The china is bird-bone-thin
in his hands— it could
fly away at any moment,
but it doesn’t
and he sets it on the table,
turns the plates so their
borders are mirror images
of each other, staring
eye to eye like lovers across the tablecloth,
locked in place by the teacups, already
warming the table with
chai smoke. He checks his watch,
turns it on his wrist, twice, and
straightens his napkin.
The cucumber sit like
illuminated half-moons
on the salads, crisp and plump.
He glances at them,
at the door, at his watch again, ‘
and pours some water into his glass, and
sighs, watching the ice bob to the surface,
dawn and situate itself somewhere
in the middle. He blows the
candle out, and the ash collapses
into the wax, absorbs it, sending
gray curls into the air. He lights it again, using
the running-on-dry red lighter in
his pocket, fumbles with the switch some after
to pass the time.
His breaths are measured in
minute hand ticks and ice half-lifes.
In the Subway on Main Street we sat talking
for an hour about how we are and aren’t our
mother’s daughters. You were sitting
upright, but relaxed in the way only you can do
on a single person Subway seat without
looking like you’re trying too hard to stay still,
saying Yes, I am my mother’s daughter, laughing
when you realized she would never
eat in a downtown Subway after 7 pm
and I was sprawled across the
double-seater bench across from you,
arm hanging over the back, head against the
poster of toasted tomato footlongs,
saying, Yes, I am my mother’s daughter,
then it occurred to me that she would have chosen
the poster with lettuce and fresh banana peppers.
In the Subway on Main Street we sat talking
for an hour about boys and girls and people we
used to know, how X hasn’t changed and Y became Z
for someone else. You were busting open your
bag of Cheetos, dusting your fingers in
orange then licking them and commenting on
everyone you saw do that in
middle school, saying, Everyone licked their fingers
in eighth grade, and I poured the rest of my
original Lay’s into my mouth, gathered the crumbs
from the corners of the bag with my finger, and
did the same, adding, Everyone still does,
and we sat in the Subway on Main Street for an hour
talking until our parents pulled up in the dark
at the corner, hugged and parted ways, again.
She emerges from the covers
like a bloom, dripping in
morning breath and dewsweat
from a sleepless night, peels the
blankets down. She is a petal,
frail, pink-thin at the edges,
translucent when she passes by
the window, stops to pull her fibers
apart before she falls from the
stem. It is Sunday, noon,
and she has just woken up,
bleary eyed to snowed-in houses
and not a footstep in sight.
It’s the time of year when
nobody leaves their flowerbed
nobody faces the sun and
everybody wilts near a fireplace.
She pours hot milk, curls up in
the windowseat with the intimate
brew steaming in a blue
cup by her breast and watches
the snow, detached from her roots.
Lips parted,
some
but just enough more so
people wouldn’t say
slightly;
broken in the middle like
the split trunk of an oak
she carries them pressed
against her face
peeling at the corners because
she is dry and
windblistered.
Eyes blue,
not
the blue that goes with blue—
the blue that
goes with gray;
weighing on her
from the sockets down like
river rock
embedded in her skin
she rubs them down
smearing them
into her cheeks.
Filed under: Poetry, Uncategorized | Tags: people, America, north carolina, waffle house, smoke
I can see the ashes following them in the
blips of sunlight as they
pass in front of the red
chairs (lined up stiff like crimson still-lifes
against the window wall,
stewing in the early morning smoke like
it is their womb-broth or
their salvation), floating across the
metal slats that will be opened
when the sun is overhead
because here,
the sun can kill you like
a basilisk; like a pot of gold if
you look at it too long. Here,
nobody looks up because they are
too busy stirring
old dust up from checkerboard floors
onto their jackets. Their trails are
left midair, paused until they
take their coffee and go.
He didn’t believe me
when I told him I
remembered the smell of
their old place. The smell of
her bears. Dust and
mothballs gone bad, her
perfume leaking from the
couch cushions.
She’s been gone almost a year.
He still has pizzelle
cookies she made
sitting on the third shelf
above the macaroni,
smells like wood and sugar.
he smiles, nodding his
archaic grey grin, says,
“Really?”
“Really.”
I had a rainy day moment.
I saw you, cold as a memory in
your terrycloth robe
shimmering and threadbare
about to evaporate and
become the gray cloud
weighing like deadweight on
my shoulders.
It rains without
warning or reason.
The sky is
yellow-white,
dusted eggshell tint,
and the water
slants down,
battering itself in bounceback
on the roof,
like the sky is trying
to break its vow to
the clouds by
throwing its diamonds away.
I am filled with
rain like this.
I am filled with
noise and storm. There is
lightning,
then nothing.
the love in me
is pink and curious
like a tongue sealed behind
molten glass lips,
probing where the glaze is
solidifying and
a patch of light shines through
indigo and carnelian,
scalding. it threatens
to dismantle the window
piece by piece,
and leave its church
through the very
thing it worships.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 9/11, airplane, America, painful, people, Poetry, politics
It is impossible to determine the
magnitude of noise in a person
during a moment of silence. The entire
country hushes, like a white cloth
has been thrown over it, showing the
contours of stillness, and the only sound
is the sound of a billion lower jaws
sliding forward and clenching.
The only movement is
a hundred thousand people
entangling their hands in
someone else’s, the only feeling
is the feeling of their pulse, and
the only color is the white space
where thumbs have pressed through us.
