How a love story begins: that bitch
pushed your name to me,
a perfect paper sailboat, and the
first thing I said to you was
“That’s what I want to name my son.”
The end of the story goes like this:
Summer has tipped students out the
library, we are the only two left
on the basement floor. You will stay here
shelving books into their tombs.
In these remains, we buckle,
my knuckles grip-locking you.
This is how to say goodbye.
Like expelled angels falling from the sky.
Biceps tremble into my shoulders so tight,
may the blades weld into wings.
May I fly to you every night,
to resume. On our way to 7-Eleven and
pause over every star. To bicker over
who packs the bowl, who pays for the food.…
...continue reading
Tomorrow night, I cry as activity instead of catharsis.
This little bloodstained duvet twisted between my bruises.
Why are you still here? A bleached monochrome dance
I bore into at every cusp between late night and early
morning. The Notes app dream journal woven in
half-delirium, half-life, but within is what may have
truly passed, if there is such a thing. Such is the pied
piper of evening sky: are the transient pinpricks above
liminal windshield dust or celestial negative space?
This is why I shake Descartes’ hand; a pretense.
Grip his palms gurney-white as my blackened soles
demarcate love from convenience; dissonance from
flesh. A too-sterile chain of suspicion stretches half a
link before evanescing amorphous, bits of iron and
thought drifting upwards my guttural ceiling light.…
...continue reading
I was with my friend Brad, working with him at his father’s sawmill. Brad’s mother came out and called to him.
“Michael’s needs to call his wife. His grandmother has passed away.”
I saw her face, immediately sorry I’d heard this way. Brad’s mother, like Brad and Brad’s father, were matter-of-fact people, not insensitive, but they usually delivered news with the same quietly firm tone of voice whether remarking on this year’s garden or the death of a loved one. They all cared about people and their feelings, but running a ranch and lumber mill, where death was a hard, but very real fact, they wasted no words on emotion or embellishment.
Brad and I started for the house. Then I stopped and suggested we finish what we were working on before going in.…
...continue reading
Bred to move along, avoid the roundup,
to reign in the moan that jolts me
like a stone skipping a pond. When I dream
I declare to my dogs of half-sleep—
will you cry for me when the time comes?
Corgis & Labs, all off-leash—all those
stretches of grass made of sleep
flatten out past the rows of marked trees.
Today is marked by my brother’s death. He was
a companion and protector. Suddenly gone.
I am the one who remains, mulling
the question that woke me with something
about who owns what, how to mark it.
It’s not that we didn’t know death was coming,
the clues screamed in glazed surfaces.
I see myself as the stone thrown,
puzzling the gravity of heavy loss
and retching into a wet shirtsleeve.…
...continue reading
to be a woman is to be that thin casing
in which knowledge is embedded
in thick knots of sausage-wire that
coils against fair skin, sweet skin,
kempt skin. kept thin and malleable
bruising and tearing and fit to burst.
Hecuba died a mother because
once new life had seen the inside
of her, the messy sprawling tubes
and wires of her, it was all she had
left to be. oh, the towers of troy crumbled
around her but she keened a cry
for her children alone.
let the men play at war
women only play at bodies.
but she was a just caricature of a
womb, wailing the wide walls down.
and I have seen the woman knowledge
of my labyrinth of cell-swelled cords,
and I have seen the woman cries of those
who no longer have a choice.…
...continue reading
Lamps drip sour light and mercury
carrying sounds of erosion
roaming through pipes and three-story cities.
Everywhere is the lessened trickle
of Heaven through bare metal
tickling the gutters, wetting the lawn
sputtering the candles, leftovers
of lovers. I hate this word, it’s the one hiding
behind the drapes, skin wan on the covers.
The air breathed into the window
is heat-heavy, hallowed. Sieved through
lacy silk embroidered with geraniums
my mother grew, effortful. The dregs
of this are summoned every other month
to the whimper of the mourning dove;
this love. I don’t speak of anymore
for I am so sure it’s missing from
the cooling departure of faces on rain;
one more reason to shutter the windowpane.
– Zachary Dankert
Author’s Note: It’s funny: many, many months after I’d written this poem, am I really so sure that this love is missing?…
...continue reading
I.
Waste-whipped, we climb—
facing away from wind impossible
when wind gusts from every angle
eddying tiny tornadoes
a white out winter.
This isn’t winter though; it barely
was. One storm then gone but
the air keeps dry and silent
and bone joints crack. What was
once flexible has stiffened
like a starched bleached board.
II.
It had gotten better.
How is it now much worse.
III.
Back in ’02 hurt seemed precious,
longing a hobby, and loving a vice.
Now we measure time by decades
to save what little we have left.…
...continue reading