions
permissible each moment on earth.
A Ukrainian couple proclaims their vowels
while dressed in army fatigues,
flower petals decend upon the same ground
pierced each night with metal-cased shells.
Shirtless boys giggle while dribbling a ball
across the dusty floor of refugee camps.
A celebration for being alive,
a witness to one more orbit,
even with the hurt, the bitterness,
the weight we carry.

Wilting Winters

I ponder on the idea of great fields,

            Petals falling from yellow roses,

                        How their stems wither upon departure.

The winter mornings resist blooming,

            Dandelions carried away until spring,

                        Frost creeps over their corpses.

Their memories live in the depths of summer,

            November air fades the tint,

                        And no small hands

Reach for them to carry inside before dinner,           

            As mom cooks over the oven,

                        And dad comes home too late.

The grass of the fields never stops swaying, even

            As the air begins to dim

                        And flowers bend.

An Elegy to Waterproof Mascara

Don’t cry, they tell us.
But if you must,
be sure to look pretty doing it.
Emotional discretion now comes in a tube
so you can paint on indestructibly perfect coats,
little gatekeepers to lock away the evidence that you cried.
And should you let it out,
you risk confining yourself to the caricature of the Crying Girl,
(Streaky-faced, probably sitting in a bathtub somewhere).
Because as everyone knows, there is a fine line between
Sentimental
and
Emotional wreck.

But moderation was never my strong suit,
I am a floodgate and never a trickle.
A saltwater plumbing problem to be solved,
In airports,
During movies,
And, God forbid, even funerals –

“Don’t cry so much,”
says my grandmother’s oldest friend, half kindly, half fiercely,
pulling me to her chest to muffle the sound of my grief.
Because pain should only ever leak from us, not pour.
Because an open wound cannot possibly be worn with dignity –
is it any coincidence that the words “hysterical” and “hysterectomy”
have the same Greek root?
For every woman who wears her heart on her sleeve,
there is someone handing her waterproof mascara.

I think about those ladies in the Ancient world,
how they used to weep for hours on end,
and I wonder why we ever stopped.
Who caged those oceans inside us, deciding they were not our stories to tell?

So today, I am twisting the lid back on the tube,
nailing it shut and lowering it into the ground.
I am pulling the cork off my bottled up tears
and using them to water the roses I will lay
on the grave of every heartache I have ever buried:
Every raw emotion I have ever apologized for.

Jump Then Fall

I think it’s funny you chose a cheetah print notebook with a hot pink stripe down the middle. On the cover, you wrote your name. Harry. Your lines and curves in each letter are crooked, shaky like my hands as I flip it open and thumb through the pages. Your rich brown thoughts poured on each page, stained by the tobacco on your fingers. I imagine you, sitting on the left end of the couch, journal teetering on the rounded arm, a Pilot G2 in hand. Names, a doctor’s phone number, the bank’s phone number, medicines you were taking, why you were taking them, dreams you had—all written in slanted black ink on cream pages. I hold a portal to your thoughts in my hands and every time, with no ounce of hesitation, I jump in.

Resident Itinerant Drifter, With Apologies to the Yearning in my Chest for a Place to Hang my Hat

I. Impostor’s Summer

I brought no pictures to hang on the wall.
Before I left, I cut my hair
and saw for the first time a woman whose body
I could stand to walk around in, a woman sure
of herself, so I know I’m not the girl in the pictures.
I try to draw cold, hard lines between here and there.

Besides, I don’t need the pictures:
the woods outside my window are my father,
the moonlight my mother, the books I read my siblings.

In the sticky heat of July afternoon, caught
in a rare moment of levity, I pen a letter
and send it home — no reply.

I am no bird — wayfarer, woodland creature,
woman I am, nothing more, or less —
and no net ensnares me. But I want to float
up and out of myself and into the song
of the bluebird. Tu-a-wee.

I paint a picture for my mother, the real one,
and she hangs it in the bathroom in the house
I grew up in. Home? No, that isn’t it, at all.

II. Autumn Untethering

Thanksgiving is late this year. The trees
are nearly bare
except for the maples
burning a full, deep red
like the flame of a phoenix before it turns
to ashes,
and the crumbling stretch highway to my parents’ house
is a tired, sweeping immensity that I can spread myself out across
with no definite shape until I reach the horizon
and then some
or disappear entirely, unraveling like the seam
of a well-worn sweater,
trailing all the places I’ve been.

At supper, I am either full or starving depending on who asks,
and we sit in rigid chairs and try to not let ourselves spill into each other.

I am searching for some semblance of settling but there are only corridors
to the spaces in between the spaces in between, pieces of myself kept in boxes
lining the hallways — for continency’s sake, in case the next rendering of myself
doesn’t pan out.
One of these days, I’ll have to take them with me when I go, pile every last one into the trunk of my car and drive back down the highway to God knows where—I try to draw cold, hard lines between here and there.

  Everything around me is dying
or making itself scarce, 

shedding
the pieces that won’t make it through winter.

III. T.S. Eliot in January

If I go out bare-skinned, sleepwalking into the morning,
the bite of the air feels almost like being held, almost,
if I stand stock-still and clench my fists, cleave
to January’s shaky breath, clutching it between my fingers.

“My whole life I’ve been lonely,”
said to no one in particular,
and I am answered with the echoing steps
of my own feet on stone streets. I keep my eyes fixed there¬—
to look another in the eyes is to admit to the vacancy
of my own gaze (to have squeezed the universe into a ball,
to roll it towards some overwhelming question).

At six years old, maybe seven, I’d walk beside the fence during recess, following it back and forth, eyes fixed before my feet, humming. Would it have been worthwhile to have kept my gaze forward, to face the weight of the eyes on me? I try to draw cold, hard lines between here and there.

On my birthday in an empty house, I sit at the piano
and pick at a melody I thought I’d buried.
(That corpse you planted last year in your garden, /has it begun to sprout?)

Winter has a way of smothering the bones
so that by its end they’re almost like that of a bird —
hollow and frail, brittle under pressure but apt for flight.

IV. Spring — or Recurring Apocalypses

While it’s still windy, before the heavy heat comes,
I linger a while longer in the bright quiet of the morning
to knock the frost off the words I buried alive last year.
(Prayers? Confessions? No, prospective longings
waiting to take root).

    I dreamt I was in Eden the day before the world 

fell apart. Mine was the first sin, a temptation
not of taste or knowledge but of ownership,
the gripping illusion that I could claim a garden
as my own, to draw cold, hard lines between here and there.

The pines are teetering, laughing and screaming
in the wind, and I wish I was one of them.
I could stay here, plant myself on the forest floor
and see what takes. But I am in the business of vagrancy.

V. Incarnation

The last summer before I move away, I am watching myself
from the outside, putting all the people I’ve been into neatly packed boxes.
There are no cold, hard lines, only streams of water flowing into each other.

I pack the pictures, trade something nebulous
for the palpability of the strange tragedy of home
and the warm advent of body.

Perpetuity

Noun

the state or quality of lasting forever I wish I remembered the last time I rode in your car. I do remember other rides. Climbing into the cramped backseat of the ‘96 Sentra—always behind the passenger’s seat, never the driver’s—ingrained in me to always buckle up first. The resounding click of the belt locking into place and I could relax, slumping back against gray seats, the fabric like soft fuzz on the skin of a peach. Mema hated to drive so you were always the one behind the wheel, the one to always reach a hand back, crossing through patches of sun warming my legs until you found me. A knee. A calf. A hand. The small fingers of a child curling around your doughy skin, aged with wrinkles and rough work but always gentle with me. Maybe it’s better I don’t remember the last car ride with you where your eyes were failing, tires crossing the double yellow, your mind shaded by clouds. Instead I am six, seven, eight years old, forever safe in the bubble of your blue car, sunshine bathing my legs and your hand clutching mine.