Take What You Love Out Back & Shoot It.

Blue.

For some reason I dream of Spanish springs. I don’t know the appropriate response to this specific chaos, I have no frame of reference for the saltiness I taste in my mouth when I think of the ocean and the olives. I am landlocked. I think of your lips, in my hazy memory, they are slick and thin. Why do we write down what we’ll never be able to say aloud? I open all the windows and close my eyes instead of going outside and this is a metaphor. I think it’s because you mentioned it, briefly, we were on the world’s longest train ride in brooklyn and I am ashamed i remember because you probably don’t. I look at my hands and I hate my stumpy fingers. Yours are much longer. There was a certain kind of beauty in the way I could hang around without you noticing.  I’d like to tell you we should go to the ocean but we’ve already been and it was covered in trash.

When I think of you I see the color blue, but it is not blue like the water in movies, it’s blue like the ocean on a faded polaroid. Please tell me five true things about yourself. I will do the same.

we can call it fiction

I have loved you for each season
in specific, empty ways.
The building, budding tension of spring,
waiting to bloom, not knowing
if or when could be the right time,
fearing the late night, the early morning freeze.

Until the explosion of summer

and I am an afterthought.
All that’s left of the sweaty desperation.
A small, muddy puddle, barely enough
for you to step through.
I dream of deserts and droughts,
Waiting for you, building stages in the rain.
Waiting like a sunbather waits for the shade.
The nights get cold and I yearn to be bold like trees,
stiff and bare with bright orange leaves.
I turn on the heat, sleep without clothes,
I dream about you and wake up alone.

Keep me close if you want to or toss me away,
either way.
When it’s winter
and the snow is gray slush,
we ride together in cars and our arms touch.
All we have is this, amounting to a single breath,
some slight singularity and
other nonsense about fate.

I’m really bad at updating this. Here’s an old free-write:

I dreamed of you last night and we spoke of avalanches.  I said, “you’re mine” but I didn’t mean that I could have you or hold you or ever would but that eventually you would crumble over me. even if accidentally. I read encyclopedias in the dark, I close my eyes and rub the text over my body and hope the knowledge will seep in.  And I was wearing red lipstick and i could feel it smearing and there was snow on the ground but not enough to cover anything up.  There is something about January that makes me want to take up smoking. Think of smoke rings, think of spelling words out in smoke signals, think of parting pursed rouged lips and saying “I love you” or “i’m leaving” or “i will never be enough” or all the other things you can’t use your voice for. Sometimes I worry that we will one day run out of metaphors. In the late spring we, he, i, us spoke of fears and mortality and there was bad beer at five in the morning and i want to find the birds i know i heard emerging and say You Remember, Don’t You?  There are times when I think too much of myself goes into what I write and there are times when i know there is not enough. We are consumed with the fear that we are either inauthentic or too weird. I dream of giving birth, i dream of my birth, of car crashes, of my stepmother and I wonder what all of it means. There are patterns that emerge so visible we can’t care enough to point them out. I see the skyline of my city and I feel sad, except sad isn’t a strong enough word, except every other word is too strong. I drove into April thunderstorms at five in the morning and i thought of limbs touching under tables. I thought about driving off the side of the highway into trees and I wondered if the trees would welcome me. I thought of our limbs as the branches of trees and I wondered if trees touch branches and fumble and move away quickly. There are so many other places you are needed. There are so many other places you aren’t wanted at all. I want it to appear to onlookers that I don’t really need a family and I want it to seem like I don’t feel abandoned all the time. Am i doing all right? Are we doing just fine? When I left my mother it was in the depths of summer, all sweat and dirt, and being fourteen and not really knowing anything. When I left my father it was winter and I had bags ready and I wore boots to walk in the snow but i still slipped on ice and fell and all of this should tell us something. I couldn’t cry either time. What i want to say is that when I dream of any of the people i have lost or fear I will lose I want to grab them and i want to hold on. When you were not looking i memorized your face and the way you said my name. If i smoked i would blow smoke rings i saying “i hope you read this.”

this is old.

wearing remorse like you wear a badge

sexy something sexy sometimes sexy

like your mother wants to look when

she’s leaving you alone with the two little ones

for a night or twelve on the town.

thin like her arms have been getting,

purple-black like the circles under her eyes,

critical and wide, searching the mirror.

we could be less vacant

i couldn’t be less present if i tried.

hate like the way my thighs touch,

hate like the way i am thirteen

and don’t think my breasts are big enough,

standing next to her and wishing

i could look like that even when

she’s strung out even when she is

bright!bright!wild eyes!

three o’clock in the morning stumbling in—

and sometimes she is a performance artist,

and this is her greatest work yet.

just say what,

just say what you mean.

afraid, afraid like

the response would be

honest and unworthy,

loud and unearthly.

afraid like not knowing how to feel

without feeling anymore.

picking up pieces,

placing them like puzzles,

we’re misconstrued and we are used.

garbage bags are full and it’s trash day.

take us out.

fire/fall 2010

when you thought of life did you picture this or
was it something much more? I pictured
some kind of New England night, perpetual Fall,
comfortable silence between two people
who would always know each other.

my father makes my stepmother the same drink
every night when she gets home from work.
this is the version of love that they have forged—
never having to drink alone.

and i’m sorry, i’m sorry that i
don’t know the meaning of the words
that you scratch onto my back
when we lay in bed, when you are
grabbing me and saying,
turn over, whispering, come over.

maybe everything we all are is just
a mangled mess of
bones and secrets,
maybe it’s just our
muscles moving towards no real ending and
words that disguise wounds that
keep everything in.

we are driving and
i want to tell you about the way buildings look
like they’re on fire this time of day.
the leaves too, someone must have
struck a match. i can still
smell it burning in the air.

you take my hand and i lean toward you.
let’s turn up the radio.

the world is on fire, the world is on fire.
i turn up the radio.

the longest poem i will ever write:

There is something about sleeping in complete silence.
Silence, like at my parent’s lake house
before the exclusion,
before the recession,
before they had to sell it.

Last night the family I will never be a part of expanded.
It shouldn’t feel any different,
so it doesn’t.
So one thousand babies are born
every ten seconds
which isn’t the right statistic
but the sentiment’s the same
numbers won’t change it.

I tossed and turned
in the lake house silence, only hearing the flops
of insomniac fish.
I thought I saw shadows of something five years prior
thought i saw hands trying to hold, a boy
who wouldn’t love me, who couldn’t love me,
who only loved my desperation. I saw
myself turning heads away to look up at the window and I
wanted to yell
       
            What are you doing?

But I don’t.
I stay silent.
My stepmother snores.
When she gave birth
to my half-brother they didn’t tell me
for two years.
I still don’t know why. My father
carried a keychain with his picture inside,
never mine. I remember being
six years old in McDonald’s
thinking there must be
another world, a different universe
where he carried keys with mine.

I extend a lukewarm congratulations.
Welcome to this world, baby I will never meet.
By the time they want to call, phone’s won’t work anymore.
In the future
we still won’t talk.
So it won’t be much different.

If I called and said “I’m sorry”
and guilt came rolling off my tongue
if I was an ice cube melting in the front yard
of the first house, the small house, the house
where I had no real bedroom, would you let me in?
If it was too sunny, too warm, no chance of snow,
would you let me inside?

It’s silent like the lake house and when
my parents had to sell it, i wondered
what happened to everything
that had their name on it?
I picture my father crouched in his home office,
digging a hole for the things we can’t afford anymore,
treasure chest, hope your
chest doesn’t get tight when they talk about money,
hope your eyes don’t avert when the bill falls
to the table, say “i don’t even save pennies,”
tell them you even throw dimes away.

Do you know how much a baby costs these days?
I will consider sending a card with five dollars inside.
A joke, a hoax, say “invest this,” know they will laugh
or roll their eyes or toss it aside,  and know
I did my best.
But I don’t even know their address, I have been
blacklisted from every part of this town,
realized this baby takes my place
in family numbers
as if I was ever counted.

Pretend that i’m normal, now
pretend that I don’t spend
three hours after a ten second conversation
going over every word said.
Less anxious, less needy, maintain
a comfortable distance, be
a functioning human, hold hands
without feeling desperate.

My nose bleeds onto paper,
I fold it into planes.
Pink wings.
Pink like a newborn’s skin or how mine looks
after I scrub too long in the shower.

And the silence
is still deafening.
And I need you
to say something.

in progress:

Take everything you love out back and shoot it.

Take me to abandoned landfill beaches, 

take me to the circus,

I’ll take you

to a smaller planet’s moon. 

You’re staring at the waves.

I’m staring at 

the way sun catches your face.

Meet me at the station.

Meet me far from here. 

We wait for whispers,

we wait to develop telepathy. 

it’s all about you—-the way your lips look in the rain, the love that won’t speak its name, me waiting or the way I came, blowing smoke rings, blowing up bombs, breaking into homes, dress in all black, bank robber, word association, you’re all right, you’re all right, i love you, goodnight. 

Take me to abandoned

landfill beaches. 

I cut my fingers on all the 

antique glass bottles. 

Write down every word you remember: violet, violence, absence, presence.

I dream about you and I am afraid I scream your name. 

This is chaos, this is how you remember it.

When I was six I studied all of my Mother’s medical textbooks, spent afternoons pouring over the words, feeling with my fingers the disease definitions. 

Some things come back in flashes and I don’t know what they mean.

         When He Left She was already pregnant (but no one knew.) And He was getting me medicine (but never came back.) When He told my Father He wanted to adopt me, I was five and too young to understand why they would fight. 

                                Sometimes parents are scary. 

        Wondering now, of course, some sixteen years later, why my Father let me walk out so easily into the cold windy night, me plainly saying that I wasn’t coming back, How Do You Let The Ones You’re Supposed To Love Leave? 

                              Sometimes Parents aren’t sorry. 

        What hurts more? Thinking of your mother passed out on the couch, her mouth slackjaw open, your twelve year old arms struggling to put up a Christmas Tree 

Or

       Waiting for your father to call and ask where you are, expecting more of a fight, how you communicate now—two years ago, through the internet or maybe once separated by a snowy driveway “the car is working fine,” and he will return inside. 

When you think of Home what comes to mind?

No locations, just different feelings. 

I want to leave and I want someone to stop me.

After this, what’s next?

We are not orphans but

we may as well be. 

Next Tuesday

Don’t let the urgency of my words frighten you or how

I attach different feelings to different seasons. 

It’s summer, stay desperate. 

Stay in air-conditioned living rooms too long.

Stay so long you don’t know how hot it is,

and when you finally get outside, you’re surprised.

Avert your eyes. 

Active resistance, passive distance.

The glances of aggression and the subliminal messages,

or what you really meant when you said

“let go, let go, call me next Tuesday.” 

I’m sorry that my arms stayed around

until they were tired and sore, trying to map out

the ways of your waist, the marks on your forehead,

the lines of your face. 

Sorry that I never slept, 

chose instead to turn away, 

sorry that I stayed awake and wept. 

It’s winter. 

Stay inside with your sadness,

tell the snow you know how it feels,

everyone hating it so much, 

its very presence reviled.

Pedestrians making

sharp bright white gray 

walking into warm houses

willing it to melt away.

“Don’t you know,” says the snow

“Don’t you know I feel the same things you do?”

When I said

“I thought I held you,”

I meant it. 

I thought it was more than shadows and words,

phrases and missteps. 

Walk me to my car.

I will inhale and I will call

from two blocks away so you can tell me

“okay. that’s good. now exhale.” 

Winter

on the days she wants to die

my mother sends us outside to draw

chalk-body outlines.

We leave space

between our chubby child fingers.

We leave room to grow.

She wakes in the afternoons,

and it’s always disappointment.

Cherry-picking good intentions,

tongue-tied, cheeks flushed red with regrets.

She says when she dreams

she dreams of city-scapes. Towers in the sky.

We dream of places we’ll never go.

Living in a little white house.

Living with brown grass, bare backyards.

And in the winter the chain-link fence is cold.

Covered in snow, cutting our feet, we were

jumping over it, now we are leaving

pink blood drip footprints.