Books of advice, magazines, secret cures,
formulae, strident pages
stiff-legged and shouting expert
in the public square of the indomitable truth,
snapshots of the honeymoon,
paradise in silhouettes, champagne,
a silver script: it all flares up
so eagerly to flame,
takes the match like a lover’s hand
hungry to dissolve.
How urgent to abandon others to their lives
so you can sit in this,
the only room
where both your hearts are beating –
your only hearts and only yours,
the man across the room,
the only man who sees your heart
as the composer saw the birds perched across the alley on the wires.
They were not notes and staff until he played them as they stood
and they blazed into song because he made them so.
Listen.
Is the tune he plays the song you want to be?
No answer is good enough,
as long as it is yours.
Look in the mirror. Practice saying you’re beautiful. You must say this out loud – you must say this one thousand times until your face believes you. You must say this and see the glorious and wounded contours of the human frame, your broken nose and hooded eyes, creased skin, your crooked teeth, you must…
Sunday mornings, she would gather eggs, slipping her hands beneath the white feathers, biddies murmuring in prayer. The warm globes felt like hers, the same way the beauty of shadow on the wreckage of truck did not surprise her, the same way the knife had missed her toe – of course it had – when…
Soap bubbles the size of silent whales float and founder from the wand of the prophet. Over and under, rippling in the swells of air, they roll and surge, at play until the pop that pulls them like a sentence back inside the lead. The prophet writes again: in each smooth behemoth a plea for…
Nine chickadees hunch in the packed snow of a tire track picking spilled seed. They look so suddenly earthbound, as if they are what scatters from the sack, blind in January sun, sharp scribbled feet stuck in the drift, so many careless darts – I laugh and laugh. Love comes to this: forgetting our wings,…
Third Draft: In the Absence of a Word for a Woman Who Is Not a Mother “Your dream, then, is of a nothingness where an investment of love lives on.” ~ Charles D’Ambrosio Under the pitted crust of April snow, blind and rooting, everything waits. Even my resolve not to have babies, elegy, effigy, small…
I like walking the house at night, my husband asleep beside my absent shape. I would use the word secret, but it makes him restless, as though he were a child and I used the word tomorrow; as though he were dying and I used the word tomorrow. I walk the house I built before…
