good woman
loving a
bad man
taught me that
I am a
good woman.
I start digging before she notices
seeing, she points to the shovel
you’re doing it wrong
and she’s right
to put on paper anything I choose
to satisfy a fine kind of hunger.
What is it I want to say?
My ideas are still in a liquid state
forming blue shadows.
Isn’t dark curious, enormous, intangible?
Sometimes it chases you.
I feel like beefsteak broiled
not done in the middle,
my mind ravenous
the lid on a boiling kettle.
Everything contradicts the other
uprooting, twisting and turning.
I want to paint a woman
with nothing on but her skin
so damnably free
without the weight
a trembling kind of sweetness
untouchable, soft and feathery,
all water colors, stretched out
intensely alive—
a bigness that carries me away
an explosion I’ve been growing to all my life.
I’m beginning to realize
what seeing means.
Being so afraid makes it all the finer,
a kind of balance
headed for something
more feeling than brain—
the world softening
like green moss.
~ Cento of lines/phrases found in “My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915-1933
a worn pair of topsiders
welcoming familar feet,
topsiders whose laces
never come untied, whose
yellowed soles keep my
grip steady on wet floors
This is the last thing I wanted
to write you this particular poem
to tell you that I have nothing to say that hasn’t been said
that my worthiness
dances
on the head of a pen and that pen died
because it came from that dollar store with the weird off-brand markers with the giggly name and glowing white jesus lamps
Remember?
this poem is a half-dead bouquet of yellow-dyed carnations with the receipt still stuck to the wrapper
this poem is nothing but a box we check to get where we are going
this poem is a bullshit apology for broken promises and resurrected shame
it’s
“I’m sorry, but if you’d just listen…”
One hundred years ago today
my father turned eight years old.
With school being out, he probably spent
the day like he did many others,
riding his pony alone in the woods,
his little .22/.410 over-under
resting across his lap, miles from town
and years away from anything like
Child Protective Services.
He usually made it back home
before dark. His mother was Dutch,
and, I’m told, a good cook.
twenty three years ago today my family showered golden rice grains upon my parents, and from there they built their marriage brick by brick, a fortress of reluctant, but patient love. i know i wasn’t in love, but a smile has never pierced me like his. have my bones always been made of metal? when my parents built that tower, didn’t they think to show me how? now my hands are empty, and i’m grabbing at blades of grass to ground myself. couldn’t they have taught me how much it would ache, to see a flame in his eyes that i didn’t light? or is a love built from patience, a love held down with mortar, really love at all?
