Again and again she recites
the injuries inflicted on her
through the years, rehearses
each imagined slight, affront,
and rebuff. The litany of her joys
is brief, but the list of wrongs
done to her is without end,
each incident leading her to recall
another, a continuous looping
tangle of transgressions to keep her
woundedness ever fresh.
My schedule doesn’t have room for dreams
because it is packed to the brim with rationality–
a map leading only to places I’ve already been.
The bubble I live in is small enough to confine me
and every big idea that tries to escape,
but still big enough to keep me feeling lost.
The fragilest things always seem
to be kept in the strongest cages.
Why am I so uncomfortable
in my comfort zone?
I’ll see the world
once I’ve seen a full education,
a stable job, a happy family.
I’ll follow my dreams
as soon as I’ve followed the preconditioned path
set out by society.
My dreams can wait.
There will be time in my schedule tomorrow,
right?
Where is the movie featuring this special kind of heartbreak?
It would open with us sharing our middle school awkward, high school firsts, and college regrets.
Then comes the montage reel of matching tattoos, years of laughing at the same joke, and playing games we made up and forgot the rules to.
And then there’s the tone shift as we slip into our twenties.
When I changed, and you didn’t.
The part where you thought growth meant forgetting, but I was always saving you space.
It concludes in present day, where my mom shares your social media posts with me, and I can’t tell if this pang is longing or hatred.
It’ll show me living life, promising that I am more happy than not.
But I’ll make sure they edit out the part where I cried after avoiding you in a grocery store.
The day they came for her
She was not there
The inside of her thighs
Had merged together
Fused into a glorious
Iridescent mermaid tail
She had vanished
With the morning tide
This is me being impatient,
Flipping the end of a bookmark repeatedly and staring at the dimmed lamp.
This is you in the bed you made, turning over and over, pretending to like it
(You always were an actor).
You made me an actor too,
Except I’m not as good at it,
And I resent books that I cannot hold and finger and smell.
The night is unseasonably cold
And silent.
We are both getting old.
I imagine you staring at the wall,
Ignoring her long body tangled in the sheets beside you.
We like to think our decisions are personal,
But the truth is that there is
Always an entire community who
Must live with the consequences of each one.
I take the sleeping pills and
Switch on the darkness.
Did Moses receive the Ten Commandments,
Or did they receive him?
Did Ponce de León search for the Fountain of Youth,
Or did it search for him?
Did Ahab hunt the white whale,
Or did it hunt him?
Did Einstein discover relativity,
Or did it discover him?
Did Timothy Leary drop acid,
Or did it drop him?
Did Pete Rose bet on baseball,
Or did it bet on him?
Did Trump make America great,
Or did America make him great,
Or neither of the above?
Have you had enough of this,
Or has it had enough of you?
We do not get many
second chances.
Not with parents, or as parents,
or career…you might pull another
career out of a black top hat
but chances are it will be a wild rabbit.
Life is mundane. You must create your own.
Your own whatever. Not like your mother’s.
Something sparks when we talk on the phone.
Remembrance of space and freedom.
I want to apologize to you
before I die. Before you die.
I want to confess.
The sea and my endless longing,
washing up again and again
on the softening shore.
Rhythmic shush of the waves, milky
moonlight spills all around me
from a star-soaked sky
as I look out over the water, know my own
smallness in light of its vast, churning
power. The sea looks up
at the stars, knows it is only a drop
in an ever-expanding cosmos.
Just the two of us tonight,
water and woman, each witness to the other,
our soft bodies humming with improbable
life. The waves—roaring, rushing
heartbeat of the earth—echoed somewhere beneath
my skin. There is no end or beginning to the
fragile wonder of what we are.
