Wilt
It feels good to finally
let my edges soften
let my petals bend back
and brown
I grow so tired of standing up straight
When you carve out my heart
and spike it, place it in a glass box
to gaze, this is what you would see.
After my blood oozes away, drying and flaking
in dark sheets
After my flesh rots, veins and arteries
rendered stiff, a lump of
stone and glass
would remain.
One side is mirrored mosaic, the symmetry
pleases the eye, its beauty comforts me.
The other is blackened with heat,
metal long since hardened;
my shields are borne
of betrayal.
But when my heart beats again
and fresh life flows through,
molten gold will pour through the cracks,
making the organ
pulse, now more full and glad
than ever before.
On the stage in Normandy,
the surviving soldiers who kept moving forward
through the water, up the cliffs at Omaha Beach.
A 97-year old veteran parachutes
to applause onto a field of wildflowers,
not darkness and bullet fire.
Pledges of gratitude and alliance.
Easy abstractions to decorate the day.
You find yourself rising
high above churches
and judges. What you
were most afraid of
at night, the whispers
you thought would betray
you are the things you now
accept. It’s not meant to break
you just open you. You hurt
but you have learned. You
become more of what
you are, which is
love outside
the cathedral. A heart
taken to court
to be unjudged.
Yes.
What you see from your window
is real.
I am,
in fact,
mowing the lawn.
I know full well
that my husband always does it.
But today he can’t.
So it’s all up to me.
I feel you watching me.
I see the curtains flutter
as you gaze in disbelief
and disapproval.
I know it drives you crazy
when I zig
instead of zag;
when I round the edge
instead of forming a crisp point;
when I start in the middle of the lawn
instead of at the outer edge.
I know your own lawn is your pride and joy,
and I know
my lawn
is rapidly becoming
the embarrassing black eye
of our street.
Let him cast the first stone,
I think bitterly,
as sweat trickles down my back
in thin streams
underneath my ratty t-shirt,
whose lawn is impeccably perfect.
But then I finish my yard
and shut off my lawnmower.
I look right,
and left,
and let my eyes linger
a minute
on everyone else’s yards.
And then I behold my own.
Damn it.
And have you ever stopped to think
That after the awful recursive nature
Of these past couple of years,
I might Want something else for a change
There’s , me who was an inversion of you
Who was a variation on him
Who was a version of us.
Sometimes you get so sick everyone.
You even grow tired of yourself.
The street lights weren’t on yet
when I figured out the Forest Temple
I ran outside to find my brother
We’d been stuck for months
The first time we played was on Josh’s N64,
the boy who lived with our dad—
a dungeon we couldn’t solve
That’s why we cared so much
to be the hero, to save the princess
to slay the demon
of divorce
I wake to poetry
Each morning I am awakened
by birds, singing in the redbud tree
outside my bedroom window.
I imagine they are not hungry to sing
the way they do before daylight.
I imagine their instincts know life
happens in its own time.
On this morning, I capture the rhyme
in their tweeting, void of strife,
the way a mocking bird might.
I give my poem freedom’s wing
and open sky to go
far, far from the redbud tree,
Green River, the lake and
me.
