Waiting on hold
Waiting in line
It seems I’m waiting all the time
We wait in the drive-thru
We wait for love that’s true
It seems we’re waiting all the time
Waiting in rooms
For words
We don’t want to hear
Or
For words we hold deer
Always waiting
Waiting
Waiting
I waited for the train
I waited in the rain
I waited so long I went insane
I have carried them
for too long
in shapes
of pointed stars
turning in my throat
even though they’re living
I should have buried them
left them for dead
just how they did
for me
Coming home from the salon today
into my bedroom I sashay
to find a bobbed stranger
I scramble from danger,
but my reflection did not mean foul play.
The gateway to the unknown is guarded by two taxidermied geese,
the creatures of terror, tucked under the table just past the door
to my fears, only noticed if one takes the effort to look
down at odd angles while counting down the heartthrums
until the edge of the waterfall.
So, in other words, they’re for me.
I see their feathered horror bodies
and the memory comes as always:
elementary school, outdoor birthday party,
goose wanders to us for food
*hooonk–*
*snippity snap*-s at a seven-year-old’s
knee, no injury, only the genesis
of lifelong phobia.
Years later, the sight of two unmoving (dead or fake,
after coming here three times I still can’t tell) is enough to remind me
the reasons why I’ve come: to be brave as an action verb,
a development, to maybe not overcome
but to learn to tolerate.
——
When I wake up i’m sitting in the passenger seat,
–“mom, my thung feelth like a murshmellow,”–
somehow more aware than I’ve ever been.
It’s not like they told me it would be: that in losing wisdom
I would too lose all control of my own mind, my own words,
that I would spiral into something foregin. No,
I feel no pain, none of the thrum of uncertainty I’ve kept close
like an invisible locket for as long as I can remember.
There’s a hole in my mouth, I remind myself: a hole
where a bone once grew, but did that bone
hold the senriment long since locked up
in my mind, that fear I’d never
been able to rid myself of? Was letting go
of it as simple as falling asleep
and letting my numbed, unhindered hands
release their grasp?
When I dream of geese perhaps it will no longer be a nightmare.
He stacks old appliances
and junk cars and leaves them –
old lovers jilted.
It is barely June and yet
it is hard to find a leaf
untouched by disaster-
insects or disease,
or chemicals applied
by some master chemist
whose only desire
is to see something
shrivel and die.
But see, the trees keep growing
covering the mess he has made
with a treasure of hidden rings
and a green gown made of hope.
A sunny Thursday evening
Driving around aimlessly,
I look over and see
The local fireworks stand is up,
I want to feel excited,
But all I feel is anxious
Anxious that July 4th seems right around the corner
Which means fall is lurking not far behind
And winter is stumbling nearby
Hands full with seasonal depression,
Cold days,
And lonely nights
I think to myself how I should move somewhere it’s always sunny,
Full of laughter,
And just alive,
But that makes me anxious too
Saying goodbye,
Leaving my whole world behind,
But I crave something new,
Something more
13: The Ultimatum: Queer Love (2023)
never lived down to admitting that i liked Wife Swap to my best friend’s dad when we were in twelfth grade
‘Nothing wrong with it’
‘Says something about you, though’
what what what? that it isn’t my mother who tears up my realities, it’s just
my own shatterglass genetics, my own too-long navel-gazing prone-seeking
ill, ill brain? smear two silly geese together you get silly
goslings. the gauziness of what i understands is tissue beneath a blanket of
eternal year marriages, centuried and generation-eaten quilts.
it’s culture, it’s cringing at what i can’t
be.
i don’t get it.
i get tax breaks, i get the right to hold your partner’s hand in the hospital
and rites, rites, rites;
i’m not right, i’m losing sleep over the way y’all say
one
one
one
like it’s more than some pretty number.
My son and I played tennis
right up to twilight at the state park near home.
Smoke moved in from far away wildfires
propelling a haze through the glow of slanted sun
angles spotlighting specific trees
making them glow gold and orange,
placing braided dots across the ground as
bright as the fire itself.
As we drove home, admiring the gloaming,
a mama deer stepped into the road right in front of us,
babe in tow
its speckled back matching the forest floor as
they walked into a red ray of sun
lit up right there like some beautiful mirage of
how this place looked before people.
