Pretty big month for me!
The numbers are numbers, not dates.
My favorites here are 19, Familiar, and 15, This cold. See also my new standalone poem, Greasepaint, which combines two others from this month.
If you have something constructive to say about any of the pieces here:
20 — Boy
A new horizon melts
an old sun. The careful
learning of an unknown
heart, salt in the seafoam,
many textures thinly
dusted over with untouch.
19 — Familiar
Generation measured
by climber roses, a path made
by tweezers alone. A love more
honest in silence, distilled by
the many angles of space.
Backlit, busy hands flip
the room for the next scene.
A practice. A prayer.
18 — Girls Together
A name
embroidered trails
out of its frame. Stomach
turns a dam ledge and a
half life. Maybe in another
draft we
were girls together meeting
for the first time at the
craft station. None of this
would have happened.
You would have
been better at
holding scissors with your little
hands. I would have run faster.
For the-a-
time being.
17 — Breathe
Connect to center, click
to latch, pull to test. Finally,
finally, a new world shakes
the dust from its hair. Here
is my height back, a resting
heartbeat learned like
a finger trick to remember
the factors of nine.
16 — sweet thing
You whisper from
molten taillights, snaking
and snaking. I know,
sweet thing, I hear you.
I have and I hold you, speak
your name in my sleep.
At some point,
blue-hot core falls
back, obedient
to its own bootprints.
15 — This cold
Bright eyes, brown leather, a young
morning and its way of reaching
from the murk and haze. How not to lose
your grip in this cold--hard to know and
harder still to say.
It all counted, all of it.
I know you're good,
I know it even
when it's gone from your
eyes and stranger
to your hands.
14 — To Hold
After Li-Young Lee
So we're dust. In the meantime
I return these texts and calls,
birdseed, fabric weave, the bus
ride home to hold the same evening
I make from the evening every
evening with a new eye. Here there
is everything and nothing at all.
One day we'll lie down and not get up.
One day, all we guard will be surrendered.
Until then, we eat something warm
and we laugh and laugh. So often,
fear has led me to abandon
what I know I must relinquish
in time. For the moment,
we learn to be new every morning,
a gracious curiosity sewn
to these raw hearts.
13 — Gratitude Practice
An insistent forgiveness follows
me, this labor of screenprinting and
etching and cleaning, matter of
true fact. I am the love
I am given, the work
of real hands, what little
still anchors in strange dusk.
No more and no less.
A great hope: to give half
of what I have received.
12 — Loud
Blotchy ceramic glaze and I'm
pushing the top speed. Shut off
the stove to scribble a great idea
and you fucked up what you
were cooking and forgot
what you were thinking anyway.
11 — Quiet house
I am what I am when the
breeze from the propped
balcony door is a little
too cold. Papers around
my feet lifting
slightly. If this is all
there is, it is so much
I can barely hold it.
10 — Flood water
Big, raw hunger knawing,
knawing, breaking through
to blood stream.
Single iron latch,
flood water.
Flood water,
single iron latch.
Time, place, you.
This much I know.
09 — Names
Thread in a circle stamped
into carpet weave. Voices mark
my body, grind it to dust. Rise
above this temporal fog, burn
away the excess like you
didn't make it of
your own hands. Love,
love, this love. I will speak
your many names.
08 — Greasepaint
From the roof, my
town parched for rain,
darkened when it comes.
All this faculty of loving in our
chinadoll hands, this
geometry just
paper. Glue,
greasepaint.
God bless the champion
of life after life after life.
07 — poem for the
loops holding stones the loops
holding other loops holding stones
the loops making the space for the
loops holding stones holding loops
06 — Craters
Bird, resting, dips
its head to drink.
You never believe
you'll miss it, then do.
Behind me craters deeper
than I am tall. Before me,
fresh fruit. New shoes.
Rock, paper, rain.
05 — car alarm
hammer scripts dimensions
black swan schism in soapsuds
particulate sands a nuclear cap
cleaving forming
04 — Silence is a big cat in the tree
groaning, bending.
Big yellow eyes, cellular alchemy
tracking, waiting.
03 — Take the dog out with me?
Shoes stuffed on, undone, sidewalk
like sugar lace. My exhale a glass under
the sun. We take turns with the glue: your
left eye, my little finger. Your right ear, my
thoracic vertebra number nine.
Tell me it hurts. I know. I'm sorry. I'm trying
to be gentle, but you keep moving.
02 — Window
A giant white sky sends its best
through each slat of the blinds.
A neat julienne, tidy and
flexible, a reduction so
massive so as
to be created new.
This sky smiles with gapped
teeth. And says, baby,
but nothing of me is gone.
01 — Purple now
String
lights blinking,
blinking,
Erykah on volume
level seven. Purple now
yellow now
green. Much
of this life,
an endurance.
Not all.