Good to know that’s what you think of me, you said
my goodbye dissolved into the blue May heat.
Exonerate the days on your bed,
promised land,
a dreamscape
cluttered by crystals
and flowers severed
at the neck,
trying to make your life
something beautiful.
You’d be honored to know what I made of you:
waxflowers deathless,
hand stitched pages,
a lingering haunt,
Just A Girl echoing
into your mother’s garden.
I gather vengeance
how the moon gathers light:
cycling from forgiveness, recollecting
every little thing
on every little list
you ever made
recounting why
I am nothing to you,
pretending I am nothing to you.
If I am nothing to you
why can you not look me in the eye?
Are you grateful for the legacy?
You wanted beauty,
I made you poetry
to remember how it felt
to be wanted.
When the time dripped slow as your aquarium
filtered my head into just a motion blur
of autumn’s haze
to spring’s revelation
floating through
mystery snails,
cherub figurines,
empty futures,
promises
left to fall behind shut eyes,
iconoclastic dreams.
My heart was full of freshwater,
now the walls caved, shattered, gutted
every creature inside.
I laid back in your bed,
made better promises to myself.
I was what you wanted,
so when you left
I stole the summer,
trailed the scent of freedom,
realigned my heart
to the hours of the sun.
Offering amnesty to the walls I’ve been talking to,
you can shoot a call whenever you want.
Leaving unlocked doors behind me,
linger at my heels
only if you want to,
first love.
This is the last time
I’ll pretend to be what you want.
I am becoming what I want,
meanwhile you are just a girl.
it seems every woman I meet
is named Cathy with a C
or Kathy with a K
you were a Cathy
Look
I went to your funeral with him
so he wouldn’t be alone
Mormons sat in the front row
they’d found you in the nursing home
fading with Lou Gehrig’s Disease
because you’d signed the Book
once, during your decades-long marriage
your husband
mine now
sat still as a stele
but I
but I
wanted to belly dance around your urn
your brass zils’ bell and clatter between my fingers
the oud vibrating in my ears as I listened, boxed
rack after rack of your Turkish CDs
too many to just toss or give away
no one would have so many if not
for love
Have I lost you yet
Has your voice broken past repair
Have you cried too much
Is the breaking point near
Have I fucked it up
Well save it for when we’re drunk as hell
Have I lost you yet
Are you leaving me without air
Signs That You May Have Abandonment Issues
1. Getting too involved or moving too fast in a relationship.
Are you sure you like him?
While you’re imagining
living in his house? Before
you talked to him on the phone?
2. Giving up your needs or wishes for your partner.
What do you mean do I think he’d want a skylight
in the bedroom that you’ll share in his house?
Why are you like this?
3. Not displaying your emotions or being too emotionally available.
Are you crazy, dreaming
languid fantasies of lying with him,
beneath the glass covered arch of sky
in the bedroom, tracing constellations
with his index finger cradled in your hand,
trying not to hold him so tightly that it hurts?
4. Continuing in a toxic or troubled relationship.
Already you fear he will leave you
all alone, in the suffocating night,
and you haven’t even had your first date.
Why are we this way?
I read that most adopted people
have abandonment issues.
6. Being jealous, controlling or overly possessive about your partner.
Baby, your heart is as big as God,
just as it was when your mama
surrendered you to unfamiliar hands.
And I know you cannot bear it,
the void of no body next to yours at night,
close as a babe in arms.
You cannot abide the weightlessness
of another not beside you.
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, too.
the wound in the center of our chests,
as wide as the universe,
vast and unknowable,
sometimes void of stars.
adjective
in ° vet ° er ° ate
:Confirmed in a habit
an inveterate liar
or a dry poet who habitually
doesn’t type
under the ceiling fan and the soft hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh its blades make
The only action in the room
The poet is here night after night after night
The poems aren’t
And midnight walks down the road alone
while words struggling to leave the womb
are born dead
a diversity of…
some opinions
whatever fits in my
shrinking mind
single track when I’m
talking to you
it feels nice to not
think so much
I see so many things,
and I only smell my stale breath
focal point for my
meditations
pet the cat and
envy the bird
write a schedule and ignore it
for just another day
taxonomize emotions and
learn to understand the
world that you have been
given
I met an artist on the beach,
wandering down the pale sand on
a South Carolina cloudy Sunday as
my daughter and I took pictures
of sand pipers and pelicans,
while drinking in all the ocean we
could in a day….
she was there, walking out of a castle,
her sandles dangling from one hand,
her long linen shirt billowing out
from cropped black pants.
She was working on a sculpture of
Don Quixote riding his ancient steed,
she spoke like the waves as they pull
away from the shore,
the delicate sound of fragile shells
clicking together as water washes them
for the millionth time.
And just as I realized she was talking
to me, we had come nearly face to face
and there was Atalaya with its ornate
ironwork of seafoam green against a
stark brick and mortar rambling of
rooms and gardens, stables and archways.
My daughter beckoned to me to look at this
anomaly and as I turned back to respond
to the woman, I felt only a salty mist, a
taste of copper and the sound of
an artist’s hammer on metal.
well-practiced thoughts are
frozen behind sunburnt lips.
today, Trauma won.
4: Something New Under the Sun (Alexandra Kleeman)
just like at IKEA, in the desert, in the way a child investigates
the Precambrian and hates that
your struggled kindness imposes on their time
just like in the room where your grandmother
last failed to know your name
it’s real easy to fuckin lose _____(1)_____ in the goddam WAT-R store
A.) it
B.) track of time
C.) your soul
D.) your way
E.) every last molecule of hydration
from your precious lips to your gravlax-locked sphincter
wending in and out rows
of everything everything everything
but at least you can’t tell the difference
between water and _____(2)_____
A. water
B. water
C. your soul
D. water
E. everything everything everything
anymore
when you stand in the pyral, suburban sprawl
the way you’ll be forgotten is really just water, too
