Old apartment

12.5.13

I walk by my old apartment.
The fog is white and quiet,
the world ends very close.
When you have a body
that's stuck in the past,
life is like that.
Rain without rain.
The road looks wet,
but no puddles.
Survive, Madeleine.  
I keep writing about that.
It will not always be like this.
Lifeline, that's called.
I hook my body to it.
I say please.

Tidepool

11.22.13

Cars skidding by through rain on the street
woke me.  Unless there's a lion on the end
of the bed, I'm not supposed to feel like this.
Everyone has a god in the end.  Predators shout
about themselves from everywhere on earth.  But
at the bottom of the food chain, life can be quiet.
Rain on your small patch of moss. 
Rain in your small tidepool.  Look how
the saltwater laps against the old rocks.
You know this corner of the world.  For now,
it is yours.  Gills or lungs, breathe it.

The field

11.7.13

Glaze gold of six city
buildings against solid blue clouds
at sunset, the whole thing looking as though you
could peel it back, and behind it find
of course
something less dazzling . . .

but you always have to pick the scab.
There are excuses, yes,
the one time you found just puckered skin beneath
as if it had been waiting for you all along,
fresh as forgiveness,
the exception that proved the rule.
Your heart pounding with something
that wasn't quite relief
or disappointment, you tripped
into the kitchen to pluck a glossy orange off the counter,
started the peel with your teeth,
and that bitter pith 
was its own kind of vengeance.

To this day, you quiver with the certainty of it.
Over the next cliff
the parachute will deploy.

And you'll touch your feet down
in the dewy field for which
you were always meant.

Fault

10.29.13

I spend an hour
with my eyes closed,
picturing myself as a kid
playing inside a house that wasn't mine.
Later, I hike in the cold
and sit on the cliff over the big empty valley.
It's windy.
There are just six people down there
who don't think they know better.
I come home to the dishes and the dark.
The squirrel eats the pumpkin on the deck
before it rots.  Everyone wants to tell me
what kind of daughter I am.

October

10.15.13

Clouds lower tendrils
into notches in the mountains.
Relentless skid
of windshield wipers.
We're pretending to make plans.
Write a poem, you say.

Years I've been braced.

I want you more
than I have ever wanted
anything else real.
You're turning away.
I leap.

Grieving the thing that's still here

10.2.13

Screaming all night at the tormentor.
In the morning, white calcium appears,
the buck velvet eaten away.
You are just a body.

In the street, rocks fall.
Cascade of sound like the river
after the hurricane.
I lived on that river.  You
are just a body.

Without a finger, though,
you held me down.  Without
a finger, you instructed me
in violence.
Now I reach to strike,
my hand slides through you
like water. 
Screaming turns
to gagging.

It is not like the snake
shedding its skin.
The velvet was the living
part.

It's fall.
I still need everything.

Cascade

8.26.13

The new rubber part that carries me.
Tomato vine tar, butterflies.
Awake at 4am thinking.
Hum of NPR on the highway.
No end in sight.
Stuck inside my beautiful body.
Weird succulent that looks like a cascade
of snow peas, this
is for you.
Water when you need it.
It starts to rain.  I mean
I was up all night swelling
with forgiveness.
I've always needed someone like me
to take care of me.

The march

8.5.13

woke up on the floor again.
drank from the amber jar
water poured two blocks
away. 
lugging boxes
under the absurd
blueness.
what was I supposed to do.
I grew up across town.
the neighbor mowed
over my garden and I
stood out on the stoop all day singing
the national anthem
to the drone of air conditioners.
they woke me up three days before
my ninth birthday
and we went.
it’s august this time. 
past dogwood,
past magnolia. 
I want to jump in the car
and get out of here.  the mountains
twenty minutes west.
the river thirty minutes
east. 
bone-tired.  the war I know I’m not
going to win. 
so I make it a peace march.
this is my flag of freedom.  I'm alone
in the yellow room, breathing.
how much farther can I go?

Signals

7.9.13

middle of the night
strung on muscles in the dark
offering with my body a bow
lower than surrender

six years since I was
resuscitated
tongue to
lungs to eyes, become
visceral
captured what's above the blood
named it

this is your signal, smokeless
lidless
listen-
I know what I want

Crossing

6.26.13

My body says listen
so I tune out the birds.
One's building a nest in the gutter.

I know how
pain disperses,
the way a wave thins
to a slippery film
over sand. 
That's when, like magic,
you find your feet buried.

But I guess I know how I got here.
There were choices,
the kind you make because
you have to.

Where once I saw a fleshy cord,
I see a tightrope.

I don't have to cut it to know
if I tried to cross,
I would fall.

Me at 14

6.17.13

this is what it does, this is what i am always trying to explain- i smile, i sleep, i cut up fruit and walk along the river, but around me the world shrinks to this ring.  i fasten this life, i set conditions, the ring contracts even further.  there are sacrifices i make, and they are great. i will lose anyone.  i will lose everyone.  mine is a hunger too great to satisfy.  i write to him from the house of voids.  i was not built on solid ground.  this is a fist, a place, a lock.  i want to be held down, pinned.  at night i speak to stars.  he finds me by the water, and he knows enough.  i can’t be human, i can’t be human- god, i have turned my back on so much.

Running scared

6.16.13

it's not so imagined, the thing that's chasing me
so I tidy my hands into knives
and take off.
cut and rhythm, 
sweet hymn of reason
for the hyper pulse.
this body seethes when I keep it
from the only thing it knows how to do.
I claim this sympathetic leap
and landing, peerless, scared
to the very center of this autonomous system,
nothing left to do but run,
so I run,
I can run,
I can still run.

Not alone

6.12.13

I have tried to shove you off
through my therapist's hands.
I have tried to travel.
6,000 miles from you
for a month, I felt like a stillborn.

For years I have had dreams about parasites
so real I wake up convinced.
I have stared wide-eyed at the thought
of taking scissors to what I see between us;
umbilical,
electric,
hollow as a drain.

Full of greatness today,
I gave you another last chance.

When it was time to stop crying,
I drove home alone.

Rivers

6.11.13


Today it rained hard enough to hurt
Rivers down the black street
Tea, rice cakes, juice through straws
Stopped in time
Back in time
The places I've lived, the places
I've left
Deep enough
To dive, to swim

Texas, age 7

5.25.13

We begin to make plans, lists
of places we could end up,
long loose lines on cheap maps.
I do not want to be alone,
so I invent you,
I give you purpose.
I wake you up singing in my sleep.
You dream of falling and I stumble over the lyrics.
You would like to see the end of the lemon season,
I would like to dance topless
on Mustang Island.  
I would like the wind to lift me
like fishhooks in my palms. 
We diverge, we
calculate. 
I try to steal that purpose back.
The staggered hydrangeas bloom
between songs.  You wake up
and walk out the door.
I am on my own adventure.
I scream.
How have I not noticed; this bed
so bare and small.

Swords

5.20.13

too shaky to sleep for a week now.
outside, the moon is sharp as glass.
I drive downtown, around construction
in circles for an hour
until I forget where I was going
in the first place.

blue stains under my eyes,
my eyes themselves going blue.
so far from my skin, not even
the scalding bath could save me.

but I am in here, I know.

somewhere

I am cutting through.

Love and damage

5.19.13

The noise of rain,
then the noise of forced air.
I'm stirring onions, mushrooms and wine

slowly, my arm too raised,
my hand dangling
as if it is not mine. 
Manic depression is talking in the next room,
asking how many times per day
the blocked number calls.

I don't know, dad,
says Noah.
I want to save him with this meal,
but I know who I am.

     Poor children
who are fed and taunted.

Love, damage;

no chaperone between.

The call

5.18.13

I'll come back like the rain I've forgotten to wait for.  I will come back with a hush, then a growing whisper you might mistake for wind.  I am not wind.  Not wind any longer.  I will come back strung with lights and curls.  I will come back green-eyed again.  I will come back crying.  The world will gurgle and flow.  I will come back barefoot.  I will come back miniature.  I will come back without the wheels spun out inside me.  I will come back without ice.  I will come back with grief.  I will come back with fury.  I'll come back like a kiss through tears.  I'll come back salty, and you will know.  I'll come back alone.  I'll come back stitched up.  I'll come back healed.  I'll come back not caring that I will never fully heal.  I will come back shouting.  I will come back screaming.  I will come back throwing the punches I never threw.  I will come back through the years I never lived.  I will come back wanting things.  I will come back wanting everything.  I will come back with skin.  I will come back with fire.  I will come back and swim naked in the lake again.  I will come back with freckles.  I will come back without bullet points.  I will come back armed.  I will come back vulnerable.  I will come back pink.  I'll come back like the last blooming of the popcorn bush in November.  I will know how much I am wanted.  I will know just how rare.  I'll come back bleeding.  I'll come back smiling.  I'll come back laughing from head to toe.  I am not wind.  Not wind any longer.  I will seize my heart and come back with it.  It will be hot and steady.  I will come back clean as a snake.  I will come back bouncy as a sapling.  I will come back singing.  I will come back singing.  I will come back singing.  I will never stop singing.

New moon

5.9.13

Homeward, past
the gas station, sleepy and blue in the fog.
Sugar trees heavy in the sweet wet world.

My sister drives me around town in the rain.
We don't have much to say
so we murmur in strange voices,
turn the heat on and off.

Stars
we can see around the hole of the moon
when the rain stops.
Not a hole you fill
or cover over.

We're on the gleaming black streets,
the rich smell of soaked flowers
and grass.

I can't tell her who is alone
and who isn't.

The last year of my childhood

4.19.13

- I spend alone.  It's so hot
until suddenly it cools.
I find myself on my knees
in the potato patch,
which has largely failed.
Maybe three eyeball-sized tubers per plant.
My hands in the dirt, each swell
of queasy longing:

What I need, how I need it, I need it

like air. 

A poem on the first hot day

4.9.13

There’s a place for what hurts.
What stops the breath.

The body that wants to create
is stayed.

We are not in one bed
peering at each other
six inches apart in the morning.

But outside the sun has opened
wild crocuses randomly in the grass.

I drove you home late in the rain.
I’ll do it again.

I’ll hold your head, your hand, anything
you don’t want to carry alone.

I’ll point you out to yourself.
The way you show me
I am loved when I can’t believe it.
This is why; this is how—

I choose you.





About everyone

3.31.13

it smells like rain
she's half-naked laughing with me in the kitchen
the night before april

thank you for everything that hurts
then heals

thank you for life that is chosen
I didn't know you before it hurt
I know you better now

I found a feather

3.29.13

on the stones near your house.
Picked it up and tucked it into my vest
with the branch from the popcorn tree.
Which is budding.  It's March and I'm shaking
and I wanted to bring you a branch.

In many lives I have been afraid
to pick up feathers.
My father always told me they'd make me sick.
But since the first summer I worked on the farm
I've worked barefoot, even near the chickens
and lived through it.

So take it, I don't know, it's blue and lovely
and matted.  You say it's been there for days
and you keep meaning to grab it.
Last night I dreamed I went to pick some kale
and it was so green and firm until you said
No, look at all the bugs
and suddenly all I could see was caterpillars.

To go back to what I first saw;
no less real, my own,
never shaken.
Sometimes that is all I want.

Jordan

Quiet in the mossy woods.

Clouds and the first spring gnats
hover.

     I don't know what comes next.

Aren't you trying to break through
and speak to me?

Just past the veil
of suicide,
your beautiful brown face
     peering?

Winter map

2.24.13

Winter.  A long stretch
awake
or sleepless.
Long flight through time
and dark without heaven
or stars.

Mid-air.
Strung out above
a deep pit from which
no one wants to be rescued.
Sometimes I see my sister
wave up at me.

Maybe a tunnel, a cave.
Curled under silt.
A map to the end of it.
The light at the end of it,
or a more transparent dark.

A map, yes;
I need one of those.

Jungle instinct

2.7.13

I walk north on the main road
For miles until I am found,
Brought home.
It rains suddenly, loud minutes
Of rain in the dark on the clear roof.
In the silence after, geckos
Chirp and knock.
I open what I can. Not much.

The air is wet vanilla vines,
Red banana tails.
(Who is writing this?)

I am a bird with wings like bamboo scoops.
Bigger than you expect.
Perhaps you feel my shadow
When I pass over.

Persistently, I am a rainbow waiting to be noticed.
I am after the storm, and the sky is full
Of rainbows from which you can't close your eyes and hide.
Feel? the shadow?

In books I have read about reality;
Sometimes a flat or empty place,
Sometimes already spilled and
Spilling, but
Always a flow you can't close your eyes and stem

Asleep on the sand, in the road, under the roof, against the dead reef,
gecko in the night-
I carve in myself an instinct.
Chirp, knock.
When a shadow passes,
My head turns to look.