Needles and Nihilism
Northwestern sludge
Oozing from the pines
Thick like tar
Lonely and suffocating
Dark, dreary, and dreadful
Beautifully depressing
Northwestern sludge
Oozing from the pines
Thick like tar
Lonely and suffocating
Dark, dreary, and dreadful
Beautifully depressing
I’m scared I’ll love you forever,
That in every person I meet
I’ll be searching for your eyes
Listening for your laugh
I’ll say your best joke
And they won’t get it
They won’t ever get my coffee right
They’ll drive slow
And wake up early
They won’t listen to the same song three times in a row
Or eat cereal at 2am
I’ll think of you every time I pass your street,
Our favorite restaurant,
The parking lot we’d meet at,
The campground we slept at,
The park where I met you,
The backroad we almost wrecked on
I’m scared I’ll love you forever
But I’m terrified,
That I’m okay with that
to the top of the world and back.
letter, 1945: soldier hopes the war is over by christmas
yet at his best estimate, it won’t be over until far into 1946.
graded homework, early 2010s: at some point I complained it was fifth grade math
as if that meant it was the most difficult to endure.
cookbook, 1990: advertises healthful living, healthful meals,
like the spaghetti next to pictures of people working out, saying they eat low-fat.
wasp, deceased, c. 2023: none of us know exactly how long it’s been lying on the floor,
neglected, nightmarish ever since one of its kind inflicted injury in that very room.
Silently sailing through the evening
our head and tail lights strobing.
I’m blinded by you. Riding ahead,
I joke your wicker basket glided
baby Moses gently down the Nile.
Arm signals to no one. We ride
the backstreets. Stop signs pulsing.
Breeze wipes the heat from my cheeks.
You thank me every time I peek
and say: “There’s no one behind us.”
A cardinal
With a badass little mohawk
Follows is around the yard.
He’s peeping, chirping, pipping,
Singing an angry little song
Moving from the electric line
to the ridgeline of the empty house next door,
he turns his head to and fro,
As if we are some puzzle or curiosity
He can’t figure out.
Nothing held within me
but a small stone—no,
a planet, a bloody pulse
keeping pace with the energy
of its galaxy, where space
is limited to a cavity of light,
and still, life cannot seem
to find it, never sees beyond
the blindness of a velvet voice,
a warm sound, dark and lovely
as it says stay—quietly and
with enough pressure
that the stone begins to fissure—
not yet.
I snap green beans that fall and ring like
the singing of a prayer bowl,
connect me to my mother’s,
grandmothers’, my daughter’s
hands and the porch in
summer. Lightning
bugs’ flash bulbs
blur my
past.
At night your eyes come to me,
Deep and haunting green,
And I build your face from there
Across cheekbones so sharp
I could cut my ties against them
When I lay my head against this rock
Of a pillow, trying to get some rest.
But in the day I forget your face as
It blends with the face of a man I know
Who “enjoyed the cake” I made him
By watching everyone else eat it.
He said he doesn’t touch sugar when
Really he doesn’t touch anything
Even a little bit sweet.
he used the needle
to numb the pain
to fix my son’s tooth
a practice he’s
done for more
than seventeen years
my heart broke
when I noticed
how much
his hands shook
you can’t stop it
from coming for
any of us
that bad ending
that we all get
