So, I’ve been being good and writerly lately. I’ve started editing two different collections for contest purposes. I have tentative titles:
Full Length Manuscript: Almost Being Somewhere
Chapbook: A Whole Armada of Loss
If anyone reads this at all, let me know what you think.
I’ve also been working on a few new poems. They are a little rough, but here they are:
Water So Heavy
Sometimes I can still see them all,
when I get out of the shower in the morning—
their faces are frosted in the mirror, silverfish
floating through glass, water so heavy
it eventually turns to steam.
Sometimes one of them will pop
into the corner of my eye, like a floater,
the ones you try and try but never
catch, following with one eye while the other
stays glued to whatever is actually happening.
When they pop up that way, I’ll cut myself shaving
and watch the blood drip from my razor
into the pure white basin of the sink,
like some offering of Sunday wine, I wipe
my finger across it and press it to my tongue,
because I’m never sure if it’s my blood,
or Christ’s. Stay close,
our ghosts are coming home.
Catching Air
She says it is easy to catch air
and I imagine her a child—
tiny fingers wrapped around
the glowing underbelly of a firefly,
creating a tiny cavern of light—
a small sun to give life to a whole colony
of dust particles. She had that finesse
I lacked, the one necessary to ease
a herd of fireflies into a jar to make a lantern
or coax a caterpillar into an old Phillies cigar box
so we could witness change. Not like the chemicals
that were adjusting in our bodies turning us to adults
but the kind of change I always hoped for—wrapping
myself in blankets so tight that it rewrote my molecules
and turned me from a small silk spinner into something
larger, something with wings.
Now we’ve both gone through that wrong kind
of metamorphosis—she got breasts and I got pubic hair—
and she is telling me that air is easy to catch,
like it is a bucket of sand that you can just thrust
your hands into and pull it up, watch it run
through your fingers into small ant mounds on the beach,
waiting to be washed away by the tide.
I know she is full of shit,
but something about the breasts and the pubic hair
leaves me there, nodding my head
like an asshole, trying to return to when we captured
bugs, played in the mud,
I’d even take the time I broke her favorite
wiffleball bat and tried to hide it
so I wouldn’t have to be the one to teach her that
sometimes the things we like a lot get broken,
and sometimes those things get broken by people
you really care about,
so you don’t know the proper amount of anger
to feel or how much sadness,
but now with the breasts and the pubic hair, I stand
there listening to her talk about air and about catching
it between her long thin fingers that look too big now
to capture fireflies, but still seem delicate enough to reach
into the cavity that holds my organs and explore, snapping
bones, pulling out veins, breaking whatever she wants.
The dogs are hungry,
outside they scratch the door, howl sad canzonettas
to a stoic moon, who’s turned his darker parts to us.
My father rattles against ribs with breath.
I take his hand, more tree bark than bone-flesh.
He grasps at mine, too small. So gently he squeezes the air
it stirs whirlwinds around my fingers.
His eyes are sick-green, a color my imagination must create—
forest sickly, squalid, dead—
his skin is all the lantern I have to see by. His breath catches,
then expels the fires forcefully.
At first it is all him—crackling forehead,
sputtering whiskers—just as quick he is gone:
now a powerful wind-gust rattling the windows in their frames.
The dogs let out starved yelps, stop their scratching,
smelling food somewhere far off,
they hide their glowing eyes and leave.
