Dissolution
Days pass
like strangers,
their faces
easily forgotten.
Memory escapes me,
a blur of half-recounted
happenings, chimeric
hallucinations that dissipate,
fog-shrouded figures
falling just out of reach.
Days pass
like strangers,
their faces
easily forgotten.
Memory escapes me,
a blur of half-recounted
happenings, chimeric
hallucinations that dissipate,
fog-shrouded figures
falling just out of reach.
This year? A cloak, weighted by rain –
I watch them,
Ragging envy green
So alone
Watching from here
So consumed
With how I’m there
To convey the disparity
There can’t be limits on lines
Straining to further stretch myself
Yet finding myself more confined
He saved his best stories for dessert
so the family could linger together longer.
He covered court news
and could craft a narrative
deliciously.
(Except the story about being bitten
by a baby copperhead
while hiking barefoot
at Indian Falls–
his family knew that one well,
but for me he saved it
for our first hike there together.)
He always had a plan–
a concert, a camping trip,
a midnight swim in the pond–
was always creating
something he looked forward to sharing,
something he might revise in the moment
like taking his shoes off in the woods
or his clothes off at the pond,
something I could look forward to
like dessert.
There’s still the dress in the closet that she was wearing
to the Halloween party in 2014, one she can’t seem
to get rid of, no matter how many times she tries,
the one she sometimes stops to run her hands idly
across the black and champagne sequined satin
as if somehow she can infuse the garment with energy
from her fingertips directly into the fabric,
something so fiercely powerful, so resiliently beautiful
that no one could possibly mistake a drunken night
as a green light ever again.
Crack.
Split.
Burn.
Seperated from the soul and discarded
in the bin,
lost in boiled coffee grounds.
A still stench consuming this membrane
before disolving; a shell.
Watch us eat.
Watch us consume the yolk
before we suffocate light.
Oxygen
lifted, gagged, and tossed
in the bank of a rotting behemoth;
surrounded by our rotting bretheren.
Eventually we lie in a heap,
cells torn apart by seagulls,
stray cats and dump hounds.
Again consumed
miles away from the potential to live.
I may no longer recognize
the songs at my neighborhood pool, but the quintessential clank
of spoon and bowl has never changed.
After all these years, I’m still just a little girl wiggling atop a wobbly
chair at Gaga’s house, waiting to devour an overflowing
bowl of Moosetracks chocolate ice cream, always a scoop over the serving size. I scrounge
in soupy remains for each sumptuous morsel, scraping
spoon against glass. Though the bowl is never big enough, I savor
every melted drop as my kitchen rings with the nostalgic clatter of sweet summer eves.
