In Deference

On windy days L sits by the window
with a book in her lap, waiting
for a chill to rustle through its pages
like a cat through the reeds. In this way
her stories reveal themselves in sudden
jagged fragments, acquaintances vanish,
love flickers and flames,
landscapes melt into conversation
into monologue into description;
paragraphs fissure mid-sentence,
mood writhing, dissected on an uneven plane.
The world balances with its spine sinking
into the fault line of her pale legs,
pleats of her skirt carrying
its motion into the afternoon
while slender pearly arms pillar her head.
Her eyes close to make room for the sun.
The roar of the freeway douses the crackling
of crisp pages as death goes unnoticed; confined
to an instant, smoky tendrils encircle the infinite
and its already crystallized moments, drawing them to
constellation. All far from seamless, unseen, crestfallen,
she wants to know if love lasts; who she will see again;
if her journey was an arc or an ark.

Suicide Pact

It's so hard to find someone

you love and trust

enough to die with,

but still empty

enough to want to die.

L'esprit de l'escalier (The Spirit of the Staircase)

She said
he said,
"It takes two to tango".

Steps away
from her father.

Couldn't he make
like that Billy Idol song
and go fuck himself?

She showed me her teeth,
her stained heart,
her slender arms and legs,
blossoming in color;
bones hollowed for flight,
but I didn't touch her.

I'm all too aware I'm not the sun.
I have a halogen soul
good only to tide over till growth.

The last time I saw her
she was expecting. The time
before that, on my doorstep
with a friend asking me
to buy them cigarettes
and I told them that
was for someone else.

I wondered
if she wondered
if I loved her.

I wonder
if she wonders
now that we're strangers.

Petit Mal While I'm Out

Cupped delicate like a glass menagerie
I step as if it has already dropped
swirl the hook around my mouth
wish my heart beat at an even tempo
like lines strung from around the room

clasped in another hand vibrations coursing
through six invisible limbs a struggle
to stay in place as the moment bursts
over and over and over my head
a melody flits like a hummingbird wing
and under the earth an upwelling
ending in water, water, water

as I bite down doe-eyed
dead bird or gone missing
I'll try my best to drink its blood
and wonder if I'm only teething.

Lost and Found

I found my grandmother in the freezer
gnawing on a roast I had bought on sale
but never had the heart to eat.
She still had all her teeth: something
she had always been proud of,
"I don't eat with my robot
hip" she used to reason.

There was no one left to impress,
but she kept going as though she were
going to fell the roast, dam a river,
raise a family and pass on her efforts.

I left her to the burn-
I'm not proud of it, but would you
have me take her out only to lose her
again; find her behind the dryer, knitting,
what I would guess is a sweater, from dust bunnies
or in the cabinet doing her best
to open a can with another can,
banging them together like clumsy lovers,
but I'll bet I'm afraid to find her
as I left her: ever on her way out,
biting her tongue like an undulating snake
with no discernible head.