sometimes
we have to be the ear, sometimes the mouth. You are
and are not the speaker in this story—you are the bridge connected
to the land connected to the man you love and the woman you dislike
who teaches spin class. It’s not personal. It’s not personal
when the universe says it’s complicated and you have ten minutes
to understand quantum physics. When the man you love says
there’s a new connection called supersymmetry and it exists
between two fundamentally different types of particles called bosons
and fermions, you hear bosoms and females. You hear he’s thinking
about the spin teacher with the nice breasts and burrow deeper.
The essential idea is this—someone will always bruise your grapes
and someone will end up in the middle. Someone you love will break
your favorite coffee mug and bring you lilacs. And you will be
connected to people who make your eyes roll. You’ll be connected
to others who stand on the bridge and consider jumping off. You’ll try
to care for them. And you will not look your age, but you will
feel sad when you look in the mirror because we all want to live
a little longer, because the dog will die and the cashier has lost his job
for stealing saltwater taffy from the bin, but he still calls you
darling, calls everyone darling, and today,
darling, darling, darling, the flashlight works.
MAGPIES RECOGNIZE THEMSELVES IN THE MIRROR
The evening sounds like a murder
of magpies and we’re replacing our cabinet knobs
because we can’t change the world but we can
change our hardware. America breaks my heart
some days and some days it breaks itself in two.
I watched a woman having a breakdown
in the mall today, and when the security guard
tried to help her, what I felt was all of us
peeking from her purse as she threw it
across the floor into Forever 21. And yes,
the walls felt like another way to hold us
and when she finally stopped crying
I heard her say to the fluorescent lighting,
Some days the sky is too bright. And like that
we were her flock in our black coats
and white sweaters, some of us reaching
our wings to her and some of us flying away.
BRAIDED BETWEEN THE BROKEN
Today apologies were falling
from the trees and the apples
were being ignored.
There’s a chapter in our lives
where we tried to shred pages,
where we tried to rewrite the tale.
Let’s call that chapter The Numbness,
or The Boredom, or the place where we forgot
we were alive.
That morning I woke up and wandered outside
onto the backtrail,
past the No Trespassing sign into the arms
of an evergreen or a black bear. It didn’t matter
who held me then; I was the moss, the lichen,
the mushroom growing on the fallen log.
No one expects perfection, except when they do,
which is always.
Even you, king of the quiet,
crash when I talk about my brokenness.
Cover up, your fractures are showing.
In my life I try to apologize for things I haven’t done
yet. Those are the bruised apples of me,
the possible fruit rotting in the field.
Remember when I kept replaying melancholy?
Remember when I opened our melody with a switchblade?
Rip out the carpet. Mow down the dahlias.
Let’s ruin our lives …
It felt good to hurt then—
until it didn’t, until we were left
with bad flooring, a garden
where nothing grew.
You’re asking about the next chapter
and the one after that. You’re asking
what time I’ll be home and handing me
a cloth to buff my halo.
Let’s put a comma here.
Let’s put in a semicolon and think about
the next sentence.
I dream of erasers. I dream of wite-out.
I dream of the song where the pharmacist
doesn’t judge me for not being able to make it through
the day without some sort of pill.
UNSUSTAINABLE
When
