Posts for June 3, 2019 (page 9)

have you ever worn paper clothes
given to you by a loved one
through the hands of a stranger?
someone tasked with asking
your ability to cope
to bathe, to eat and sleep?

two weeks in a makeshift bed
built with overwhelming care
filled with fluff, nesting linted legs—
two weeks and caressing questions
become interrogations, investigations.
what do you need? how do you feel?

I paint my nails, argue with my father,
swallow my pills and
wear the blue socks with the sticky toes—
a keepsake from the place
with the paper clothes
that have finally burned away 

teeth don’t need to collide to tell a story
(as much as i love that lyric)
maybe a movie’s worth of moments
could be found in a shared glance
a graze of knuckles
these intricacies of intimacy
maybe there’s even a story
in a girl who smiles to herself
trying to read them al

There’s a lilt
like an orchid bloom
when I think of him. That was romance
at 19. That was the one-bedroom

walk-up, first-time sex in a Nashville
furnished room. Was it a lie
to say vows in red
velvet and Venetian lace? Say yes

while still dusted by guilt
of crucifix & for our parents
sake? We had no skills
or balance & Vietnam

threatened—a cobra
coiled in a basket. Years pass
like torrents of mud. I don’t
regret the blunders of young

adulthood, false steps, or lost
vows.  I’ll bear a relationship,
however hapless or brief, that tethers,
to orchid or root. If I am a many

colored bolt you are an intermittent
accent of blue. Bespangling
my canvas, you are almost swallowed
by my red & purple, my Van Gogh

patterns of yellow. I conjure
you a few times a year & I usually
smile, not because I want you back
but because we happened at all.

Sweet stranger hold my hand.

Tell me of those summer nights you lit the moon aglow with your dance.

Sing me the songs that once leaped off your tongue 

and into the ears of loves.

Guide my hands to the place 

where wrinkles now replace freckles, 

let me rejoice with you that you’ve made it this far.

Let me hold your tamed hair and trace the shape of frizzy curls that once lined your eager face.

Sweet stranger there is so much time left 

before we meet or never will 

and I cannot wait to see who we are or never were. 

Sweet stranger I will try my best to hold on so that you someday may become a friend. 

Creasing folding shaping

Dissecting models

Studying guides

Hacking instructions

Then letting fly

everyone who
has become their true
self has failed
to become who
someone else
wanted them to be. 

While Notre Dame burns,
firefighters battle the blaze,
mountain climbers rush up the towers
and cover the vaulted ceiling
to the pealing of church bells.
Parisians break into song.
People pledge billions to rebuild.

At border facilities, detainees
stand on toilets for breathing room,
while at $40,000 each,
a single file of trekkers perched
on Everest’s jagged ridge
steps over fallen hikers.

On Sunday, we walk down the aisle
carrying a man on a stick. We wait
to be clothed with power from on high.

we all ride
the infinity carousel 
with angels
singing love songs
some rise some fly grasping
the gold ring of memory

when the wind razed our fields,
kicked dust into our throats,
cycloned eddies on the pond,

we hid in darkness
with the smell of earthworms and dirt
crowding our noses,

with kerosene flicker underground.
and when the day grew teeth
and came alive above us

we huddled, heads bent
and hands steepled,
whispers creating a nave.

after, surveying the land,
we walked drunkenly about,
stepping over the past

toward a clothesline still standing.
with undershirts flapping in the breeze
as the sun glimmered,

we bowed our heads once more
in the presence of God
and laundry that smelled of ozone.

in that half-light we came unmoored
and were grateful for hands
scented with pre-fire

and the possibilitiesof
all the soil
that once held our names.

Mind that you don’t call them
fairies, or
don’t mind.

Either way, such hidden kin
explain why
your belongings

go missing now and again,
especially in
a move.

Though what they’d want with
a measuring
tape magnet

and partially used all-purpose
gorilla glue
I can

not quite get my head around:
Shiny offerings
may help.