In the days before answering machines and voice mail and caller id,
I let your phone ring fifteen times.

Fifteen times I imagined the rings hitting the wall, bouncing off the floor,                                  echoing through your apartment.
Fifteen times I thought of what I would say when you picked up and shouted, “What?” Fifteen times I thought of my love and my loneliness and what I had lost.

Later I learned that you were at her place
and not there to hear the fifteen rings,
the fifteen times I said your name.

How can I 
Get you off my mind 
When everything reminds
Me of you?

Say I’m fine 
Can’t call your line 
So who can I tell what I’m 
Goin through? 

Wasted time 
Can’t face my life 
If I can’t make it right 
Then what can I do?

Love is blind 
Open my eyes
But ain’t ready to
Share my light 

With someone new 

Your clothes still in my room
And your creams
And your perfume

Guess I’m supposed to move 
If I wanna leave 
Being reminded of you 

But how are we supposed to move 
On when our memories
Have been fused?

Don’t know what ima do 
So hard to leave 
What I’m used to 

It all fell apart so soon 
Drain each other’s energy
Hardly got enough 

Just to get through 

All the shit that we’ve been through 
I’d be there through anything 
And I know you would too 

Everything in my view 
Only brings
Me back to times 

You would lift my mood

How can I 
Get you off my mind 
When everything reminds
Me of you?

Say I’m fine 
Can’t call your line 
So who can I tell what I’m 
Goin through? 

Wasted time 
Can’t face my life 
If I can’t make it right 
Then what can I do ?

Love is blind 
Open my eyes
But ain’t ready to
Share my light 

With someone new

Resting on our deck

Pileated Woodpecker

Gifted a feather

I fiddle with my ring again
the one just like yours.

Pick up Jane Austen
Just to see your name.

It’s the little things
That keep me sane.

Write a hundred love letters
But never press send.

Complain to my friends again
“Why won’t this crush end?”

Wish you’d see in my eyes
I don’t want you as a friend.

God will send me to hell
For obsessing over your lips.

One day I’ll show you the poems
About how you’re the girl I’m in love with.

A pair of young women gathered
on a dingy corner in little Bellevue,
singing playful earworms,
reciting lines from Hamlet—
infecting joy where joy was due,
where it had seeped through cracks in dry concrete
into the current of the muddy river nearby.

Joy blossomed in song
and in “To be or not to be,”
creeping up old gutters,
flowering into dainty petals
that gave off a pleasant aroma.

Joy crept over the fence,
crossed the street,
and reached the formidable man
outside the Liquor King—
who yelled, “Get the fuck away!”
from beside his mighty steed,
a hair-raising black 4×4,

guarding his post
and his paper bag
with everything his larynx could give.

Surely, the king of trucks
could benefit
from joy’s gentle presence—
but he’s not ready
for that conversation.

I went outside to smell the heat. 
Walked a shady pathway to bathe 
in cicada siren, droning
harbinger of June.

Skin, blistered, and pinched in friction.
A thick veil of wild pollen rough
to my asthmatic lungs. 

Drinking the glory-beaming sun through
maladjusted eyes. 

The daylight like honeydew, air
tacky, and sweet like spilled cola.

Smiling families with children,
and bright-eyed, eager, dogs. 

Sunglasses, and cheap soccer balls,
lost to the underbrush, today
a memory to be made.  

It took a crowd to show me
I needed your attention.  
Suddenly sharing the reaches of your spotlight
I realized that I could not be on the periphery.  
Your composed approval: a nod
– performer code for high praise –
left me unwaveringly intent on more.
Sure, I’ll take the lead
but you’d better back me up.

I sang my way into trouble for years
even though I knew how to get myself out
the shiny dissonance draws me in every time.
Flirting with chaos, courting self-destruction
Isn’t it beautiful?

My mothers lack of self respect 
is the reason my father isn’t lonely 

My baby brother and his smile 
is the reason I still play guitar

Ten 
years ago–
a decade dissolved
in a blink, yet 
it feels like an eternity
without you here by my side.
No calls, no texts, no cigarette smoke;
no stories from when I was little, or
advice on how to raise my own small creations.
Tell me how to spend another ten years without you.