be less sure
of the emptiness
upon which sit
the cities of your pain

a great yawning
a centerless plane

be less sure now
of this filtering light
and the pebbles it lands
between

you spread your fingers
and what you lost is not
less yours because it is now
elsewhere

In as much as anything is ours
-even our names are given to us
only for a time -
what you never had
you possess more
in absence

because absence is a memorized space
created by the arches of longing and losing

and when you embrace it
you are finally
suddenly
through

conditioned

woke in the middle of the night
no longer drunk
but wrung out
of seven different liquors
and the regrettable silence
I never keep
pregnant, sick, with the space
words leave when they leave
and I still haven't said a thing

it's like trying to get
to that deeper layer of muscle,
scraping the fat away
through disciplined
arches of the eyebrow
and concentrated
flares of the nostril

through throwing the last
of your baggage in a bindle
over your shoulder
after carving whatever
you were supposed to carve
on the post

through stretching to pick
the highest hanging fruit

and I wonder if I have plucked it too soon
even as it swells within me -
the juices sweet on my lips
but in my stomach, a sword.

somewhere in the coat you never owned
never even thought of until just now
is an address written down in case you needed it

and the paper is yellow
and ripped from a legal pad
from a life you almost lived

and the address is familiar
like fire on your lips

and you are touching
lightly this paper in your mind
and you are chewing on the edge of it
and staring into a street you don't know
a street you will never know

and it is winter and the coat is warm
and made of some kind of fur
and white as the snow blowing from the west
A wind you can't name places its hand on your neck


                             ****

In the morning, in your sleep, you slipped your
hand into the warm pocket of his sweatpants
as you bodies moved separately through dreams

When you woke, your head fit where the muscles
of his shoulder and arm meet
and when he sat up and said what he said
you were scared
and then suddenly
you understood
and then suddenly again
you were home

I am trying to learn you

your eyes and your smile
and the smile that is there
when you are not smiling

I haven't found that yet
and sometimes I mistake
your thinking face for an
anger I have seen before,

and it scares me, the quickness
of your clouds

but I think that is just as foolish
as making fun of German because
of its guttural sounds when it
contains the word sehnsucht.

How little I know of your pain
and its circumference.

How little I know of the coming joy.

When you touch me I know
my stories and sadnesses
and also how small they are,
how they are mice haunting
the walls of this house
and after we fight, sitting
across from each other
on your bed, I know I don't
even have to set traps

but rather, just stop feeding them.

I dreamed we were tuning 
our voices to crickets
We kept talking about broken trees
as a metaphor for maybe broken bones
or fingers that no longer worked
because of sunburn or jalapeno juice 
and the paralysis that ensued for years
after the incision or eruption

It wasn't Vesuvius
but I walked until my skin broke 
and if I outran the fire 
I didn't know until now
because I died anyway
in a certain way,
in a certain way. 

And later, in bed, we were cautious,
taking up each others arms
as umbrellas
as circles within which to dance

It is September
late enough in the summer
to burn candles by my bed
late enough in my life
to abandon this curated loneliness  
 

I had forgotten that I wrote
my father's obituary.
What a revelation to find it
three years later
in my email archives
while searching for something else
in August by the sea
as the sun sets behind the light house
and the water moves
in the familiar way
of his smile.
Whether or not he loved
the taste of blueberries
I will always pair him
with the slick blue sweet
taste of northern mountains
and rocky sea coasts
and an optimism that followed
him to the the last.
I am a phoenix he said
I am a phoenix and I am 
about to rise.
I think he must have finally ended his
long argument with God
because lately in my dreams
he's been far more pleasant,
insisting he faked his own death
and has many more lives to live.

slept in an ant trail
woke early
to car alarms
that sounded like
a dial tone
or a busy signal
and wondered who
was making
the call
and who
wasn't
on the other line.

How do you measure pain?

The coldness of a frog?
The taste of pineapple?

Here is what to do
when you are lost:

pronounce the word
love as "no"
and wear the same shirt
for three years without telling
yourself.

Collect shadows
of birds, the prints they leave
on the sidewalk,
and hide yourself in that sunless
space.

When you are hungry
bite your thumb at hunger
and when you are angry
sing songs to an empty window

and when the morning comes 
too soon
stretch your muscles against 
the sky and know,
from the center of your bones,
that there is a room inside your chest
and it is full of secrets you've kept 
from yourself. 

Enter. 
Further in.
Embody yourself.






 

Three Poems 
for David Paradine 


Liminal 

The moon is nearly full again.
It appears out of nowhere
as you do, my friend
a ghost casting light
on my clouds
suddenly.

Like the moon,
you are almost 
the wholeness of yourself.
My brother,
how you shine.



From Tangiers to Manhattan

though neither of us live
in either place
we sit in the kitchen
sharing bourbon
intertwined like roots



From Idomeni to Hartford

after the bitter medicine
the kill is nearly full again
it appears hour of nowhere
as do you, my friend,
a ghost casting light
on my clouded
suddenly

There are three doors
and I stand in the threshold
liminal
You hold my hand 
I walk through

and wake to a jungle of birds
and a boy collecting stones
to remember where he's been

looking out the window that day you knew it would end
and this is the last time I'll dig up your body
because I don't have anymore questions to ask of your bones

the drain is clogged again
and the toothpaste floats in floral
patterns on the surface of the muddy water

I could create an entire language of the half
words I never finished saying to you
I could build a house out of all the years you took

and this is the last time I'll look back over my
shoulder to see your breath hanging like a ghost
from the tree we never carved our initials into

I cut you out slowly, strand by strand, as I shaved
my hair to the root. I thought it was rebellion,
but it was an old mourning ritual I learned before I was born

and it worked. As the hair inched down, my body
healed and my mind returned from its wandering 
and when I looked in the mirror I saw that 

days had ended and begun again
that the moon had risen in its fullness 
that tomorrow morning will always come, 

even when the night felt like a heavy door that a thousand 
other men could never open. I was wrong. 
The door was a veil and when the wind
blew again, the veil lifted and I was born to myself.

Help Improve Our Proofing Tools

Allegory of The Cave
currently the pay off amount is 0000.0
To Whom It May Concern,
For instance, if I had a student who had learned to excel at memorization but was limited in his 
each essay gets the reader's attention?
December 0000 -- Present: English Language Arts teacher at the Academy of Nursing and Health 
this led me to add the second major of psychology and seek out a research assistant position 
why are some schools respected more than others?
the tension between what I saw in application at the school level and what I was reading about
free lunch, I lived alongside these questions 
she said with a half smile 
I am specifically interested in studying what policies are impacting students in areas of high poverty 
why are some schools respected more than others?
what happens when they leave there? do you get to start all over?
will other colleges accept your credits? would they be able to get a job with what they learned?
Do you graduate?
Have you considered yourself getting a job with the educational things you learned in prison?
Have you considered yourself getting a job with the educational things you learned in prison?
We read Plato's Allegory of the Cave and Malcolm X's Literacy Behind Bars to get a better understanding 
of a prison and its impacts on both inmates 
for the safety and well-being of the children 
detail-oriented, fussy, picky
up, a mountain loses its hugeness and becomes  
there should be a middle eastern teacher
"why is that so, do you think?" "because we're not white" 
Your job is to tell 
Can you imagine the blood in my vein
but it's their fault they didn't go
My allegory of the cave
you can not face me 

they wanted to know if Etheridge Knight really went to jail and i said 
that's something we have to look up because my history is built 
by textbooks and curiosity but you can't be curious about a name you've 
never heard, in spite of majoring in English, studying poetry, and writing 
it for the last ten years and i am embarrassed by my whiteness and my 
ignorance and it is not too painful to tell them, because they know anyway, 
and they are kind about it. 

and so, yes, children, he did. Just like Malcolm and just like Martin
and just like i don't in spite of all the opportunities, because right 
now it's more important to get to you by 7:30 and anyway, who 
would post bail? 

i try not to cry, as much, anymore, because i haven't earned the tears
of other people's lives. i have only earned my own and God, and anyone 
around me, knows i've shed enough of those in the last four years 
to take my breaths in a jagged way that shakes my whole body and 
alarms the students and they say miss, did you forget to breathe again?

and what a question when yes maybe i did or maybe i held my
breath too long in order to feel the air press against my lungs when i was biting 
my lip and trying not to cry but i walk around free in a world where 
it is easier for me to breathe than it is for others 

when i saw her face it was on the beach in the summer and i was wearing 
a striped bikini and feeling good in my skin and then i saw her, smiling, 
not her mugshot, and by the time i saw her, she was dead and i didn't know 
what to do but shake and shudder and burn with anger under the sun
until my skin turned the color of the inside of my eyelids that did not burn
with tears because this was beyond that

i am still trying to find a language to speak but what is better is to listen and
i would like to believe i am ready for the revolution but the only reason i'm 
closer to being ready is because i know i am not and that i need a thousand 
more years of sitting at the feet of others to learn how to live as an interruption
to the heavy forked tongue that tells our history.

A student says in class:

there are two meanings to the word husband
the verb: to carefully use or manage

That night a student says to me in a dream:

I don't mind the dirt and I like the twists
but, I swear, this winding dirt road better
lead somewhere eventually

and we watch the camera pan out
and the road keeps going
through valleys and trees and fields
and there are mountains further off

we know
every road leads
somewhere eventually.

But sometimes I forget that
and it seems like all the streetlights
have turned to trees
and I am lost and there is snow in my beard
or in his and I mistake myself in dreams for a
man I used to know
and I am trying on men I don't know
and wearing their bruises
and it seems to make sense since I am 
32 and that is an age to begin to think about what
might be around the bend
and besides my ovaries hurt

but

i am further from home with men
who believe that I am lying
when I say I would rather be a very ancient
wall on which people write their secrets
than a mother or a thing that is easily
managed or used

what home but the road is there for a woman
who will not be had?

The moon's eyelid is half shut

the cross my father made me

dangles from the only nail left in the 

plaster, all the others having pulled 

from the wall and then pulled the wall with them.

I am not my father's daughter: there are many bent nails,
broken hammers, and dead plants in my possession.

I imagine if I were Basho I would look
to the mist over a mountain or the dew on a blossom
and know transcendence but I live in a city
and I am alone with the grain of the wood floor 

and the chill from the thin windows.

What they don't tell you when you lose someone 

is that it happens more than once.

I have lost my father every day for two years,

The plaster on the wall is waiting to crumble
and I am waiting to be fully returned to myself,
but still, there is the swollen eye of the moon,
the whittled night, the orange street lights
that dangle like fruit.

I am a thousand years old and Basho is my
mailman. 

10/26/15

I have been living from my stomach lately
in the center of that trembling
that comes from coffee or the days before
unutterable change

I am getting smaller
so that I can climb further
in, so that I can touch those places
that still burn

the cilia tangle, blushing at my nearness

7/2/15
It mattered, didn't it, all
the babies that smiled at me
on the way to Caitlin's place
which is around the corner
from your first apartment

like the fawn that night

and when I got there
I sensed rain and rose my open
hand to the air

I am ready to take whatever comes now
I am ready.



8/15/15
The night a hat gently on my head
this covering more than I ever had

the love flowering from the bones
might just as easily have been worms

this is what it's like to look a thing in its
eye socket

to breathe in the same space you used to fill
      until you no longer did
leaving behind these circuses of air.



8/24/15
Girl, girl. Let your hair down like a veil
Today you are 20
and moving into a dorm room with four girls
and four corners and many tiny white lights



8/30/15
The smell of coffee
up the stairs
my bed a table I lay myself across

and the moon all huge and yellow
and bobbing in the sky

When my bed is not a table
it is a boat
and I am alone in a sea



9/5/15
the little girl through the window
says "he loves me he loves me not
he loves me"



10/24/15
I am very tight inside of myself -
every muscle tuned to the key
of moonlight puddled in a curled leaf

Do not speak, but collect
your words and press
them beneath your tongue
so that I may find them
when I kiss you.



Dates Unrecorded:
to say God and really mean it

Rain raised the river
rain ran to the river

"I was thinking of how I had to break
the binding in order to make the book
lie flat"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omhHQ2mVWXU

What parts of us do we frequent? What tuning do we
sleep to? What was it like to love you? Remember.
I don't. I feel unfinished - and somehow young -

We are greatly sad, we are gently lost and leaning
in doorways and listening to piano music that
saturates our clothing and catches on the locks

we are ghosting ourselves, never responding to last
questions, standing ourselves up for dinner so that,
when we come to, we find our vacant bodies bending
into the yellow light of the fridge in a dark kitchen
at some neglected time of night

we run out of milk and make the best of it
we run out of hope and make a collect call
to the last place we saw it

wondering if it's draped its bony body over
the divan, a copy of some lessor Dostoevsky
in one hand and a cigarette in the other

and then the world turns around and astonishes us

I saw a man who reminded me of you in the card
section while I was lost amongst the vegetables
considering the price of beets and all the different shades
of green, and I thought this man, he is older than the
last time I saw you but that you are older than the last
time I saw you and so am I

A child walked by with a fire hat and said hello
and I floated toward to the deli.

I didn't wake up until that night in the middle
of a dream in which you and your lover had moved
into a dark house with low ceilings and narrow hallways,
a raised ranch, right across from my mother's house

and I couldn't understand who you were now. I kept looking
for the boy I knew who studied maps and communism and
art history now and then. I kept asking God where he went.
The dream went on all night until I made peace with this loss,
and just as I did you walked by and held your pointer and thumb
finger together as if to say "I was this close to coming to you"

and I couldn't speak for fear of crying but I looked at you as if to say
"I was here the whole time, waiting" but I know that's not the
story you know or the dreams you have and I know now that
your stories and your dreams are no less true than mine

When I woke it was fall and the leaves were already
carpeting the ground and the milkweed was floating
and the hawk that my mother believes to be my father
was perched over the fence you built, watching the clouds.

Summer gathered her children 
and rowed all the boats to the edge

of the land and waited for the darkening 
so she could close her torn hands.

She hung her apron from the moon 
and stretched her body over the horizon. 

She sang a song we couldn't hear. 

We all die when she does - 

her lonely suckling at stars
her green complaint against the sky

a reckoning. 

There are things moving we can't see
my mother says

wood beams in houses that contract
rocks rising through dirt

I said "pin nah chey" and you said
"it's pinawsh" and I folded the correct
pronunciation and a silver shame
into the bird cage of my chest

I remember something as a rose petal -
either your mouth of my nipple -
and the bed was so hard I remember
sleep as a plumb line

and there were train tracks in that
room with us in a weak white light
and speakeasy doors

Can you remember the password?
It's important in case anyone takes our
body and wears it around as a costume
at galas or bars or tea parties

my neck is strained from looking for you

I hear my voice in your head as a silver bell

I hope your sciatic nerve has stopped choking you
I hope your body has worked itself to joy
And I hope when you dream of me
I am walking towards you with all my bones
exposed