POETRY

When I’m told my writing is feminine

I wonder what it means to write like a man,

Oh to have that Godly, guided hand

To write like all wars have commenced at once

Then ceased at my doing

And tell stories of fine, dark hotels

With forgotten fishnet stockings

I’m falling in and out of spaces

Full of graffiti walls

And folded napkins

I won’t have cigar smoke wrinkles

Or watch my broad shoulders 

Sink into collarbones

But I can buy you a drink at the bar,

Still be sober enough to walk you home,

and write that Godly, gilded poem.

I love being twenty

and easily amused,

I love dogs and summer,

and hand-poked-tattoos.

I love crying on Kimball Avenue,

shameless sorrow shared with strangers.

I love enjoying the rain

for the first time in a while.

I love the numbness of cold

and stiff fingers on a glass cigarette.

I love regretted feelings

 rolled up and smoked into dust.

I love falling too quickly in every direction,

up, down and out with hopeless affection. 

I love the voices of poetwomen,

and their hands with stories in them.

I love stringing together a conversation,

knowing nothing of natural inclinations.

I love anxiety-influenced moments of nervous

knee-touching anticipation.

I am the backyard pines

with the flimsy branches I climb,

I come from sap-sticky palms

and green needles in my blonde hair.

It’s the same pine where we

buried the family dog

when I was fourteen. 

I come from broken bones and

bloody noses, always

falling up the stairs,

always landing at the foot of 

my grandmother’s bed,

eyes locked and last breath,

Yes, I come from there.

I come from the Simon and

Garfunkel CDs tucked in to

my mom’s glove compartment.

I am my mother,

she is sixteen and

train station bound.

I’m her when she

races down the hill and

slips into the last car.

I am my mother when

she puts on lipstick

while riding the metro north.

I come from my mother,

always running late. 

I come from divorce papers

on laminate countertops.

I’m from the kitchen table chaos

and ceilings collapsing in.

I am the ghost of each of them,

all the women of my lineage.

I’m everyone that will ever be,

but first, I came from the trees.

I dreamt I swallowed snails,

A sick, cyclical nightmare,

don't know how they got in there

Esophagus villains

With shells nestled in my tonsils

When I woke,

they'd slithered

to my lymph nodes,

A streptococcus circus

I can no longer focus,

succumb to fatigue

melt into the sheets

and fall back into dream

Meeting old lovers in the Netherlands

when the antibiotics and melatonin kick in

We're at the Lakes of The Clouds

we're swimming,

we're naked,

we're freezing,

I'm waking up sweating

hair soaked in fever and

each muscle cramping 

I try to wash the snails down

with water, swallow harder

and choke

fall into the pillow,

We're at Walden Pond, 

peeling mollusks from our skin and

skipping them like stones

Yours jumps six times

across the sunny surface and 

Thoreau himself is there!

He’s patting you on the back,

we’re all laughing

and he’s pulling the snails from

my throat and it is so funny.

Then I’m conscious and still coughing, 

sitting up spitting,

I’m alone in tangled bedsheets,

I'm resting,

I’m sleeping,

I’m waiting it out

Lately I’ve been grieving everyone I’ve ever met:

the bodega lady who paid for my drink,

the shirtless man that crossed the street,

dead pets, living friends,

and anyone who has laid in my bed. 

I got a job as a cemetery caretaker,

burial site custodian.

I am so good at dusting down graves and

peeling moss from granite.

I am truly good at keeping records,

both vinyls and handwritten notes.

Someone reminded me,

Autumn is the mourning season.

Something about dead perennials 

and rotting roots.

I’m writing obituaries in the form of poems

because it’s cold out and I’m bad at remembering faces.

I’m digging up lost lovers and runaway dogs,

We’re holding a funeral, we’re singing a song.

We are quickly forgetting each other’s voices and hands,

clinging onto the things we remembered to write down.

My graveyard’s in The Andes but next to Central Park,

under the subway station, behind The Pacific.

I’d let you visit but you wouldn’t be able to decipher my script,

The endless lists of those I miss.

Hotel of bad dreams 

And blonde hair.

My sister and I

Played in the bedroom

Then fought in the kitchen ‘til

Our forearms were bloodied, finger-

Nail marks in our skin.

Fears I forgot to pack in cardboard

Are still lying underneath

Lavender paint and I’m

Lamenting their loss in 

Secret.

Realistically, I’m mourning that 

Old house loudly, making a scene

And haunting the property as some ghostly

Deity wrapped in the living room’s curtains.

I’m sinking in the grey couch.

Feeling disconnected in

My sister’s apartment until

My cat crawls

Up onto my thighs,

Tickling my femurs

With kneader’s fists.

White warm paws

Step awkwardly across

My boney lap.

He clumsily settles

Onto my belly,

Humming contentedly. 

We exchange body heat.

I wonder what it’d be like

To exchange worries.

How would the furball be

At making money and

proving people wrong?

This morning I saw tissues,

Scratchy snowballs,

White on green fallen sheets.

This morning the ambulance

Alarm woke me up.

It was louder

Than the robin’s chirp.

I worry often about getting sick.

It’s a side effect of 

The two year pandemic.

A symptom of 

March’s cold.

I dreamt I fell through

The earth’s crust.

It was freezing, 

I shivered and

Saw carpet crumble

As my mom screamed.

I read somewhere the

Earth is filled with magma.

Gooey, thick fire. It glows.

When I broke ground,

I felt cold air, saw nothing.

I watch my roommate 

Drop paper wads

Into paper bags

At her bedside. 

My toxic cough made her 

Sick so I pour the

Red syrup and

Green tea and

Serve them at her desk.

I carry pepper spray to CVS,

Wear the blue scarf and

I’m consumed by the scuba-diver sound

Of sniffing the drip back into my head.

I’m the drowning victim of shipwreck.

Everybody says better days are ahead.

Would it be a better day 

if we could take a deep breath?

Would it be a better day if I could just warm up?

I wake up from dreams where

I’m in love with people I don’t trust again.

Is it this low-grade fever?

The strawberry melatonin?

Perhaps my brain is 

Liquifying, clogging up 

My ears and nose.

I keep my poetry in the same journal

As my notes from therapy,

I write down what she tells me:

How do others serve you?

What are you receiving?

Now I’m trying to be

Selfish for the sake of my sanity

The other day or

A few weeks ago,

I was alone in the woods

Until I wasn’t, a deer strolled up

in front of me,

Big antlers, broad shoulders

looming above as I was

sitting on the forest floor,

And he asked to borrow my lighter, 

I swear, it was the pink one but

He never returned it

I used to have hermit crabs

Gifted by my grandma when I turned seven.

They were from a kiosk in the mall and

I didn’t know how to take care of them.

They grew too big for their shells,

Painted like shiny black 8-balls.

Can hermit crabs feel claustrophobic?

Am I making excuses?

A BBC documentary shows wild

Hermit crabs sizing up, then lining up,

In perfect patient synchronicity and 

Trading shells in a rehearsed ritual.

My crabs played in my dollhouse and

Died of dehydration and I don’t even

Remember what I named them.

Yet they’re buried with our other pets

Beneath the backyard trees.

Maybe, I’ll return to read this poem

And clear out the weeds.

I learned in psychology class, 

Sleep is essential for happiness so

I slept 13 hours last night and

still woke up feeling like shit

at 1:30pm, with the weird dreams again:

I plant peonies in the gardens

Of people who don’t like me.

And I love circular poetry and I

Wish I could seal this like Ziploc,

Like the baggie my dad put the 

Brown crustacean carcass in,

Until the winter ground thawed.

I’m awake and still dreaming,

Still guilty and giving, still looking for a 

bigger shell and better ending.

I’m in the ocean but I’m breathing,

Imagine me salty and thriving.

I have gils and so does the deer and the

Hermit crabs are laughing,

Look at us adapting and living.

Look at me all zipped up but

Still leaking.