The Goddess is a Man

I live next to a concrete river.
A father is my neighbor.
I may have been myrtles and snakes,
pharaohs and girls.
I might sit on my steps with coffee.
The porch light is probably on.
Traffic patterns time.
I know where I live through touch.
This man is searching, this man got.
Where I live now, mothers write letters
when their sons feel clack
clack clack in their stomaches.

Women send mail: woeful letters and coupons.
They ask for thoughts and they ask for
the miracles they need.
Women don't address these, and I find them
strewn in the street.
I've read the same writing for years,
and i've not responded the same response:
on a postcard, I didn't tell someone to be okay enough
to feel through the pain – there is more coming,
I didn't write, so don't let it hurt you.

I look for smudged ink on manicured hands.
I stand in the paper aisle and watch which
stationary disappears. I hope that postman
allen will hand me a spit-sealed envelope,
but he searches through his mail pile
and moves to the next house.

Women don't send their letters to me.
My neighbor gets mail enough for him to ignore.
Maybe he is the Goddess.
If he gives hope, I'm going to hope for him.
If they are just bills,
I will think my thoughts anyway.

A Letter to My Grandpa If I Sit With His Again

Remember that I mistakenly sat on your lap,
remember that. I was just tall enough.
The plaid blanket rested across your knees,
and I slipped when I tried to climb up.
You couldn't reach down for me, so someone else helped.

It was seventy degrees at Christmas.
The tree outside the kitchen dropped brown seeds.
Winter weighed from the opaque sky,
and we took its complexion.
My pink face and blonde hair bleached in low light.

I wait for you when I've grown up.
I'm sitting in the dirt in the shade – it's too fine.
The chickens you had scratched the soil
too small for a garden.
They will build a house on this, by the way,
and cheat on the rent.

I'm going a little farther than you did -
and a little further. I'm going to inhale
the dry wind to callus myself against the desert.
And I will call you over to rub your palms
on the powder on rocks .

There was never water near this dryland.
The ground cracks with no rain and moths
cover the concrete. I found a little plot of land
that I can have in June, and water will never run.

A Conversation with Birds

After this exhale, my coffee changed taste.
I'm jealous or warm wine, now.
Yesterday, it was the jumping ocean.
I lit a cigarette to swallow
the ashes – they sealed over my teeth.
Like finches that swallowed fire.
The birds said to me
in red text plus ampersand,
“Assuredly, the rocks will rub you raw,”
and they whispered in brush strokes.
I wanted to sift further and deeper
into the stones: sun-beat and broken
by salty waves, harnessed and cracked
by intention. Someone put them back together.
And the birds spoke,
“you are my very own rubbish.”
Their color broke under my heels.
I will eat funereal flowers.
Downstairs, I will change my mind
and disregard the past.

Javanese Meditation

I have never faced 90 mile per hour winds
to feel the leaves flick my skin.
I've never stepped in a rain puddle and learned it is shin-deep.
I have never laid in my bed – one leg under the sheet
and the other so the fan's air grazes up my thigh;
sprawled across the kitchen floor and measured my shame
to begin with a heart beat and end with the next;
laid on a yellowed comforter with my toes in the tears
and smelled my niece in the seams.

I have yet to sit crisscrossapplesauce and listen
for the walls to tell me about international politics.
I haven't grinned an insomniac chuckle, and I haven't
gone to my desk and recorded everything in a second's
notebook. Penciling what I remember and knowing
that a quarter of it is lie.

I have not tried to remember anything.
The split thread I keep trying to shove through the eye
and pinch on the other side. Fingers never close enough
to grasp the passive hair and my slightest breath
always able to blow it away. Tongue out and against my upper lip
until I can feel my teeth through it– drying from exposure
and still drooling. The thread, wet from my spit, slacks
and I can't try again.

Walk Through the Open Door

The stairwell smells of varnish
and the doorknob sticky with paint.
People were here: their sneeze and ache
residue fogs the air. For a moment, we live here
– making our way through their
living room and dust-covered master room.

Running our hands against bare
walls. Dropping hair strands in empty sinks.
Camels mix with cowboys and track
shoes with stilettos. Thoughts of pancakes and compassion
and car wrecks and permission filter, push away
the previous thoughts settled in the molding.
Layer them with the respons-
ibility to carry pain.

We walk out the way we came
because it's easiest. I can't speak quietly
when I'm cold. Before, we whispered non-secrets
into the carpet fibers for someone to hear.
Face pushed against the floor.

Together, We (second draft)

Know the breeze on oily skin.
Salt your eyes. Listen to seeds
push from the soil.
Live with the pollen. Stand
in the coals – peel dead
from your feet and elbows and hands;
or dust a path for our children to meet;
but leaves but glow but the instinct to fall.
Touch my hair – tangle your hands in the naps.
Say, “Lo siento, 'speranza, y yo.”

Biennial Bears Fruits (second draft)

Murray and Etheline: grafted
together and they throw out the life
that soaks in my hair
and beads on her neck.

Murray and Etheline:
orange flared trumpets feed the flies
and bees that she bleeds
when she bleeds and bruises when she bruises.

'Urray and Metheline rally for the sun
as much as the shade. They barter
for water, drink it
in their roots and spit it in our books.
The sent a letter to our house
and addressed it to me.

Endearment,
Give us your happys and sads
and include us in your talks.
If we can do more.
'Cause we don't give
enough of what we should
but want to die
as if we did.

Murray and Etheline: afraid
that the spider
barreling through the rain drops
knows what they bear. Keep still
when the sun and moon sound them.
Sit at our table and choose to keep
the secrets
the Fates commanded -

the heart and soul I gave them
to spare us.