Polaroid Transfer

They say you ripple
into black dust before
your synapses can re-
connect their constellations,
trying to make up a word
that explains itself.
Fire burns through
your veins and your soft-
pounded skin—blue
turned ochre particles
falter in the sighing
light. Like you sighed
before you grasped
my cold arm in the dark.
They say you sift
through the screen before
the sky breathes white.
The mountains keep
their hands around our
staggered throats—
and you are out of here.
Neither here nor there—
who takes your postcards
when you're gone? Return
to sender, please. We have
no landscapes left to us.
They say a lot of things,
but I am left devoted.
When the sky does take
its breath, we watch
to keep your flicker
closer to our lungs.

I want to break into
the power of lightning
captured in photos.
You're the closest
I've ever gotten, and you
are just as intimately
seized into emulsion.

The cactus flowers
came more conveniently
than I thought. 227
miles isn't so far counted
in disc scratches.
You'd rather have counted
the times the road goes
black within the sky,
but we didn't have enough
disc scratches to count
so high. Pink, poked,
pressed into Encyclopaedia
porcelain pages, blossoms
just as crystalline as lemon-
drops on the rubber floor-mat.

I should have seen the cracks
clawing up your forearm.
Spread out with your veins
in the sing-song sunlight,
they took ahold with enduring
demand. Keeping up appearances—
you told me you'd eat up
the pleasantries of sunshine
for a little reality, a little raw rain.

They say your hair stands up
right on end, listening, just before
it strikes. I'll give them that.
My cells could predict thunder
before I could predict your voice
quieting our cotton T-shirts
at sunset. You'd have claimed
the smoke-filled skies
enough to singe your hair,
and they did, no red-
pen corrections to be had.
Graphite on the windowsill,
you drift without words before
the sky breathes white.
We watch to keep your flicker
closer to our lungs.  

I want to break into
the power of lightning
captured in photos.
You're the closest
I've ever gotten, and you
are just as intimately
seized into emulsion.
Return to sender, please.
We have no landscapes 
left to us. Nothing half-
way about voltaic distances.


My workshop piece! Shout out to Ms. Alexander and all my classmates, if they ever find this—because you're all wonderful. I feel like I get so much more out of hearing other people talk about my words than I can pry out of them on my own. You're all inspiring, and you're all amazing, diverse writers. Reading other writers makes me feel like I'm looking in on the physical progression of a person, in so many figurative and literal ways that I can't find words for. This class has offered me new ideas and opportunities to explore the unknown and my own work. Giving and taking what we need in our words. Thank you for all of that. Today was the sort of class that reminds me why I want to go into English. 

Making fun of my diminutives

Should I hang back and watch the clouds roll across the mountains, without going to the mountains to pull them myself. Everything stays in my echoic memory and I try not to attend to it. The buzz of the refrigerator when the power flickers back on; that summer stayed sunny. But repetition comes in every snap and drawback, carelessly drawing your thoughts up in your arms before falling to red sleep. Everything is as real as it lays across your convalescent skin. 5/16" needled-out nights. He was real as his God hates his dopaminergic neurotic insomnia. Requiring or claiming more than is generally felt by others to be due: The language of inquiry, pedagogy of poetry.* Girls line up in the hall, barefoot in white. The candles fade into their hands, in and out of heavenly tapping along the carpet. I told him angels watch over his shoulder anyway. Unable to bend or be penetrated under pressure; hard: When what happens is not intentional, one can't ascribe meaning to it, and unless what happens is necessary, one can't expect it to occur again.* I mean untroubled by the distortions.* I mean untroubled by voiced concerns without dimes lined up between them. I choked on a dime. Language R is parallel to Language E, perhaps they cannot touch, so we fall into a translation (description) trance.* My aunts said, "Don't worry, it's just like chewing gum." Superstitions lined up on their sons' palms jammed open on the rocks, white and wide maggoting up through their fortunes. And another thing: devious, and cotton, but with sweetly analytical hacking and hilarity (I have said, and meant, that I want people to "get" this, and yet, with expansive sensations, I hate to "lighten up").* Fishing line and the kitchen table gone out from under their flowing fats, gathering crowds to prod at their grimaces. They don't use emergency rooms; he, on their other hands, always made sure to hide his stitches. So I just watch the clouds press their wide bodies against the mountaintops and keep my hands to myself.

*Lines from Lyn Hejinian's My Life.
Also present, dictionary.reference.com definitions of demanding and unyielding

Little Miss

            Her ruby eyes shine out of her sweater hem, woven in with gold thread—I’d like to weave anything close to that treasure.
            She shuffled in the door to push off her boots against the floorboard and pull up another pair of socks. I like the repetition of her motion. Seven steps to the kitchen, the click of the lightswitch and soft pitter on the tiles. It moves me more than I would have liked a month ago. But here I sit and feel her sound, soft caresses across my legs. I can’t say it’s so different from the sound of car doors creaking and slamming out the window in the dark, but here I know it’s her. It’s always her here.
            She flashes and I jump in the mornings, turning herself over and over until she’s gone. I wish she’d stay longer.
             But she’s here now, always moving. She startled the wood with a dropped spoon, a quiet Crap. Her voice smooths over the air in arching waves. Imitation of her tongue-in-cheek phone calls is lain crooked behind me, cracked where I could never capture her imperfection in silk. Her hair shines like dewdrops in the morning. She runs her hand through the strands of sunshine and settles back in the red velvet chair, bowl propped on her knees, her feet on the ottoman and her breath in the air. Spirals of sweetness from her chilled lips.
            Maybe I’m too brave to poise myself above that breath. Silver lining of all my days hanging in the air. I rest on her shoulder. She doesn’t know. She couldn’t know or we’d never be so far apart. Wool and her hair across her neck. Her beautiful neck. I move to touch her.
            She’s screaming, and I’m on the floor, red in my eyes and heat in my legs. Don’t be frightened! I want to say, if only my jaw could wrap around the air like hers does! The chair is gigantic from down here. Her shrieks are larger than life. Scuttle into the bottom of the chair; the dark will return to quiet. I hope for another day where her sound stays soft beside me.

Sleep Text 3/20/14

Fearlessness cracked
into dihedral impossibilities,
in theory never touching
again but knowing
the gaze makes us whole,
takes us whole to gray
skies that wash
in dirty water down
the page, curling the edges
like they can't quite
touch the ground either.
I've never known
myself so fragmentedly,
found in paint
chips layered on bare-
back walls, our naked
arms pressed wide in hide-
away freedom. Keep
ourselves together, but
don't let me touch your
skin and blow away
your ashes. The frantic
weight of starlight creaks
in the windows.
Inches of dust pile across
our open eyes and light
the storm-door break-
away stardom we felt
in the early hours of sun,
left alone with furniture
that lazes around and
leaves none left for our
tiredness.