Running
I don’t have much to say these days
I just go go go
running from myself like the rain
races down my bedroom window
until the water traces the sidewalk
and spills into the streets
and there is nowhere to go go go
but home
Quivering with gratitude at the temple of your legs, the altar between your thighs, and how we take and eat of each other.
My dog tries to fight the thunder.
She barks at nothing
and threatens it.
She lunges at empty air.
She says, “I’m going to cross the street
and get you,”
as if the noise is just another dog
or cat or squirrel.
I wish she could chase away my headaches,
my depression,
my anxiety
the way she chases birds,
sneaking up on them,
creeping slowly as if she has any chance of catching one,
pouncing a split second after they move,
cussing them as they fly away.
“And don’t come back!”
We both fight things we cannot see.
was sooooo angry.
She stomped all the way
to the hardware store, where
the Red Radio Flyers,
coiled-up water hoses, leaky bags
of dirt and fertilizer filled
the big wavy plate glass window.
She opened the screen door
almost off its hinges,
the little tin bell dangling from the door,
was so loud the old guy in overalls,
always tooling around the back,
tripped on his way to the register.
Tillie was sooooo angry
She bought as many clay pot saucers
as she could carry–4 inch, 6 inch,
8 inch, 10 inch, 12–
Would you like some pots with those saucers,
Miss?
On her way out, Tillie kicked
the screen door closed–
the bell broke,
the clods of manure from her boots
hit the floor.
She was pretty pretty angry.
Tillie walked out of town very slowly,
carefully balancing the saucers
that were beginning to tilt
like the leaning tower of Pisa.
She made it to the backyard
where the hollyhocks hide
the garbage cans, piled high
the clay saucers,
picked each one up–one at a time–
smashed each saucer on
a mound of big gray rocks
older than the moon
until the shards exploded
into teeny tiny bits of orange powder.
Lordy, she was angry
we never did find out
why for–
Tillie was sooooo angry.
The spider living outside the window stole
her green stripes from a retired circus zebra. For dessert, I drank pudding that never set. My speaker croaked
out a Halloween playlist as if Rihanna’s “Disturbia”
were coming from inside the walls. The cats ripped off a beetle’s legs, leaving its abdomen buried
beneath the belly of a harlequin deer. I’ve seen stranger things
The sign on this case proclaims
Stupid, stalling, slow,
indecisive, not doing what I tell it to
when I tell it to, holding me up,
squandering what little time I have
left to finish this thing on time,
infuriating, technology-was-a-mistake,
I swear by whatever robots hold holy,
dumb, pokey, lagging,
computer.
Oh, you want
an update now?!?
I don’t have time
to wait
seven minutes and
an eternity
for that,
I have to move
fast.
how many words
are tangled
in the abandoned
fisherman’s net
how many questions
are swallowed
by the humpback’s
searching sieve
how many touches
are stolen
by unrelenting currents
Depression is much like an insidious black hole
it creeps upon you
for a long period of time you feel nothing
notice no difference
maybe that you’re driving in silence more
or too tired to pick up your book at the end of the night
or that the green of the hills is slightly less vibrant
maybe you crave the light a little less
saying hello to the neighbor suddenly is a Herculean task
your favorite food, now bland
did you know that we will know for decades that a black hole is approaching?
it will ease into our solar system
it will sidle up next to Uranus and Neptune
consuming them whole
while we continue to scurry like ants
unassuming, under a magnifying glass
as it gets close
if the dramatic changes to our ecosystem haven’t already claimed us
we will feel a pulling
a stretching beyond what we’ve ever felt before
spagettification they call it
and we each will be reduced to ribbons
that’s what depression does to you
a slow devouring
a celestial meal
it tricks you into believing you’re well
until it mercilessly tears you apart
Seasick, scroll through self-portrait images
and a frenzy of dated, annotated food logs.
Poetry dies on the backburner. Messages
starve unread in my texts, I draft obsolete
responses in my Google Docs, lose them
in the snowfields of white pixels sparkling.
Go out, agoraphobic, to buy a three ring binder
to sort my life into. They don’t sell body bags.
The Office Depot is humid, a herpetarium,
a cage for amphibian skinwalkers like me.
I wilt in a castle of printer paper, sucking air
through gills, lungs not yet fully formed, not yet
meant for land, to be an adult. Get back in the car.
Hear the rain smashing gore on the windshield,
crackling on glass. It sounds like a sparkler struck
aflame when driving faster, chasing futures, ghosts,
burning up ink pens, lapping up spilled milk, shame,
spilled blood, flipping through pages to find the start.
