Category: Poetry for Issue 5

Strike your match on the arches of my feet. Break my spine with your Hades look. I never want to walk again. But if I walk, I want to broken crawl. I want to limp. Drench me in your apple cider scent. Yell song lyrics into my torso; tarnish my whole surface with them, tether me to them. Break me behind the knees and build me up somewhere else. Stick out your neck so I can admire your countryside. Oh what a lovely countryside. I could erect houses on that countryside. I could tear at the flowers on that countryside. I could shed my former selves on that countryside. But only if you repent all your skins your bones, your afternoon shadows, your trombones. Only if you show me your obsidian pasts, your dark decisions, then take them swiftly away. Make me think I know you when I do not.

Decoding the Poem

And the cardinal is December. And in December
there was blood and a wavering light. You describe
a flock of wild hair and it is that hair that makes me
keep still. I hold the phrase white tissue with my fingers
as if it is very small and broken. And there, I see
that you want me to touch a thing more dense
than air, but I know that you cry when you write
your letters and the lack of stars
does not mean you are lonely, but only
that you are very alone, in that moment.
And there you place moodiness and there
you set grief, just as we did,
at the kitchen table
after you lost the baby. And there it is again-
December. And as always, December
is put there sneakily to make me think
that a staircase is a door, but I know you
and this door is a hole
or wound that you walk through.

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Galapagos in Spring

We sit on the beach in our underwear, trying to figure out which bit of
broken plate fits into which by looking at the china patterns. The sand is
warm, flesh-colored, the water like it’s from an uncle’s bathtub.

Bats hang in the trees, stretching their wings and yawning. One of them
complains, I feel broken in two.

I spell messages on your calves with my mother’s lipstick, emergency,
coconut-flavored, red-cross, but you’re on your phone, texting someone
else. I whisper, running like a coked up reindeer, I try to break my head
against a brick wall, and it hurts so much I have to do it the rest of my
life.

You put a hand on your paper hat and wave to the bats, calling, I know
what you mean. I shuffle to the rim of the waves, past two half-blown
shacks, an overturned VW bug, banana peels and fake nails.

I say, I feel broken into, and hope you can’t smell me. My toes are
bruised and swollen, I suppose you remember why.

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Uptight Flamingos Will Only Have Sex to Marvin Gaye Slow Jams

Later, in the bedroom, you’ll undress me
or I’ll undress in front of you, and we’ll
stop mid-way because something you mutter
makes me uncomfortable, like that time you
said Tell me you like it before I even let you
inside me, and the way my limbs
became empty corn stalks and I tugged
my underwear back on because I had to
start over, and you’ll always keep saying
how sorry you are, it’s about the moment,
you get so into it, you just want me so bad
and I’ll really know that if I don’t close
my own eyes, I’ll watch you too closely,
find a new gray hair in your mustache
or count ceiling fan blades or imagine
us in the same bed at sixty. We’ll always
have to start over, try a re-do,
make it work somehow, even on laundry day
or in your mother’s home or in the car
while I think of grain bins or medical bills
or your brother’s new job or what we’ll
have for dinner each night that coming week,
when we’ve promised to do it at least
twice a week because all the studies say
that couples who make love more
are truly happier. I’ll ask you to change
the music, and change it again, or turn
it down, and you won’t hear me
and my hands will move too quickly
to catch up to your hands, and I’ll apologize
for all your apologies, so much breath,
and when it finally happens, and we move
remember how to move or where to place
our hands, it won’t be that awful,
and we’ll forget how long it took to get there,
how tricky it is to allow the body to open,
to let all that sunlight in.

(*title taken from a Jezebel article)

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