poetry – Page 28

all day long I do mathematical equations
they say I’m calculating.
in my head.
as I walk to the laundromat
shifting the hamper beneath me,
I think,
that’s an understatement.

I think.

I think.
I think.
I love probability
like
what’s the likelihood I’ll see you again
believing I both convinced myself in this reality
and believe I convinced you it was true
so imbued in my delusion
but then God came to my defense
and I knew that as I watched
some things begin to sprout?
or the analysis like
how much money will I make
if I do this appt and at what cost
to me?
and statistically speaking,
we have to look at patterns,
not just equations but
trends so then here comes
the past.

I turn the headphones up.

you gave me a bouquet of
weeds as I was drinking
my third cup of coffee.
you had picked them from
our backyard when I wasn’t
looking.
you were smiling with teeth;
big, and I thought I loved
you.

I had gone upstairs to
change into a sundress
and tore something near my spine,
suddenly, like a rip inside.
I mustered up enough breath
to walk down the stairs,
back to you,
where you had been standing with the weeds,
where you had been telling jokes,
where you had been laughing and I said:
it feels like I pinched a nerve
and am having trouble breathing.
what should I do?

you had to be somewhere
soon, I knew.
you looked up the staircase
on your way out
the front door and tossed a
I don’t believe you
over the living room floor.
someone else drove me to
the doctor and that doctor
confirmed it,
prescribed me Flexeril
for the pain and wrote me
a note explaining to my internship
why I wouldn’t be in that day.
I laid in bed, waiting for the
drugs to subside.

you came home
and attempted to justify
why you always felt
deceived by me.
I lay numb,
relieved of feeling anything as you recited
everything I’d ever done
that bothered you.
you weren’t sorry,
it’s Thursday and I feel
nothing for you
now.

I drop a pair of panties
on the sidewalk
on the way out and
someone calls me from
the corner.
I turn my headphones up

I feel nothing for you now
but history repeats itself.

“Thursday”

April 10, 2019 0

She put her makeup on slowly. She wanted it to be correct. Never quite flawless, she was more adept at wearing graceful missteps to humanize herself in public. Tonight, she moved slowly. She paid attention to the brow bone, the jaw line, her full lips, all of her best features. She stopped applying the powder to stare. The blush she chose was dark; a shimmering burgundy that ran across her face and cheekbones in the shape of a bruise– untidy but organic. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear examining the soft, honey waves falling over her shoulders first as they moved with her fingers, with the light twist of her neck, and then again as they settled over her clavicle. She wanted to see what she looked like as she approached in stillness and in motion.

“That took too much time,” she said out loud.

Moving her head back and forth in a slow no gesture to see what she looked like disagreeing, she could feel and see the skin of her lips cracking. She eyed the chapstick on the shelf but wet her lips with her tongue instead. We must move on. There was nothing she did for anyone without motive and no one was around to touch them yet. Setting the bamboo brush on the sink, she ignored her dry mouth and unyielding thirst to pick up the mascara. Carefully, she applied the wand to the eyelashes of her left lid and then immediately stopped to examine herself again. Unbundled and free, her thoughts had been leaping ahead of her. They were constant, persistent and biting. Sometimes they were mean. You will never make it. It was distracting. They were being seized by something else (you will never make it); something distant, either imaginary or future she could never tell, but something tugging at her sleeve. Look behind you. She stopped applying the mascara to reach for the twisted, plastic straw from the sink’s ledge and began twirling it in her fingers on instinct. Letting herself be overtaken by the fake memory; the fake way he held her, the fake way he smiled, the fake way it felt, she felt the rush in her chest.

“Stop it,” she barked at herself.

Staring at the mirror once more, she held her own gaze in trance.

“My name is Catarina Kacurek,” she practiced again.

She said it a couple more times out loud until she was satisfied with the way it felt rolling off her tongue. Naturally. Nodding, she put the straw back on the ledge and began to apply the mascara to the right lid’s eyelashes. It’s always like this. She couldn’t see the clock in the bedroom and was thankful. I’m late, she knew. Taking her time anyway, she could still feel the electric bubble running up her spine underneath to announce its arrival, announce its bones were growing over her bones into a grove of wands. I have things to do. She set the mascara neatly back in her makeup bag and pulled out the eyeliner. Dragging the skinny black pencil across the top of her left lid first, she felt a breeze, a draft from a hidden place to the left of her. As she fawned over herself inside, pretending he was next to her complimenting her as she coyly licked the cherry gloss from her lips, she let him praise the way her eyes grew from small and doting to big and black and full of infirmity. She let him kiss her cheek and she closed her eyes to feel it, his light kiss that held no real urgency. She felt his lips part near the corner of her mouth. She could feel his tongue poke out a little as she turned to meet him before she heard a car backfire a few blocks over. Goosebumps trickled up both arms. He was gone and she was gone too. She opened her eyes to see the pencil was now in the drain in a pool of tiny drops of water. In her spine, her bone grove of smoke and scream and sudden life, she felt it. She stared at the pencil, now damp, not ruined but damaged like everything she owned. He was not with her in the bathroom. He was not with her. To clear her throat, her desert dry throat that desperately needed attention, she let out a tiny cough. She came back to life.

“My name is Catarina Kacurek,” she began, facing the mirror.”May I come in?”

She held it there, in her reflection, her dirty blonde and olive complexion not unlike her original self but twisted, distorted slightly like the way it feels when you finally see yourself without a mirror. You’ve been looking at yourself backwards. She was looking at herself angled her whole life; angled smirk, angled eyebrow lift, angled posture. Manicured and yearning and looking more nubile lately, she began wetting her lips again with her tongue. Her lips tasted like plastic fruit and she laughed aloud to see her smile lines so she could once again hide them when the time was right. She laughed aloud and the car backfired again but she expected it now. Her spine grew. She let herself feel the backfire of every other thing in the distance.

April 10, 2019 0

every day at three pm
the chime rings and
most of us ignore it.
we are sitting in front
of it; he in his wheelchair
and me standing, nervous,
moving from side to side
with clench palm, straw inside,
unable to commit to the chair
I placed at the entrance of
the cage.

the birds in the aviary
smell their own shit all day and
think the bell is a taunting God
clanging from a distance to keep time
of their blinkered sentence.
they have flown less than one mile,
tired out on plastic branches
picking each other’s imagined nits;
stick legs and beady eyes that,
if bigger,
would reflect a melancholy
I always thought that myself,
or the willows wore best
but they have a rival.

I consider lighting the whole thing on fire
so they can rise to the clouds with the smoke;
use their wings for something other than
beating back water
during forced bath time when
that satanic effigy
in a hazmat suit approaches and
I’d give them tiny tools:
tiny lighters, tiny bullets, gatling guns
and the wherewithal to fire them.
ice picks for the stabs and
the insults to go deeper.
I’d help haunt him.
but they are small, untrained,
and they’d just eat the things.
smell the irony
when the cage fills up with
bloody stool and the devil
in white comes back to wash
them out.

my apologies are inaudible.
outside looking in,
gawking, checking my phone
for the time, an old love letter,
avoiding my clients’ increasing mucus
in his cough,
his impending question.
(no missed calls)
do you think Sarah?
          in his Polish accent,
            sleeve half covering his mouth to hide the yellow
                            discharge.
. I have a tissue in my pocket, wilting.
unprepared to think of anyone but myself
               at this time in my process.
(check the time)

             but they don’t get words,
fertilized; little beaks poking through
spotted eggs and
above all else,
birds with clipped wings
avoid the despondency
that liberty brings.
that bell rings
and I want them to know
               that the birds think that bell is a God?
  muted sniffle.
                 I move past the withering Kleenex,
                      his equally decaying stare,
to check the time again
(no new voicemails)

that bell rings and
I want them to know
just how badly freedom hurts.

“the aviary”

March 29, 2019 0

when I was a kid
my dad played this game:
he would ball his fists and
stick his arms in front
of us

start turning them over;
one over the other in a circular
motion like a machine; the way
gears turn round
and round and he would repeat
the phrase
perpetual motion.
we would start to laugh;
those secret games
only family gets.
he would say go ahead, Sarah,
you can’t stop it;
it’s perpetual motion,
go ahead, go ahead
in his thick New Jersey accent;
Wild Irish Rose on his breath,
and a pack of Merits nearby
one burning in the ashtray.
my brother pinching or
poking me to distract me.

I was so small.
I would reach for his arms but
he used his might and
kept turning them like
he was churning something.
the dog was usually howling
and I would be overcome by a fit
of giggling listening to Matt’s
sarcastic comments, watch the smoke
drift from the table and my
mom somewhere near smiling
and he was right:
I couldn’t stop it.
I was too young
and weak.
he would just roll his arms,
his hands clenched and say
perpetual motion
perpetual motion
sarah sarah it’s perpetual
motion.
I would scream and
jump on top of his forearms
to prove him wrong
but everyone agreed that was cheating.

it was the emptiness
I couldn’t take;
the space from the post to
my side and the absence of
words between that.
and also the unbridled
mood swings.
the way no one saw me
or heard me or checked
in.
I would spend hours
pacing the small corridor, the
tiny living room and saying things
out loud to myself:
I can make it
it’s fine
I can make it here
or I would turn it up
as loud as it would go and
vacillate between the pacing and
jumping up and down, twisting
a necklace or straw
in my hand
and I would picture only one thing:
breakfast or dinner
with a man   it wasn’t
the man, it was the nourishment
I craved, the nutrition
I lacked and the double security
of food and laughter.
it always took place over a meal.
I reached for it every time I felt
anxious, every time I had a
major transition–the savior returned;
the reverie of an unconditional
ear, someone placing their hand on
the small of my back,
handing me water,
congratulating me on completing
a piece and asking me
the question.
.
I rarely pictured the warmth
in sex   that wasn’t what
I lacked.   it was the question I wanted.
he always held space for
the long version.
taking a bite with my fork,
it was cooked or take out
or restaurant, it didn’t matter.
it was warm and filling
and good.
he would say
tell me again
and I would begin the story
where it began:
January 5, 2014,

I arrived in
Kensington to awake
from the middle of a
perpetual daydream.
no, the thing
about your brother
“Sarah,” she gently said,
getting my attention again.
I look up from the top of
my thermos to see my therapist.

“You were going to tell me more
about your brother,”
she repeated.

it’s Thursday, I’m between worlds
again and we are finally
opening it.

“synchronicity”

March 27, 2019 0

my heart was a brass bell:
frozen,
staid,
caught between two
hungers, and I’m asking
you if anyone ever told you
there is no time.

you demand cogency,
a nightlight,
me at your bedside blowing
ardent lullabies.
here I come in linear order.
in the end my gown will be
doused in the close shouts of
someone you love;
I will be draped in
the slow and constant drip
of her;
the residue of
skinned bones rouging
my cheeks with their sudden
red cries that blossom into
spells I tie into crown,
rest on my head
like a prize
as I am laid against
my slain and coffined
in confession before I
rise but you should know
so I’m writing it.

I would pluck at my
backbone to charm her
into weave, into
conjure her discordant euphony
that produced a mild shock
of light to remind me
I contain some very black
nights but a
torch lodged deep in
coccyx, and a dream;
sketch on marker web,
write the titles
in my thrumming patient way,
my hum,
my black belt bullet tongue
of song rising with summer,
and a damn stitched in
spine ready to synthesize
in crescendo
downward like a flash
flood and

you should know the truth
as it happens and the
past as it really
was and me, risen
growing full of hell
with each new moon,
full of part
with each new
sun.
you should know
what I mean
when I say
my hands contain a deluge.

“the flood”

March 27, 2019 0

when it came to me
you said I was all
muscled positivity
as if I didn’t hang myself once before;
as if I didn’t try to tell you

how cavernous a grin is,
or anything at all.
even though you are never sure I won’t
find that perfect bedsheet knot
or not or a razor
or a kitchen knife
or a drunk night on the freeway and I’m
headfirst in the cement mixer
but I made it out of that
in jail but alive and I am
always palms clasped and grateful.
you say   you pray
with FERVOR as I finger the locket,
my brother’s ashes clasped
around my throat
and I hold onto
that same little lie
about choice.

I let go of the wild lavender
sprouting from your toes through
the hints of splattered paint.
there’s a meadow in your abdomen
coaxing foxes from their
holes    your knees knock mine,
sudden sting         close and sharp
  the way memory sits on your skull
then pulled back
how you held me
far away sometimes;
making wind happen
blowing kisses from the pines.
the bath is on, I’m cold.
you always say
I’m cold.
I beckon to the side:
you and I are from the same
arctic sky.
help me in so I feel
the frost of your fingertips
trace me;

my broken back to you now.
my nails are brown tipped and filthy
from digging myself out of my ancestral
grave and I’m spattered in the ,
sweat from a hard night’s day,
walking alleys, stalking shadows
and you’re truly unremarkable
these days save
the mosaic of carpenter’s paint,
some gray cement
garden: no flora, no fauna,
and even God told me to pause
and rest on my previous laurels
before I get carried away.
but i’m a martyr for this,
God,
I crave repercussion

I become a
yawning, clanking watering can
spritzing your open lips,
dolling up your stolid ground
to birth your stories:
pollen murals out of micro gestures,
extinguished longing that suddenly reignites and
I’m grabbing cattails from the gales to
comb out the tangles of your childhood
tell me about your father
fistfuls of mud planting seeds in the
tiny cracks around your chest that my own
sharp-toothed grief left when you
muttered the first
no and I stepped a few
years back.
freedom will teach you how
to stay in all new ways.

there is no difference
between love and liberation
and some were born saints,
you say as you help me
in the mugwort bath,
the smell of rose and geranium
circling the tile.
I plucked the petals and dropped them
one by one for aesthetic.
not free of indulgence, but
patient your fingers make
stems in the water
and I guess I am waiting
for something.

“the swell”

March 22, 2019 0

She walked slowly towards the house. A transfer of guilt must be achieved, she recited in her head. She was moving her fingers, clutching at the bottom of the jacket. The straw lost somewhere, she kept moving her fingers to mimic cradling it. A transfer of guilt must be achieved. What was the rest?

It was the second polar vortex in four years to hit the city this hard. Pounds of air stood packed around her so she felt boxed every step. She couldn’t see. Snow fell all around her and because the wind whipped her face with each violent gale, she was also forced to look down. Forced to crawl upright, she could only feel her way through: the knife-life breezes, the sting right below her eyes with every movement, every touch of sleet against her skin a slow-drawn slap. Every snowflake bruised her; it’s touch burrowed hard beneath her cheekbones and lingered. She was red faced and trudging. Her eyes were brimming with tears that wouldn’t leave the bottom of her lids. It is freezing. They were frozen there. A transfer of guilt must be achieved.

Her eyelashes were coated in snow and she could hardly make out the building in front of her. Being drawn to the light in the window, she floated like a black moth to the driveway. As the girl stepped closer, she could see there were candles, maybe a soft lamp, burning in the upstairs window. Everything else was dusky and had the stale feel of abandonment. The house was coated an ashen gray color by owner or night, tall, protruding but with no bright awning or curtains or mailbox or car. No song wafting through the howl of the storm. There was no sense of welcome but it was her only option. Let it be a party. Let it be jovial and light inside. You can deceive yourself into believing anything just so you’ll participate.
About thirty feet from the door, her body was suddenly struck with sensation: panic. This is respite. Stillness creates panic. She stood still and let a shiver take her; let something pass through her. The future was here and it was portentous. She grabbed the sapphire amulet around her neck. God, give me strength. Pausing at the top of the yard, she allowed her breath to come out slowly, deliberately and with planning. What do I look like? She was draped in all black but blue in her flesh; pallid and chattering. She was a ghost in a cloak. Blue like ice. Blue like river. Blue like the ash-filled locket. Give me warmth. Her breath was slow and deliberate and planned. The girl was pacing herself in stillness instead of step.

Before continuing, she allowed her body to stay there, frozen from foresight and weather, in a posture of complete surrender. She was upright and floating allowing the wind to carry her up the short driveway to the door. There was no effort to shovel. The driveway was packed with snow too. It had taken her several steps to get from car to driveway and several more to get from driveway to knob. The door itself was plain beige without number or knocker. There was nothing spectacular here. Looking around once more to confirm there was no one else on the block, she held the locket with her bare fingers and set her teeth together to quiet them. She was a shadow in the doorway. .My breath is slow and deliberate. Her hand balled in a fist, she began to raise her other arm as she fingered the silver chain. I am breath. I am breath. She tightened her fist. B r e a t h e. She was muttering. I am safe and protected in white light. She exhaled. God, give me grace. She began knocking loudly, feeling her jaw clench and her respiration stop, the last of her crystallizing in air.

March 22, 2019 0

I’m done spitting on your face
and on my way
to pick up a bag of cutlery and dishes
for our house from the front porch
of a stranger’s
when I stop to admire the cracks
in the side of the building.
the wall is coral, faded but still
garish, stands out.
it’s brick and

this building has no doors and
one broken window.
these defects in the painted halls
lining my new city catch my
eye each time I run an errand
and I pay my respects in
photographs      stopping at each one,
trying to remember how the boulders
haunted too      how the ocean felt
on my wasted ankles at gloaming when I guzzled
vodka Big Gulps and watched the
ghost crabs roam the bay.
watched myself dissolve into
the bits of me and can I remember
how the sunset looked draped over both
tide and flatirons,
hold two things at once
without favor?
how it feels to lose several
small countries you claimed.
all I see are metaphors
and I’m intruded.

these overcoats that rot
without dismay hold space;
there is natural beauty
here but it shines brightest
in demise.
these bricks are painted to distract from
it’s true inability
to keep a home safe like
the way men have held me;
hugged with their claws,
I cracked at the touch     put my rosy shades on
I only see them
in their handsome sway.
I snap a picture of the edge of the broken
glass pane and the beginning of
the paint peeling into
white–the fissure.
I trace my finger
over a chip and watch
it flake.

how they left me.

“doors #1”

March 18, 2019 0

it’s Friday and we are
processing hard truths
before we seek the auspiciousness
of everything; before we rest,
pay altar on Sunday
like
:
sometimes some things
just aren’t meant for you.
it’s true, the blur,
life is rushing and swamps
with it’s shades of
blue; azure
(you name things)
sky, or cobalt fluid
or nightmare
like a wall of nail polish
you’re reading every
dressed up inch of you,
every feeling to decide
what to bathe your magic
tips in tonight.

with or without your
undivided presence,
your inquisitive fantasy,
the moon moves.
time heals all those
unsewn wounds and you embrace
things now with reticence,
but you’re open to the aphorism,
to the temperance,
to the tombstone epitaph
you made him carve across
your eyelids that night
on Jupiter:

I remember everything.

everything you grow to love,
you lose.

“xxx”

March 17, 2019 0

March 12, 2019 0