so many of my roads
are brand new?
COURAGE & A COMPASS
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
BREAK THE GLASS
OF YOUR CHEST
Find the following contents:
courage & a compass.
Maybe your heart’s never given
the greatest directions,
but it’s always done its best.
Listen to the ruckus,
the pound & the pulse.
You’ve got this. You’ve got this.
TILTED HALO, CROOKED CROWN
When I grow up
I want to build empires
with my bare hands
just to knock them down
curtsy as they crumble
tilt my halo, crooked crown.
HOW TO TELL A STORM IS COMING
Lick your fingertip. Hold it to the wind. Wait for Michelangelo to paint you into existence. Wait for Adam to find God. Witness frescoes dry / fade / peel. When you feel you’ve waited long enough, wait some more.
Understand this: prediction is not a religion.
Fall down a rabbit hole. Now you’re
a cloud atlas, a weather pattern,
mackerel skies & mares’ tails,
birds crowding power lines.
Now I’m standing outside watching
stratus clouds wondering
when the rain will come.
v. Now my heart is a weathervane
& the barometric pressure of my blood
is just enough to keep my wings tucked,
to make me forget all I’ve ever known:
shoulder blades & petrichor.
DEPRESSION
When I said
it comes in waves
I meant
that in the middle
of the clearest, calmest day
I see its hundred-foot face
in the distance—
the wall
barreling toward me.
Even if I survive
come out on the other side
there will always be
another Goliath
building
right behind it.
FROM SPACE ALL OUR CITIES LOOK LIKE STARS
FROM EARTH
the moon looks like a small boat
drifting into obsidian. A black sea,
still as the day she left me.
I can’t stand the sight of it.
Caustic crescent.
Waxing goddess.
So I set sail beyond the atmosphere
let the darkness decant
cozy up in spatial fabric
with my favorite book.
FROM SPACE
she is not worth mentioning.
FROM SPACE
all our cities look like stars.
THE TOPOGRAPHY OF YOUR BODY
The weather makes my knees ache. I crumble
into Epsom salt, tape paint
samples to the sky & brainstorm ways to stay gray.
Cinder block. Forged iron. Campfire smoke.
Burnt ember. Pewter. Lava stone.
Poets should avoid eye contact & interviews.
“What are your strengths?”
“Vulnerability. Devouring people whole.”
Even now I can recall the topography of your body
every inch soaked in opaline possibility
every canyon, every curve luminesced.
Even now I am surprised on the mornings I wake
to find our bones still covered in flesh.
I want to be wide open. Vitreous. A house
made of only windows.
So transparent birds try to fly right through me.
THE FERMATA
I grieve with my hands.
Fingers of a pianist,
long and delicate
like held breath.
I put them to work.
Scrub dishes,
smooth sheets,
pull weeds.
They stay busy.
By the end of the day
they curl under the weight;
my mind follows suit
& collapses into a heap.
A pile of magnolia leaves.
A pit of oak burned to ash.
PAPER DOLLS
I could write an entire book, call it
“Falling in Love at a Distance.”
I could pack the pages with metaphors
about having tectonic plates for a rib cage,
how my heart rests on a fault line,
how it’s no one’s fault but mine.
I could write about imaginary lines
& states that shouldn’t exist
simply because they come between us,
but that doesn’t make any sense.
I won’t write about that tonight.
Tonight I am dropping temperature,
low humidity, bracing for fall,
when my thoughts will dress up
like paper dolls & parade around
in layered rumination.
This is how the story ends.
(This is not how the story ends.)
SONGS WITH OUR EYES CLOSED
FADE IN:
EXT. ATOP A SKYSCRAPER – NIGHT
Four legs dangle over the ledge of a high-rise. Below, light trails, halcyon from a distance, throwing gilded glints, carnelian meteors against the asphalt backdrop. Between laced fingers, neon. Two near-strangers sit, their shoulders squeezing empty space, trying to collapse the earth’s lungs. A city, running out of breath, a symphony of horns and ‘to hell with yous,’ muted, spins its vinyl song.
HER
Just when you think you’ve made it through the worst, the universe delivers another blow. It’s like we spend our whole lives learning how to navigate the pain. [pause] But there has to be more than this, right?
HIM
That’s the thing. It hurts to exist.
A car crash in slow motion. Chopin’s Nocturne in B-flat Minor, op. 9, no. 1 accompanies the accident. The impact is shown in fragments. Glass shatters. Metal folds. Airbags deploy.
PAMUKKALE
Bleach. If you use enough bleach,
you can clean anything, even your
daydreams scaling rice terraces,
white travertine tiers gleaming
in the setting & forgetting.
I have not seen this shade of blue
since that day in Monteverde
when the taxi sputtered away in fumes
bought or borrowed from Kuwait
& left corneas looming in my irises,
had not seen it previously since Hume
asked me to imagine what was missing
& I couldn’t until I met you.
Does that somehow still count?
(They say I dreamt you up.)
Pamukkale, petrified waterfall—
I am so many frozen histories.
I am a hot spring of memories
of the men who dwell inside me;
they live like kings in cotton castles.
I just plan on melting away.
SEISMIC ACTIVITY
At my funeral
I don’t want anyone to speak
Over the absence of my voice
No longer a cashmere static
A voice poured like cold milk
Over a bowl of Rice Krispies
No longer a crackling fire
& when they lower my lifeless body
Into the ground,
drop lilacs on my casket
I hope they think of me and tremble
Remember me hand-clutched-to-chest
Because of the aftershock & shake
When every word still aches
No longer, no longer
The very legacy of my work—
The kind of seismic activity
That makes passing strangers
Simultaneously stop & ask
Did you feel that?
NORTHERN LIGHTS
This song is eight minutes & sixteen seconds long. A cathartic symphony of instrumental snowdrifts, wordless because what is there to say, except that you’re gone.
You’re gone.
& it’s harder than I thought. Your hand in mine. (Goodbye.) But these are only lines. Science defines how it ends. A final flickering of the brain stem before the city inside your head goes dark.
I don’t believe in science anymore. Give me legend & folklore. Tell me that north of here the electricity of her voice still hurtles into the earth at hundreds of miles per hour. That she exists in the pink—green—yellow—blue—violet collision of charged particles. The violent orange & white. That she dances on the nightside of the planet. Tell me the human spirit is inextinguishable. That her joy still sparkles on moonlit beaches in the Maldives, that her fire rages in forests across California, & that her synapses strike in Catatumbo lightning.
No, she is not gone. She has only passed on.
& she is light. she is light. she is light.
Iv. crescent
HELIOTROPIC
What was the world before you?
A dull & aching gray, deadened
(with so many dead ends).
I can barely remember it.
But I will never forget the color
you birthed into the universe,
how the warm & cool of you
blended into heliotropic hues,
then emerged as twilight hours.
Everything I know about love
I learned the very first time
the moon shone on your skin,
that to me became lubricious,
& under lavender halos of light
I danced & romanced with you
& your glow-in-the-dark bones.
INVINCIBLE
This morning when you rolled over
out of bed & left my embrace,
I did not fear for your safety.
Under covers of night I whispered
spells between your shoulder blades,
casting a shield over your body
with the imprints of my lips.
But you are not invincible—
you must come home before
the sun crashes into the earth
& shatters into a billion stars.
(You belong in my arms.)
THE BOY CRYING WOLF
I have a problem with NASA. They keep
taking pictures inside my brain & claiming it’s outer space.
Don’t believe me? Last week, Pandora’s Cluster—
that was me watching sound waves,
bats echolocate, remembering what you said
about fumbling in the darkness for friendship.
We could learn a thing or two from bats, like
what happens when signals don’t bounce back.
Don’t get me started on the heart, or the supermassive
black hole discovered just last month. Now they’re
studying the science of [falling out of] love.
On the event horizon, evergreen soldiers pantomime
the word pining. Nobody knows what they want.
Fables learned as children, now acted out as adults.
The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
Where is the boy crying wolf?
HOLD STILL
This isn’t the first time you’ve fallen
and I’m sure it won’t be the last.
That’s what happens when the body
grows faster than the man wearing it.
Even after all these years,
your skin feels like an oversized shirt
with too many pockets.
Hold still,
let me wipe the crumbs from your mouth,
garnet remnants of hearts you’ve consumed.
You didn’t mean to, you said.
You were just hungry for something more
than what your stomach was built for.
Hold still,
let me blow the ash from your forehead,
from the creases lined by fires you’ve set.
When I asked why you were building
all these matchstick empires,
you said they were easier to burn.
Hold still,
let me grip your unhinged jaw
and kiss the existence out of you.
ANATOMICAL HEARTS
I’m making a list of practical things:
— always carry an umbrella
— look both ways before crossing
— don’t fall in love during a monsoon,
mid-summer, 2000 miles apart
Here, in this garage, tattooing your
whole body in anatomical hearts.
It wasn’t enough to wear love
on your sleeve. See figure 3b.
[It never was.]
Fireworks. Between us, enough
e l e c t r i c i t y to light an entire city.
What would Tesla think of our spark?
HARBOR TOWNS
This town is different.
Six days ago we were strangers
smiling at each other from across the table.
His eyes were land. Mine were land—
locked. We were halfway home.
Somewhere in the harbor of my heart—
a ship dropped anchor.
On the surface he appears serene, glassy.
I want to know what storms rage inside of him,
what puts the wind in his sails, what makes him
the man he is. He asks where I’ve been.
Waiting. Wading. Wait—
suddenly
the shorelines of his lips
give way to oceans,
a depth I’ve never known.
THE MARTIAN
Last summer I planned a road trip across your skin but your face was a mirage a monolith a melting clock and somehow your name dried up got lost in my voice box.
Death Valley. Namib. The Atacama.
What does it feel like to be an alien on your home planet?
Something like excavating your own rib cage
(and calling it archaeology).
Tell me with a mouthful of red rock. Desert and dust.
How did you find me here? Give me coordinates.
What were the chances the odds our paths would cross
pointing satellites into empty space.
You and I, we live on the same wavelength.
Changing frequency --- adjusting antenna
listening to the static in the dark
the charge and the spark
wondering if anyone else feels the way that I do
and if I’m standing at the edge of the earth
why does my heart look so much like Mars?
TWO TRUTHS, ONE LIE
The kitchen table appears a continent and an arm’s reach between us. We play two truths and one lie.
Some nights you stay awake counting stars. One for every regret. Two for every time you wished you were someone else.
You don’t love me.
A black wolf visits y
ou while you dream.
You never dream.
LOSING YOU IN HUES
Tonight I am missing you in spectrums. Ultraviolet light, the clear of coconut rum. Sun-soaked skin, the color of burnt umber, mushroom and mud. Tonight I am losing you in hues. The way the blue of the mountains fades the farther away they are. The way a cooling star goes red before it burns out. Sometimes I think about dimensions, and how if I stand in the doorway where we said goodbye, we are still together in every dimension but time. I put my hand to the bodiless space where your cheek would be and tell you I love you. Invisible you. So close, so impossibly far.
DANDELION CLOCKS
One day we will talk about
how our blue moon wish came true.
How, when the universe finally released
the pins that held us so remote,
we did not fall, suddenly and all at once,
but rather drifted toward each other
with the whimsical grace
of dandelion clocks.
SINGULARITIES
There must have been a breakdown of space and time the night you died. A singular point. A collapsing of your soul into something else. Into someplace else. Sometimes I write out loud. What is the word for the way tail and traffic lights reflect on wet pavement? Reds and yellows and greens, all blurry bright. The way the inky black of the road holds the glow. Sometimes I swear I see your face in a stranger’s face. In the lips, the jaw, the eyes. What I mean is I have seen the world glitch in broad daylight. I invent new theories to account for the vanishings. If supermassive black holes exist, then why can’t the opposite? Consider that a microscopic singularity has occurred in my brain, is devouring cells, neurons, intercepting moments, destroying memories. Maybe if I write enough fiction, the rules and laws of relativity and nature and mourning will no longer apply and I won’t have to accept what I am so afraid to accept:
that I am simply forgetting.
TELL ME HOW THE WORLD ENDS
as if we are
in the backyard lounging
on Adirondack chairs
looking up
tell me the center of our galaxy
smells like raspberries
and tastes like rum
that somewhere beyond the dust
cloud of Sagittarius B2 a harmonica wails
a guitar strums
Stargazing at Noon Page 3