Resisting Gravity

This is an older poem, but I recently got it accepted by Zygote In My Coffee which is a fantastic mag you should all be reading at http://www.zygoteinmycoffee.com/


The cycle is starting and
again I’m feeling like writing was never the right thing for me.
That I would be better off hapless, like I was that day,
that the weather shuddered and turned over
and I frowned at the handsome black man
sitting on the curb, his bag in his lap,
his friend at his side.
We were at waiting at the light and
for a change, I wasn’t driving.
He held my eye for what seemed like forever
through the window of our car
and then like he remembered a raunchy joke
he smiled
all those white teeth and shining eyes
still holding my gaze
and I couldn’t not smile. I was so lonesome.
It would be like resisting gravity
even though moments ago you had been stung by a bee
and the sky was so metallic
I would have to punch holes in it
just to see a dash of light.

It wasn’t till later that I realized
I’ve been searching through this city
for something like that strange moment
since the day we got here.
Waiting for someone to hold down my stare
and then turn it all over on me.

I’ve been missing everything I left behind so badly
that we taped the photos up on the walls
just so I can remember,
that yes,
so far
it’s been a good life
better than I remember
or at least better than I let myself remember.
and you tell me it will keep getting better
as long as we don’t have kids
or become stagnant
or stop writing
and I know you are right.
There were other great writing couples
Ted and Sylvia,
Stan and Anne,
hell, Ginsberg and Orlovsky had decades in
those tiny apartments, their life collected in sweat, smeared fingerprints
and a comfortable mattress on the floor,
so why not us?
We got the bag full of tricks right here.
We’ll be the hitchhikers.
We’ll remember the raunchy joke next time.
It’ll be us sitting on that stoop someday
smiling at the red-headed girls that drive by
making them remember
if even for a second,
what the whole goddamn point is.

Yowling in the Next Life

In the next life,
I’m going to come back as a cat.
No more of this pink hairless life.
Instead I will sit on the dock in San Francisco
and laugh,
that white bright laugh
that used to torture the prisoners on Alcatraz.
The sounds they could hear over that quiet bay,
all that gentle conversation, the awkward
dinner dates, the shuffling starts and sputters
of men and women getting to know each other.
The symphony of clinking silverware, coughs, chatter
nervous accents, embarrassed pauses, spaces of silence louder
than laughter.
All of it floated over all that black water
over the honking of seals,
and came through those
rusty, sea-stained windows and
my god, it must have driven them crazy.
The cacophony of want.

Yes in the next life,
I’ll be on the dock, too.
A fat black cat, yowling at your moon.

Seagulls

This will soon be available online thanks to the lovely people at www.jackmagazine.com

The sea gulls freeze in the air
floating, cut from silk and hung on a thread
just below the clouds that are strapped to the sky
milky white and liquid
the sharp bird beaks cutting a line
as they float like words above me

I can see my breath crystallize in the morning air
and still smell the ocean,
and feel the salt stick to my palms
even all the way up here
over the car exhaust,
and dog shit.

I can still hear the waves, and the roll of broken shells
cracking into each other
over the sharp staccato of Chinese
and the screaming brakes of the subway.

Spring is coming,
tunneling through the ground
upsetting the graves,
overturning the rotten wood and bones of the dead
like a giant nimble worm
blind and intuitive
stretching and contracting in the determination of yearly renewal.
I can hear her rumble,
I can hear her coming.

And so can the gulls,
and that is why they are floating.

In the Silence

In the space where the music is
and now isn’t
is where I’m keeping you,
in that buzzing hush,
that anticipation that proceeds what happens next
lifting itself from the velvet
of what has already come,

This is the transformation of a love.
This is a young woman pulling her glasses
up when she reads,
just on top of her head
and in that simple movement
revealing herself as something changed,
something that the man next to her hadn’t seen till just then,
something that crystallizes and sits within him,
tucked just under his tongue.

You will fill that space,
that in between space,
so that I can move you, like a chess piece
from the past of my life
to the future.
I can carry you with me,
because at this point,
I can’t leave you behind
with the last song.
No, instead you will be that moment
when the violinist rest his arm,
the bow sliding one last time over the string
the note held shimmering
for a millisecond, like a bird wobbling
her wings, two flecks of white holding her up
against all that startling blue.

In the impossible miracle of temperament,
that’s where I’ll carry you.
And you will not be lonely there.

The Ninth Apartment

This was recently accepted by SugarMule.com. Enjoy.


Listening to the zip
of the key sliding into the lock
and the smell of the rain outside
with the windows that have been locked all day
the cats greeting me
in the evening light of this room,

I realized this is my ninth apartment.
Nine sets of white walls, spotted with fingerprints
and newsprint stains. Nine floors I don’t sweep often enough.
Nine different cabinets filled with
the unused baking sheets,
bed sheets,
and towels.
Nine clogging showers
growing mildew in the tiles.
Nine ways to line up the couch and end tables,
the gathering and keeping of objects.

And that’s in about twelve years, which doesn’t seem
as bad when I think of the cities I have lived in,
the cars that died on the side of the road,
and the pets that have come and gone
the fucking, bending,
cooking, bleeding,
the surgery, driving,
the study, testing,
the work and quitting.
The turns this planet has made,
hanging as if weightless,
rolling
lonely in all that quiet darkness,
dotted with the business of our ant lives,
the times I have hauled this mattress out of another truck,
through another door,
onto another floor,
and collapsed there with you.

Still you.
Always you.

London Bridge

These days I’m spiking skulls
up on the bridge of my mind
as a warning to myself.
It’s another lesson I’m not learning

when I’m standing in front of you
trying to explain without words
that I don’t love you.
Not like you love me.
And I can’t keep apologizing for it.

I’m hoping maybe you’ll just understand
and it will keep you quiet.
For once, you’ll realize it
and with a degree of decorum, close
your mouth and let this moment, if nothing else, pass.

Darling, I’m just saying it’s been too much of this lately
and I can’t remember what I was like when we talked of other things.
Do you understand I have been screaming
through my rag doll smile all this time?

But these skulls I’m putting up are for me,
rotting faces, eyes leaking pus, slack unwanted jaws.
They are treachery and deceit. They are theft, lies. They are mutiny.
They are a hung through the fog of my mind so I’ll remember
that I alone am allowing this.
It’s a tax paid in full.
I’ve got a scar on my thumb,
to remind me of the time I slipped the hangman’s noose
so many lifetimes ago.

My heart is clockwork,
it requires mending, gears, and the minding to
I haven’t time to worry about yours.
And maybe, it’s not as dramatic as all that.
But I am tired of being in the back of your head,
floating like the potential you should have thought better of.

My bones are soggy, my muscles stretched thin,
I am tried of walking the edge of this island
just to avoid this stupid poem.
To avoid marking on paper what I hear in the ticking of my heart,
what you hear late at night
when you can’t sleep
what the ghosts have been telling you for decades
if you ever bothered to listen.

Molecules and Little Bricks

Over the pot of Darjeeling tea
she told me that had they kept their first daughter
they might not have had me
and I realized that I had never considered that possibility

and the molecules and little bricks
that come together
and apart each day
to keep me going,
shifted again ever so slightly
in this conversational undoing of everything I am.

That knowledge sat in the corner of the tea shop
waiting for me to notice it.
Knowledge nodded at me, when I finally met its gaze.

We spent the rest of the day
discussing the generations
and the people who have passed
or have yet to come
and fondled the books
sampled the peaches and apple slivers
and laughed in the train station.

The land that I was raised on, bounding over the gravestones
and bones of the Iroquois, have seeped into me.
Their longhouse, this family that I am threaded to
is something that cannot come undone.

But I still thought about the grains
of black tea
the slivers floating at the bottom of my cup
like little strands of DNA
unraveling, shifting,
Coming apart and together like the cells in my fingertips,
my thighs,
the length of my hair
to make someone new.

and I tried not to think of her dead
buried
unmoving
unraveling
but you know I did.
If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have thought so hard
about the air in my damaged lungs
and the heavy crown that is this truth.
I am cleaved, split in two
two writers
two people
two daughters
two lives
the sloughing off of yesterday
and the recreation of tomorrow.