Poetry

Fabric 

Maybe God is a novelist. Maybe he follows families like the greats—

Garcia Marquez, Porter, Chekhov. Maybe he follows our family 

Our picnics our skinned kneecaps 

Our proms our diseases.

Maybe God is weaving our ends, our starts

Maybe his master loom

Maps narrative arcs.

Gather your yarn, babes, 

Pay attention to how your fibers fit 

above and below

Maybe all you can do is vibrate against them

Make tiny waves against their tiny waves 

Until the colors of your symphony 

Ring. 

I have too many things in my arms right now 

To carry you. If you just stand there though

Everything will be just fine.

Light Weight

There are days you can’t leave the bathroom
days where all you can do
is scroll without absorbing images
words sounds
weather.

Days where the energy it takes to move your eyes between posts
between spaces on the floor–
tile rug
reflection of half-light–
is too much
drains.

Days so cold outside the bathroom door
anything other than this thick gold light
hardens the skin
to a leather purse.

Days the air is heavy
your eyes are heavy
your arms heavy legs

Days your head

thickens with the weight of the faces in pictures
your mom gave you when she unburdened herself

of that big house.
Smiling ancestors
straight-lipped fathers
times when dinners were formal as a candlelit table.

That weight.
Those old genes
old skins leathering in the elements.

There are no commas in this poem nothing to separate
the space between your
plush-cheeked self and your withering self
the one that will bear their smiles their stares their nodding knows
when you open this door.

The light in here smooths that space
as a hand smooths a tablecloth:
the unrolling of something deep something ancient something captured
in black and light.

Their stares are your stares
their genes hand-me-downs
you’ll wear in photographs to come.

Your face is their face is the face of a box of faces.

You’ll open that door
because there is no other option.

And their lips will straighten you into a stick of light.

Memory Flats

It’s a sin
our memory reshapes itself each time
we recall an experience.

Forgive me I have
the gold-yellow Sunday of a sixth birthday party
at Chuck E. Cheese stuck.
Dim, stale with cold pizza, how those animatrons sang.

Or it was a fifth birthday, or a seventh birthday
Or Showbiz Pizza and Saturday afternoon.
I have sinned.

But the city is right, the pizza is right;
cheese-only children are selective with their tastes.

Forgive me
that you paid for that animatronic weekend
only to have me revise it over and over
like silly putty, I have sinned.

Nostalgia knows know shape other than selective taste.
Yours so strong, it left a flavor in my mouth
of the city sidewalks you jumped rope on
you spun around on
you tugged up your hand-me-down socks on.

I was never even there
an unborn memory buried deep in your cells
you passed to me silently
like candy during a long sermon.

Forgive me
for betraying a collective memory: your youth told again and again
until it formed a shape in me
I have molded without your permission.

Once, we discussed remembering the same moment.
News of the divorce.
You told it kitchen
I heard it bedroom
and we were both there. We were both there.

Which of us sinners rebuilt the bones of that moment?

But now both exist.

Forgive me
for telling this
for recalling it once more
reshaping it again. I have sinned.

How are we to be trusted with precious experiences?
we must recall them
we can’t recall them
they’re too precious to risk deceiving.

If I tell you the moments I remember best, the ones you weren’t there for
(crackling bonfire at summer camp
Christmas at my father’s house, crackling
heat against cool flesh, snap against silence)

The sounds of our memories will be the same
(Can’t be the same)
Have bent themselves around the same frame:
the only place I can conjure for the sound of a fire.

You must believe me:
What I’ve made is real.
The same way a camera flattens a moment.

I lay it out before us. I adjust the depth.

My sin is as real as a photograph, a smiling face
a face projecting two dimensional joy
a lens reshaping a moment.

Forgive me this space
For I have whittled us into a handful of candied stories,
a different flavor each time,
an urgent sermon
a preservation call.

I have sinned against those spaces I cherish most
hot-handed, melting sugar
and clenched around them so.

What you get is real alright
A picture of a Sunday, yellow-gold
and blue
with the sun streaming in,
casting flat what is whole.

Forgive me this window
has stained what was
has tinted what is
has bent all our Sundays into hued planes.

I have
melted birthday parties and sidewalks and kitchens
into luminous particles
you could run your fingers over
again and again in never the same way.

I have cooled our light and our heat into a slick surface,
shining on its own, like hard candy.

Precious years thinned to autotuned notes,

the sound of a live mosaic, tinkling
like glass.

The naming of a Scar

No one else at the educational conference 

Cried when the speaker said

Generational trauma.

They already knew.

No one had to lift their shirt to show

The putty scars their grandparents pressed into their skin 

To say These Were Our People.

Don’t forget.

No one had to ask the

Black speaker

To lift his white shirt to show the memory of

His people 

To a room full of dresses and shirts and 

Grandparents 

And scars.

No one else cried from 

Suddenly realizing their scars 

Aren’t your scars 

Your scars have a name.

Their scars said Here is How to Be Strong.

Yours said here is how to hide.

Yours said here is your name.

Only those who speak your language 

Will see your mud rose scars

Your ash pink scars

Your shadow in their 

Hiding place. 

No one else had to ask 

The definition of

Extermination 

By torture

By work

By starvation

By fire.

No one had to say 

We know. 

They knew 

By the color of their palms 

The arc of soles

The shine of their pupils,

Students of history.

No had guess you 

Were there 

They knew you were hiding.

They knew your name.

They knew what color you cried 

Their grandparents shared bread 

With you.

No one had to see your scars to know 

The color of ash.

No one had ask.

That was enough.

House on Fire

Last night I dreamed
A house was on fire
Not our house
A house
Somebody’s house
She had children.

I was the boyfriend, I think.
It wasn’t anything the fire department couldn’t handle.

So I waited outside
The kids hanging down
passed down
From an upstairs window.
It wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle.

I stood outside
In the backyard
The concrete backyard
Holding the cat.

All the Names We Know

All the people,

all the shapes

the templates, bodies

temples

with different windows

stained, glass:

shrines,

prayers, present and past.

All the names

come and gone,

your names

the ones you know.

All the people special to you,

shrines.

All the names you remember

and don’t remember

but remember

their faces

their templates

their temples.

They live and live and live in you.

You are alive somewhere

in someone.

After you’re gone,

after the fire,

Someone holds your temple,

carries you with

them

in their temple.

You are the shrine

in their shrines.

You are their fire.

You are a house of worship.

Someone prays in you.

You are not made of stain

or glass (it’s only a small beauty within you).

You are the sturdy frame.

You are this dirty frame,

under all the dust you hold,

old because of all the houses of worship

you carry inside you:

the shrines

the names

the fires

their flames.

You are a temple,

a sturdy shrine to someone.

You are a fire.

Shine, shine.

A slow, slow descent

You could hope if hope was efficient,

load-bearing,

just.

But it’s not. 

There are no more road trips 

like the ones we took to Maine, 

station-wagoned, bobble-heading

on some eastward highway to a redneck family reunion.

At fourteen, every face was a potential 

friend

and every face was not. 

Every hallway encounter

was a maybe smile

or not. 

Or the trip to New York

where you fell in a creek, sneakers mildewing 

outside the pop-up camper, 

drying tongues-up in the sun.

Stand on corners and prepare for wind

a force to knock you back

Lean perpetually forward.

Brave and unafraid are not the same:

You must untether this sword

if your shield might crack.

Or the camping trip to Kettle Moraine

the blueberry stand

all the blueberries

all the blueberries

the ripe sweet blueberries

we never left the tent. 

There are ways to prepare for this. 

The slow degrading.

The kinetic launch fizzling out.

The outward deprecating.

The after-punishment.

How at eighteen, you don’t apply to schools

because the rejection

will be greater than the cost of hope. 

The last, long trip, home from Iowa.

A snowstorm fluttering a highway 

full of Christmas carols

25 miles an hour 

a slow, slow descent.

We know what we want when there are obstacles in the way.

That wind. That Iowa wind.

No one prepares you for the angle 

you will lean 

coming around a corner

cheek-chapping cold wind

cracking every 

shield.

How in your forties there is only punishment left 

for not changing your major 

adopting sooner

gaining some weight

daring your routine. 

After the accident, there are no more road trips.

There aren’t even cars.

There are only roads others travel.

But isn’t it easier here? Without the hope?

Windless, dry, forced heat

without the holidays

the music

the ability to run through a forest and get your feet wet?

You can order blueberries online,

packaged, gray-hued blueberries.

They taste the same, don’t they?

Just like you remember.

The application of loss

Things they don’t warn you about:

A rapid decline
The silence of coming home
The sound of an internal voice

Remnants

Leftover rituals
collecting in a hand

A handful of rituals
with no shoebox for keeping.

Humans have a dozen applications
for the language of fire:

Burning
Dancing
Licking
Light

We stoke
We kindle
We tend
We ignite

Passion
Anger
Wit
Life

The hardest part of returning home is a shoebox of rituals and no match to spark.

The application of absence fuels no measurable results:

Loss
Emptiness
Hole
Gap

But apply them to apples, children, loves or hands
you’re only left without.

There are a thousand ways to celebrate with fire:

Deep fields of fireflies, lighting, mating
An after-game night
A flame-shaped crowning
Candles on a cake
A switch bulb of light

What use is loss? What purpose can it hold?

The denial of a presence
can only ever be full of that presence.

The exhaustion of grief turning familiar the familiar forlorn: 

a dimple in a sheet
the fibers of voice

Eventually, even the smells will fade.

If nothing else, emptiness stretches itself into a ready cup. Dark, waiting,
returning home again.

You will find threads of hair woven into the carpet and

spaces between breaths

I am here for your ceremony: I will hold your loss.

Everything She Ever Told Me

I have never seen my mother’s bones

so much as in her hands

her knobby artist hands with those eyelet

knuckles and papery skin.

The only bones of hers I knew

I will know

no matter her frame (fleshy-white and sponged

against paper)

no matter her depth of eye,

(when all has cataracted and clouded in pools)

I will know the grommet knobs

of her seamstress hands

of her lawyer hands

of her like-my hands

by their distinct bones,

their curve, their stretch,

their light pink flesh.

In her gown (lace-collared flannel or paper-white)

I will know by holding

as she holds my own

how we knot together

bone of her bone.

And it is here I will remember everything she ever told me

as it became part of myself

of my very skeleton

of my very tone;

my hands, her hands

old and alone.

You’ve never looked so much like yourself

I will weep. Hold me in your palm,

Mom, me.

No matter how long I have me without you

I will have your hands in my hands

in my papery bones.

It will be your flesh that surrounds me

Instead of my own

And that is how I will make amends

when I can no longer see my white-knuckled ends.

I will say they are yours, these hiding robes,

these billowing drapes

this skin-bound shape.

The seduction of bone

is something that has gone and returned

and gone

and returned with pokes of feeling.

It is your womb I’ll recall when I’ve lost myself.

And when you can’t see me any longer

wrap yourself around me

around my (your) hands

and conjure what I look like from the inside out.

Grit

It’s everywhere,

fallen on window ledges, dressers, countertops, winter coats, the knife block, vinegar bottles, pillows,

the treadmill we bought at the start when the pandemic was new.

It piled and colored in gray as the dead cells floated down from the vents,

so harmless.

And now, a year,

it fills our lungs with soot, with ash,  with a year spent anxious and alone,

accumulating little deaths of our own skin

just to have flesh to touch.

The cat has aged.

She wails now, left alone in a room or even with us

she can’t see or hear or sense where we are unless we’re right beside her

or holding her.

She’s unquiet.

But it’s not just dust. It’s grit. A sludge coat we grew into without really noticing.

Who were we before? How did we dance?

How did we do and do and do

Without slowing to a crumble?

When the waiting is over, I will still wait.

It’s the only thing I remember how to do

after all this time.

How did I climb stairs? How did I sing? How did I stop at the grocery store on the way home

recalling the list from memory after working two jobs?

Where have I left that sweeping self? Where have I placed those precious things

buried in the sludge?

Each day shed and sloughed and landed on

the floor the table, the couch, the bookshelf, this backpack, these magazines, that alarm clock,

ringing and ringing and ringing.

I have forgotten the sound of getting up.

The wailing of it, the pushing off.

The lifting out from the pull of slumber to another morning

another same

another choreographed mime routine we have scripted ourselves.

Here we are still breathing,

still alive in the rubble, untangling from the blankets by force or habit.

Here we are eating and talking and dying and regenerating

cell after cell after cell still recreating the semblances of self.

Another reason to emerge distant, but there.

There’s a sun somewhere in this drifting dust.

Eventually, when the sharp edges of a city emerge again, will we recognize our corners, our sleek former selves? Will we see our shoulders and ask how we held up so long?

When the mask lifts, grit lines at our mouth-points, tracks to our ears,

another self will settle.

Another self will burst.

Another self, canyoned with the pressure of a year

will peel back its onion skin

  and shed the weight of its worth.