INTERRUPTION

you can commune w the dead and should cherish this gift.

January 17, 2021 0

I think a lot about my
own divisiness and the ways to get
more or away or someone.
how I mask it.
what I can do.
what I’m doing.
how what I thought I about
yesterday compares meekly
to the euphoric way the sun
hit my shoulders just today
and no other day will compare to
this feeling so I mold it into
tangibility, twisting a straw,
photographing the figures of me
opening the door for someone
on way to get my second load
and thinking, so happy
to witness.

also
I love probability
like
what’s the likelihood I’ll see your
friend again, seeing him three times
already and you never there cuz
I don’t set foot on your lawn,
your territory, not mine
to fight for and
what is it going to take to hypnotize
a small crowd and at what cost to my
well being and I was practical so
how much money will I make
if I devote myself entirely
to one thing vs. side things
and how honestly bad I
crave the hustle
but also I would like to crave stability
and statistically speaking,
we have to look at patterns,
not just equations but
trends so then here comes
more of the past.
I’m real used to it:
being three places at once
if I’m any less than nine.

II. (uranus in sagittarius in fifth house)

January 17, 2021 0

I scream in the corridor,
as you pick up the AC you
left and make your way
to your fifth meeting of the week.
me? I’m
chilling in bed, reading Louise Erdrich
and when you see me again,
I will be serrated.

all day long I do equations
in my head.
as I walk to the laundromat
shifting the hamper beneath me,
I think about how many quarters I brought
and what that will get me doubting
my skill– yet every month,
I still have some left in my cup.
what chore is coming next.
I need to wash the windows
and also I’m ankle deep in someone
else but that might
be conjecture
I think as I place the bin on the
ground knowing I have two more
at home and three flights of stairs
and I think that’s an understatement

I think.

1. (mercury in Virgo in First house)

January 17, 2021 0

my childhood is never coming back.

I learned to drift young and
listened to my Papa’s
stories, my aunt’s stories,
the whole family telling stories
and I learned to joke
too. it’s about knowing
what people respond to
but also a dauntlessness.

everyone in my family
laughed big and loud,
smoking cigarettes sitting around
the picnic table,
a pretty red-wood covered
with some tawdry pear-slathered
yellow and cream plastic cloth
made to absorb ketchup
and beer cans everywhere.
the empty ones there for butts.
and bottles of Coke in giant
two liters their tan slender fingers
and the confidence of lighting up.
I perfected the flick of an ash
off the end of a burning cigarette
long before I held one.

it’s ninety percent the way
your neck looks when you’re listening
and ten percent what you say
when you finally move to
enter the game.
I learned to grift.
there were many ways.
more about fun then–just how to sneak out
at night to grab cigarettes
from the bowling alley cigarette
machine; a preposterous
thing but came in handy.
I would sometimes crawl out of
my bedroom window,
my bed right beneath it and
able to slide the screen right open
without breaking it,
it was easier than the back door.
I had to tiptoe.
we had thin walls.
I slept with my door shut,
pitch black and covered with
pillows scared of my closet.

sometimes we took beer from my friend’s
parents cooler,
or candy pocketed from 7-11
or lip gloss from Eckerd’s
or something from a man’s house,
anything really.
I liked to take photographs of them
and items of clothing to smell
before they leave me.
sometimes I would stare at the pictures
he left out on his dresser
suddenly. not sure if they were planted
or just forgotten as he
offered me a shot of tequila on
his barracks colored carpet;
that off-white every sailor had;
stained with Friday nights
and teenage vomit.
movie ticket stubs falling
out of my coat pocket.
I always took my shoes off
out of politeness even though
I could see the scrape of dirt
from welcome mat to
cot and today:

a picture of him and his wife
on the rocks on the coast
of San Diego,
a card she left him,
something in spanish.
I would listen to the CDs he played
on repeat to get over her, later
alone, more holding the sting
and the shattering way
it felt forced to be fucked
to music like that.
fascinated that grief can transcend
between two people, same song,
two different ways.
two different meanings.

where are you running to now?

I’m at Lehigh and 2nd
giving a man directions
to the 15 stop and he is asking
me where I am going.
I have no job or friends
but tons of antique wood
furniture and I kind of nod
to myself without answering him,
just keeping that buoyancy of
knowing that
acquiring objects is half the battle.
the other half is unearthing.

“walls #1”

January 17, 2021 0

I repeat the question in my head.

yes, he was my only brother.
it is much easier to disappear
but the house moved with
me; from freeze to open
like an unattended mortuary
moved to resurrect itself
after years of
neglect and

did you know,
the bones given a soft lick
will sparkle white
like fresh-caught ivory
and once it feels the brush of
mouth
will file any joint to tip
with tooth
and gore the things that touches
it, that holds it
near to chest or
safely in its palm?

as it shreds the flesh from
crown to feet,
someone says to me,
with sincerest sympathy
and I fall into a fog.
was he your only brother?

as I pass a trashcan,
I fumble a little,
make room in my bag
for lipstick.

“the sympathy card”

January 17, 2021 1

I was in my big brown jacket
that absorbed me in
synthetic down,
twirling the stem of a
decaying feather
in my pocket,
the lyrids are crowning as
I am responding to
a nod, someone asking
was he your only brother?

“grief (part three)”

January 17, 2021 0

it was a frigid drive across country.
the first time I saw buffalo,
I was leaving Colorado.
it was the coldest front we’d had in years
and the car had no heat.
my cat was squeezed in a carrier
in a sedan full of my dresses
I couldn’t bear to leave
but I don’t have a single
emblem of home.

“space #2

January 17, 2021 0

it is the sun streaming through my
bay-sized sliding door windows
and the white-apped mountains
framed within them
that I will miss most
in winter.
clearly, I can’t hold
two things at once without
favor, and
today I have
a piece of paper,
a dozen dead things
wilted in their vase
to remind me.

there is a touch of red
sprinkled around the glass
that browns and sets as dry
on the sill in
my small uncurtained bedroom that
I pace when I have
too much on my mind
and today they remind me

life is a patient rot
to tomb, a gauntlet and
fluid so I better keep
moving.

life is a patient
gut to get to
wound it was April
on Earth Day when I wrote
My Brother Is Dead
in the back of a notebook I would never
look at again.

thrown away to make room
as I packed the car
two years later.

“grief (part two)”

January 17, 2021 0

don’t tell anyone what i did to you.

January 17, 2021 0

humiliation of
all the little violations
that add up to today
without one strong word
or accurate verb
to describe the way a knife
sticks for a second and you moan
the wrong way.

what sounds better to you?
I say over coffee, trying to
finish some titles,
possibly in love but also
possibly

.“besieged” or “PTSD”
or simply
“raped?”

“the act of naming things”

January 17, 2021 0