Every day I spend away
You glitch a little more,
Your expressions fade
And my memory falters
Day by day,
Did you have green eyes
Or blue,
Brown hair
Or blonde,
Did I crane my neck to look at you
Or were we eye to eye?
Last time we talked,
Did your curls meet your eyes,
Did your smile shine across the room,
Did you touch my arm,
Or is that all just a glitch?
On the day before my last
day of work I thought I should
clear the coffee cups off my
desk.
To do:
1.Organize each tilting cabinet,
clean out every jamming drawer.
2. Wipe the moisture rings off
the expensive greige veneer
I hate.
3. Dust my shelf, erase
tiny smudge of footprints,
the last vestiges of my
King Kong action figure.
4. Pretend I’ve never been here
I should clean the slate.
I should write a note, thanking my boss,
my friends, my partners in arms.
Action Item:
Unveil a custom cake, pithy saying on grocery
store buttercream, lurid and sweating beneath
its plastic dome. Just leave it on the table. No
pomp, no circumstance. Play it cooler than
the fridge you yanked this from.
I should take the pay raise and stay.
I could still ask, negotiate my terms.
Remain stuck in a winding web, convincing
myself I hardly ever see the spider anyway.
Action Item:
Forget previous action item.
I could live in fear of new beginnings.
Tremble, shrink away from new
steps on a new path. I could trudge
my tired road, again, sun casting
old shadows back across my heels
like knives.
To Do: (ammended)
1. Leave right at 5:00
2. Coffee for commute home, and
to the side, a single serving of cake.
3. When the barista calls your name,
take the order. Take a Deep breath.
We are always in the midst of leaving.
4. Salt over my shoulder. Medalion. Warding spell.
Anything. Everything’s a prayer now.
5. Forget I’ve ever been here
Clouds in the sunrise sky like Superman ice cream and the neighbor is already ranting at the suspicious robins in his yard and the houses of the neighbors and their closed blinds and my television is blaring with strobe-light orange men and the failing Dutch and Tony Stark on mushrooms and ketamine and my inbox is already pinging with emails from students who have forgotten how to breathe and my eggs are frying in oil and burning my wallet and the kids with their broken guitars and chargers and drums and video games and notebooks and remotes are still asleep upstairs and the leaf blowers are already firing up out back and my mother is in Florida with the real crazies and here I am seeing only the shadows lining the trees and parked cars and wishing I could afford mind-altering drugs and golden toilets so I could grow the rainbow afro and red plush nose and cartwheel down the sidewalk spilling loose change from my baggy pockets for an Andalusian dog to find on its bouncing walk in the evening and lick clean while my eyes bleed on the stoop and coral snakes wind through the tall grass at the edge of my driveway and here the day has gone again with boiling veins and constitutions read in pig Latin.
The ephemeral stream beside
my house holds treasures.
It’s rocky bed lined with generations of
junk woven between rocks and roots
🎶Take it out back and dump it in the river🎶
Spring rains reveal buttons, springs,
hubcaps, handles, and shards of old dishes
🎶Take it out back and throw it in the woods🎶
washed down from the old smokehouse or
unburied from the banks where it was cast
forgotten for ages as moss covered stones
and trees grew tall around the edges.
🎶Take it out back and chuck it down the hillside🎶
One time, my kids uncovered an entire
Pyrex casserole dish intact while digging
for gold along the stream path as
part of some game.
🎶Keep the front yard looking good🎶
They gifted it to me, I bleached it
clean and still use it to make cobblers.
🎶Lyrics from “Take It Out Back” by Chuck Brodsky
Phrases flying past my ears
never quite reaching their target.
Slide after slide,
this professor never pauses to refill
her lungs,
we gasp in unison
as the screen flashes
tiny scribbles above our heads
each filled with 8+ syllable words
that sound completely made up.
Classmates tuned in,
I bond with little blue birds circling my eyes
praying to catch as many
droplets of information as I can…
our firehose of content is never
turned off.
You are on the threshold
Of manhood
Barely 19
A December baby
Like my daughters
Your eyes could be those of
My father
My brother
My nephew
The son I never had
Your cheeks are pock-marked
With acne
The kind that will scar
The record says
You spent a month in solitary
And still you aren’t
Penitent: you aren’t sorry
You refuse to obey orders
You try to escape
You were a boy once
What scars do you carry
What (or) who raised
This rage in you
from sleeplessness to quiet i clutch
fragments of soft morning and the grace
of songbirds beckoning all the ones i love
into another dawn, too familiar to us
the only mercy we can ask for
Nothing was moving
I went down to watch the herons
Nesting by the creek
Working my way out
Through the deep scrub, to the point
Silent by the tree
Camo-wrapped I watch
Enraptured as they squonk there
Movement brings me back
His bark is close, mad
Slowly I turn, face-to-face
Furry nemesis
Flicking his big tail
Acorn in paw, leaning out
Tensing to attack
I pull off my mask
He stops, cocks his head, confused
We wait, not moving
Nothing to see here
I turn back to my herons
And he to his lunch
He swings by his toes
Upside-down, crunching his food
Happily humming
Thonk! His prize falls, lost
We look at each other. “Awrrr”
I laugh, he runs away
The moment is gone
Both of us back to our lives
On a warm spring day
Leaf blowerleafblowerleaf
blowerttreegrinder tree grinder tree tree
weed eater weeeeeeed eater tree
lawn mower lawn lawn lawn mow mow mowmow
Stumpgrinder chain saw sawsawsaw
stop! Stop stop stop–Stop!
it’s Sunday
this is the day the lord hath made let us rejoice
be glad
wind chimes wind chimes windchimes
silence hummingbird
robin cardinal yellow finch bluejayblue blue woodpecker
house sparrow house sparrowhousesparrow
coffee maker
dog bark bark bark bark bark. Bark
windchimes chimechimechime chime wind windchimes
wind chime
