Posts for June 25, 2025

Tonight our youngest lost one of her last two baby teeth
That means I’ve only got one more chance to be the tooth fairy after tonight 
So tonight after I laid down with her and watched her sleeping for a while 
I slipped the tooth from under her pillow, ever so gently 
As I tiptoed to the kitchen to write a note from said fairy
and slip some tooth money into a ziploc bag, my heart ached
Deep into my chest, way down deep where her little head used to nuzzle
When she would sleep upon my breast and I was the only person who could make her happy 
There really is something to be said about the magic in a child’s eyes 
When they look at you with wonder and you’re the only thing they see
These years will fly by, fleeting softly into the night like a fairy 
Stealing away my joy like lost teeth 
and I’ll have nothing left to hold but the bag 

I feel like I’ve been shackled to this soapbox since surpassing Lacan’s dreaded mirror stage. So, I might as well speak on a logical fallacy of conservative ideology.
    (Oh the orchestrated ideals of man’s messy making! 
    Revere the modern muse—modeling GLP-1 and less than a portion of passion.) 
Here’s a contradiction of the red’s ruling culture I contend with: one cannot set an archetypal standard of motherhood while also maintaining an aesthetic standard of thinness. Those two conditions of being, for a woman’s body, are diametrically opposed. 
    Thinness, as in the modesty and morality of taking up less space; anorexic trends returning from Tumblr; the panopticon of femininity policing every ounce of fat; enough autonomy for off-brand Ozempic but not abortion;  
    Motherhood, as in the traditional assignment of women to the home; eugenic ethnostates (win a prize for procreating six times!); delivering your own deformed desires; Madonna and Christ; I learned to make pasta from scratch during that summer I stayed in North Carolina. My neighbors showed me. They would invite me over for dinner a lot—it was nice. They had this old blue farmhouse and a garden out back. Their son was four, I think, and he had this toy lawn-mower that he would run up and down the yard all day. His mom was so kind to me, and I loved helping her cook these big, elaborate meals that we’d all eat on the back porch together. You know, one day when we were pitting cherries I had a moment where—I don’t know—that late orangey glow of dusk was coming in through the window, and we were listening to a song from their wedding, and her husband was playing with their son outside—I just… for a second I just felt it. I felt like I could be really happy with a life like their’s. With a kid and a loving husband and a little porch swing, you know? Like, there’s so much serenity there. I don’t know why people always call it “the simple life,” there’s nothing simple about it. It was like a microcosm of all the human kindness in the world.
How much care for another person do you have to possess in order to pit cherries for an hour in the kitchen? Just so they don’t have to spit the seed out? You know who does that? A mother.    
 I will never be one to tell women what meaning they should birth from their own beings— their own bodies.
But beware the beauty of bone (That sounds archaic—I guess it is, Eve’s undoing was also a type of hunger)! I’ve starved myself into societal salvation, left the page for a pretty purgatory.   
That size 00 will suck the soul right out of you, warp the womb into a wasteland, diminish every desire except dinner—leave you swaying, struggling to stand on your soapbox. 

Farming, blasting, farming, blasting, waiting:
Repeat the next day.

My spirit goes traveling

The funeral home on the way downtown
from the, quote, commercial, end-quote, part of town
has featured for as many decades as I can remember
a baker’s dozen of model deer
easing themselves out of the dark pines
that huddle around forgotten paths and monuments.
Eyes naturally check this space
every time one passes by
and rejoices to see
a stray doe or fawn
nestled among the simulations.
The most remarkable part of this exchange
is the continued glee upon realizing
that one of the fakes
challenges the memory
of the same individuals mocking reality
that somehow prompt us to think
about the natural world 
more than the natural world itself. 
If deer can fake their presence so knowingly
as hundreds of people drive by unknowingly,
can we fake our own participation
in something as grand as life?
Otherwise we risk
darkening the pines on the forest path
until no one remains to see
our monuments and memories to them.

the first time we met
you 
played this song
with a room full of amps
cables coiled around the floor
with the glossy black heavy 
1965 Les Paul break my heart 
custom guitar with vintage 
sweat stains that you can see 
still to this day as it hangs 
in a shadowbox on my wall

the second time I met you
a stroke broke your rhythm 
and you tried to play 
in pajama pants 
the notes mottled together 
but I could still hear Santana
stutter through the string

I wish 
we could have talked 
about why you 
went to bars with a bible in hand
a music man wishing to save 
them all

we had was a moment 
standing on an island
in a estuary 
said not a single word 

becuase why would we
estranged as we were 
but we both shared 
that music chase 
fevered notes and sweat 

so I’ll play it for you 
cause it’s the only language 
we knew for one another 

share with the others out there
that know what it’s like 
to make a guitar sing 

grow berries, spinach;

Forgive my impudence—have you chosen
to omit the frozen treats from this evening’s
selection of cuisines? I’ll throw you like a sparrow
through the rafter beams. I’ll concentrate my hate
and concuss the waitstaff at this Denny’s.
I’ll concatenate my rage to vapid poetry.

Maybe maple or birch,
it’s wild, leafy and twisted.
Lush green with strong branches.
The roots are spread wide,
across states and borders,
oceans and rivers,
but rooted deep in New York.
Too many leaves browned 
and fallen to the ground.
We buried one this week.
No matter how far I am from its roots,
I’ll always be sheltered by 
the shadow of its love.