It’s good sleep. It’s honest-to-god real sleep where you don’t dream and feel like you’re falling every time you drift back into consciousness for a second or two and find yourself soaked in sweat like a rag dipped in lighter fluid and there’s a cold spot on your chest where the covers haven’t been melted to you yet and you can smell the salt coming off of you like you’re being fried in a Teflon pan. It’s the kind of sleep that’s too good to sleep through so you have to wake up every now and then to make sure you’re still alive, and each time you find a bubble of moisture around your body where the sickness has left and is burrowing into the cotton like a toxic gas and, but you don’t disturb it and burrow right into the covers yourself. It’s a comfortable sweat.
And there are clocks. They count the minutes that you’ve been sleeping in sweat and they don’t let you get too far away. They keep their green, long faces on you, watching to make sure you stay put. And when you wake up to look at the numbers you don’t know if they’ve been pressing you down into the sheets or just watching.
There’s always pressure in your gut. You think it might be from the clocks hands, and if you turned the lights on and looked, you’d see white marks, but you don’t, so you never know. It feels like you’re pressurized, like you’re a canned soft drink with the slightest hole in the top, fizzing from the inside out, and it’s only a matter of time before you run out of steam.
And when you get up, you have to take a moment to recollect yourself, look around the room in the darkness, searching for the clocks and the sweat and the soft drinks and you wonder if it was all real. You wonder if it was just a dream, or if you really made it through sick-sleep alive.
There were nights I waited for you
on the porch, crinkling myself like cellophane
into the old rocking chair,
bone-angles creeping through to
the cobwebs underneath
and I would count streetlights in twos. They
had eyes like massive grasshoppers,
flickered amongst themselves and the
wind crept through their grey bodies
silent except for the occasional
sifting-through of broken wings. I became
part of their chatter, told them about
the time you came home carrying
a large brown suitcase with plush leather and
brass hardware that thudded like
an elbow when you put it on the deck to
open the door and it was full of god-knows-
what. They nodded in unison and slicked their
armor back behind their shoulders, shone
until they exhausted the stars and
my stories. The best nights were the
ones you never came home, you
left your coat thrown over the backseat of
your car like a decorative pelt and
stewed blackness inside yourself while
black lasted and I was left to the porch and
your old chair, dragging electric whispers
out across swollen horizons.
The first word has to snatch you like
a nightmare, render your
feet useless as if you’ve stepped
barefoot into wet clay-mud, pressed
papules of earth through your toes (now
pulled upright and spread like the
legs of a startled spider) and are staring
breathless at the dirt-iced extension of your
self, playing the initial
squelch and following moments of
silence through and through your head,
has to make you regret ever
learning to walk.
poetry is an awful place to get burnt
i learned that from the snow
shaken off branches like robert frost said
verbatim
when it told me
cover your mouth you don’t want to catch cold
plastered hexagon copies of itself over and over me
swathed me in folds of petrol and showed me fire
said do what you wish and
gunpowder lines ran through my cheeks
set a poetry-something-or-another
screaming in flames out of me
i learned from the snow how to play with fire
December is where we begin,
where we put aside
our Octobers and Novembers
and reminisce about the different sunsets
we saw, take time to
learn the lines in our hands and trade
stories like tarot cards.
This is where we find ourselves
peeling our carbon shadows up from the
sidewalk, dusting the soot on our jeans,
and folding them into stiff linens
in our closets.
December is where we pause,
where our jackets warm like tea
with every failing half-degree and
our breath is a continuous churning jet stream
of old vapors and new worries.
December is where we end,
where we step away and our hands
are split like tangerines from one another,
clutching the last tenth of a degree
before freezing.
This is where we notice that our faces
are crystal lattice structures,
fallen from a passing storm
to wait for January.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I’ve been lousy about posting things recently.
I’m going to fix this.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: amoeba, love, Poetry, science, universe
You are a universe.
Every one of your cells is a galaxy, spinning
like a bead on a crystal chandelier
hung in some dim, drafty hallway—
microscopic, luminous,
turbulent. I could spend all
day looking through windows for you,
poring over high-power lenses,
prodding slides of you until I break open one of your
lipid membranes, peel back the layers
of your speech. I will excavate white dwarves
from your gums, uproot the sapling blackholes
in your internal organs.
I will exhume the remains from your chest
to see if poetry died in you,
or the other way around. I will stain you with
Iodine, color you amber and Bromothymol blue,
resuscitate ink in your lungs.
You will inhale, one deep airless
gasp and collapse in on yourself,
and I will pry the pulsars up
from your skin like beauty moles, set them aside
in jars for you. Light-years from now,
you will find them on your dresser,
run your fingers over the holes
punched in the top, and release them
into the night, barefoot and swaddled in terrycloth,
wishing on your own stars. That is how
everything will end—you in your back yard,
gazing at the sky, me transcribing your
amino acid sequences onto my
palm with the nib of a star,
writing you into the constellations.
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.
