Sweet Alyssum

She filled her living room with flowers
like they would give her new air to breathe.
I kicked the dirt like it would sing to me
if I tugged hard enough at the roots of soul
or of dandelions or morning glory impersonators
or, I don't know, maybe at my own feet buried
in the mud. We really never met. I knew her,
she didn't know me, and that's the way she liked it.
Alone in her house, I imagine she let bees
amble in and out the holes in the window-screens,
taking the scent of roses and sweet peas
on their soft bellies in their circular paths.
Something about the smell outside ate at me,
like I could almost touch the flowers, tangible,
but buried in the withered smell of fresh funeral
wreaths—left for the week after the green ground
forgives the emptiness and starts to creep in.
Suddenly with her and never with her; never touched
and never told that sunshine isn't just the here and now.


A semi-stream-of-consciousness piece from a few nights ago—they always seem a little better after leaving them alone.

To burn with a swaying flame

He falls into the distance of lens flare. Corpses of color sift into silver. Sifted into silver. The light distortion was a flickered beam a million years in the making—and he holds it in his hands. He tries to imagine the day the photo was taken, but the subjects seem too unreal. Too white by faulty light meters. Too still by nature. Sifted into silver, chested and ingested for a breath. It's too easy to imagine the next moment they moved, unaware of their unreality. Their bodies relaxed into time again. He falls a distance of lens flare, 266.7 millimeters of a lifetime.

We have yet to exit

            The white lights glare sickly off the tiles plastering the station wall. I can almost make out my reflection in them. The crooked squares angle me into two-by-two sections. I crane my neck and watch the left half of my face push into other tiles. Imagine my brain rippling through the grout and snapping back into cubes.
            Impatience wrinkles through the air again, and everyone sighs. I turn and press my neck against the cool ceramic. We can all almost hear the squeak of sharpies against it, feel the smear of someone's spit over the lines to seal their handiwork. But we stood long enough not to care. Enough to think, without really attending to our thoughts. The spit would have been rushed along too. Just make sure the marker sticks and find another blank space.
            Across the platform an ad proclaims WHAT IF SEEING EACH OTHER AGAIN CHANGED EVERYTHING? I want to stuff it in my purse to think about later. In different lighting.
            Impatience demands attention when it's finally outrun you. The muffled weight-shifts of backpacks crawls into my ears, the clack of hard-soled shoes. It is momentarily compact and clean. Surrounded and squared off, bodies push through bodies like open air.

Static Apparatus

Architects climb the vertical lines with grace
to draw across my worries, silver and black
beams between their fingertips.
Their trapeze costumes match their pencils,
pointed and dropping into skyscraper masses,
blending with their work as the movement
dissolves. I can't decide if here, in this beautiful city,
I am pleased or I am panicked. If I am alone
in this stairwell, or if I know this address
too well to give directions for "away again".
Who hired the architects to bridge the gaps
of each 3 AM nightmare? I paid for the metal
they bend with their teeth.

Untying Stillness

Our voices crack along the edges,
where they run together and then quickly
fall away. Dust on our shoulders
echoes "I love you" and we brush
our fingers in our silver words.
In all the days our silence ran over
our lips, catching a lisp and a laugh,
we built up a resistance to keeping
our arenose vows to ourselves, alone.
Mine and yours and the space of ours
cresting in the place between our lungs.
I've never loved the dust swept into sun
as much as I do when we swell the air.

A response to Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely, from my creative writing class last semester. (Open in new tab to view original size.)

For a moment I was lost in expansion

            Sunset comes more slowly. It stretches past its own dip toward horizon, out of atmosphere and down again. My shadow extinguishes and comes to rest at the foot of the mountain, flickering in windows, bright gold faces to the sky. I feel space. Suddenly physical, brushing my hair with its impossible fingers and prying my lungs wide. I feel your heart beating on the other side of twenty miles, smile so close to that standard, and my body alone. Nothing but light and space and road-maps drawing us parallel on paper.

Sleeping Pill

I want to call you,
wake you up to say
I love you,
and wrap myself
in your sleepy breathing.