I’m trying so hard right
now to love myself
the way I love
elderflowers,
ripening blackberries,
moonlight, and
lightning bugs.
Love for just being
love for existing
love for all the ways
this harsh world is defied
by redefining
what is beautiful.
I am paralyzed and putting my trust
in this thing weighing down on my chest.
Putting trust to the strength of my ribs.
Heavy and panting and clammy and wet.
Only the whites of its eyes, its teeth show.
I dart my eyes for figure. I cannot turn away.
I blink twice for yes, thrice for thank you.
With pajama bottoms at the foot of the bed
I make out shapes in the popcorn ceiling
i’m too touched.
ghost hands burn on my knees and wrists,
all the intentions that touched me still do.
my father reaches back from the drivers seat to place a hand on my knee
i am 8 and too grown up
he is alive and the smartest man I know
i look out the window and sing quietly to myself.
a 40 year old man picks up my hand and lays it on himself
i am 19 and asleep
he has said he wasted his time getting to know me and
i am too drunk to drive myself home,
so I lay in his bed for years.
god was cruel in letting both men touch the same girl
and leaving her to file it all in one skeleton;
my father is dead and I focus as hard as I can on remembering
his hands in mine or laid on my shoulders or my knees
but she’s screaming too loudly of
where she remembers yours instead
i’ve only loved two men
and it all feels unfair that this is how it’s played out.
To be
In that moment they were magnificent
What is this place where toadstools sprout up
In rings in the yard below my deck.
Where bluejays and grackles fall from the sky
No one knows why.
What has grown between us
During our long solitude safe from each other
Brood X slumbering for 17 years
Risen to reek havoc then slipping into sleep
The citizens of this place stumble
Finding no real home
Finding landscapes changed
By mowers and insecticide.
The bucks, antlers mossy still,
Pass through my yard, lazily looking at me.
They may never become great stags
Prey to asphalt and rubber and steel.
Have they lost their connection to the land
Like a child raised in urbana,
His earth, kept in pots, and flowers
Printed on curtains, fluttering in windows.
They paused, then
Lean muscles flexing,
white tails flipping,
loped off between the houses.
In that moment, they were magnificent.
Girl
makes me cross my legs,
hands clasp in this neat lace lap.
Pray
I lose myself
to whichever braver diety
begs me forward,
beckons me to scoop
all of my too ripe fruit
into a dainty pile of rind
just before
a hot summer solstice.
Woman
is that blue ribbon winning
melon
fertilized
plowed
harvested
when in season.
Steady
Directed
Beneath the waves
Natural
Universal
Nearshore but still at sea
As a child I was taught to fear the undertow
It had stolen life from others
Stolen children from mothers
As a woman I have learned to fear white men
Determined to steal life from others
Steal the future from all
Age 13 sitting on the ground
in the backyard, the world summer soft
around me, running my flat hand
over the grass thinking in some unformed
way of my virgin purity, the hard pews
of church never far from my mind.
If it’s admired as beautiful,
it gets messed up and so its beauty
destroys it. My aunt looking
down from the porch,
what are you doing?
Of course I had no words to explain.
