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.