My limbs are electric,
reaching, clinging, wanting
wanton for the press of
her foreign flesh.
As much as I had feared
my desire was a raw nerve,
feeling pleasure and pain
indistinguishable.
After,
our limbs twisted together in fraught knots,
exhausted.
Exhausted of the wait,
exhausted of the fight to stay apart,
magnets calling for each other
from opposite poles, finally
collapsed on each other.
Exhausted from the wicked curiosity
of being unknown to each other,
of hiding, not lying, but
not telling the truth.
And we are swiftly boated by sleep
that refuses to abstain any longer.…
...continue reading
Clad in homespun in summer
or her husband’s thick red and black plaid shirt
in winter, two hours before dusk each day
she crosses from cottage to tower. Joined
by the dog they slowly ascend the spiral staircase
pausing on landings to honor arthritic joints.
Entering the lantern room
she checks the kerosene supply, trims the wick,
then polishes lenses and each window
as if they were fine crystal. On foggy days
she turns on the diaphone,
audible companion to the light
lest its beacon prove inadequate in the haze.…
...continue reading
for Laura Savini and Jimmy Webb
On this day,
with the side glance
of a reluctant sun,
We have emerged
from the cold-snowy
backdoor of March.
The granite garrison,
armed with the
stuttering teeth of rakes,
Gathers the debris shed by
trees twisted and bent in
callous northwest winds.…
...continue reading
Everyone called Cynthia, our church camp counselor,
Cinders even before she burned
my pink bikini in a big trash barrel
because I’d “left it lying on the bathroom floor.”
Branding me a rule breaker,
she slid her smoldering eyes my way
during our moonlit devotionals by the lake.
Those same eyes glowed with adoration
and envy when the boys’ counselor,
Donnie, led us all in my namesake song.
She snuffed out any spark of joy
lingering down in my heart.
I quit the church of my youth years ago—
misogyny was my reason.
I heard Cinders stayed,
married a man like Donnie,
a preacher who spews vitriol
about women keeping quiet in church.
Sometimes I imagine Cinders,
listening in a pew up front,
her gray eyes glistening with tears
necessary to dampen any scintilla of her fiery self.…
...continue reading
I always feared the open sea
the shore on the horizon, too far to reach,
and the depth below that could encompass me.
that like a whale carcass I might sink to zero degrees,
to a lonely grave, the sinews of my bones leeched
away in the macabre dancing gravity of the sea,
blobs of fat and sponged skin, colored dark rosemary,
as it glistens in the distended membranes of benthic leeches,
all these depths that twinkle with their ability to digest me.
these detritivores drift then onward, unstable certophyllacaea,
wanderers without time, woven in existence foreign to speech,
predatory—a reason to always fear the open sea.
and wanted it too, though to a lesser degree;
to feel myself come apart and transcend some mortal breach.…
...continue reading
The feeling was one of relief, not gratitude.
There were the familiar aspects of flight: velocity, height,
measuring distance, and seeing so much, again,
of the world as it should be.
She circled them once, in the clearing,
not as an act of farewell or defiance
but in a final effort to
understand these strange creatures.
Despite the searing pain at the time,
the injured eagle fought them at the start,
then learned in her captivity that
survival would require cooperation.
They had touched her and fixed things.
They had watched her, and even fed her,
and sometimes the touching, though unwelcome,
was strangely reassuring.
And as she flew madly above the green landscape
of summer, she did not circle back again
and could not hear her rescuers cheering
and did not care that they had given her a name.…
...continue reading
‘the silence of God is God’
— Carolyn Forché
the sky dons its black cloak
and all its stars wrap about me.
light streams into my eyes
from so far away,
when the birth was first envisioned
on those starry nights of a distant time
that opened all around Them.
i. the idea
struck you,
the only free will,
to have your son begotten,
to give him flesh and blood,
then raise an arm against him
when no angel in heaven would dare to intervene.
hard to imagine the thinking, when the word was God
and he was with God, talking to himself, mumbling
this is suicide, murder —
only to be answered
why hast thou forsaken me?
one would know a human mind,
mercy, love, suffering and affliction,
all that is of the flesh.…
...continue reading