Sincerity is scary: here’s my poetry with frighteningly little irony. Yes, I’m terrified.
Oh well: Rock n Roll, baby.
—
Space to Move
This is space in The City.
A kitchen for brushing teeth
A place to sit
A drawer for socks
How lucky I am
Even without a window
In the bedroom.
I sleep with my eyes shut
Anyway.
—
they were old
someone there to hold your hand
while they fuss around and fix your bed dressing you
as I undress, touching you just there. the softness getting colder
but never cold, not really. I don’t need you to carry me.
I need you to have been here
with me here
to have shared this breath just this one.
this last one.
that’s fine, it is
that’s fine.
—
Space
There is a space
-a vacancy
Between my shoulder blades
Where I often place my hand
In place of remembering
—
I’m imagining a mirror
the tips of their hair
dripped invisible drips–
colors mixing, turning black
blending into the folds
Of an old shirt of his
he told her they looked good together.
she told him it made her shy
to watch the two of them
together there.
she felt a fawn.
weak kneed, speckled
with white–eyes
wide and searching
for something steady
he smiled and she
turned her eyes
into his chest
pretending not to see
the mirror bleeding an
imperfectly remarkable shade
—
Bright’s Disease, of which she died in 1886
-For Emily Dickinson
And so I sit here, with Emily
As I always seem to do
When I’m scared to die
Or bored of static minds
That all snap shut
On the curves of a woman
I fight through dusty words
The kind that haven’t seen a line
Since she chose them
To carry her
Like wooden shoes—noisey
Uncomfortable on purpose
I think about her often
Not always writing but
Dead too
And how remarkable, truly
That she should die
Just as she lived
—With a terrible Brightness.
—
The Cubical is not Friendly To Reflection.
In the wreckage of calculous
Of twelve years
Of wars and deals
Six years of Spanish
Novels dissected
The cell turned inside out
In cold terms
Who died
At whose hands
When
For what reason
Do the tides
Like sky turn
Blue to red
And still–nothing
The mind turns over
Empty.
—
Chess
Why don’t we play more chess
Why do we fold our napkins
In wild shapes
And why do we cook
Fried eggs that run
Why do we water our lawns
Why do we pull our hair back
Why do we drive
With bone-white knuckles
Why do we paint
Just the ends of our fingers
Why do we pick at our lips
Why, at the end of each day
Do we not lay down our anxious
Hands and why do we not
Thank the Earth when we eat
Why did we start keeping time
On the wrists that we pray with
Why, when we look in the mirror
Do we pinch our skin with the same
Hands we used to
Give thanks with
That we used to
Play chess with.
—
synonymous with
I began my day comparing myself to a small, circular strangeness. It was someone else’s mirror, taken and placed in front of every one of her sentences. Her beauty directed for some reason at my collarbone. I drank coffee, deeply sweetened, and compared myself to this.
I counted every inefficiency in the female body, and further, my female body. When I reached a number high enough, I continued. This is synonymous with pain, I think.
I want to be synonymous instead of what I am, which is some undesirable reflection. I am at a loss, sincerely, for ways to appropriately alter my body.
To make it small is limiting on one’s ability to modify—I have far less space to work with
than originally planned and so I am forced within. There I find only less of the same.
A bruise so dark it has taken years to bloom and dry up.
A deep love of the missing bits of memory and old credit cards. Destroyed out of fear or something sinister.
Destroyed out of fear, I think. Needlessly.
—
I love you, dear reader.
Without any irony at all.
Girl Seeking Peanut Butter 