Category: Poetry

Avalanche

The pain of losing you:

Like an avalanche in my gut;

A cold tumble of every moment

You touched me and I felt alive.

Months of carefully

Structured happiness,

Delicate planning to not get hurt;

A mountain coming down all around me.

The snow and ice and turmoil,

This culmination of every beautiful thing

We ever had.

This will surely be the way I go-

Frozen to the spot,

Unable to get out of the way.

Go and Sit

Parted eaves of hanging flowers-

Dahlias, daisies, delphiniums divine.

Have you ever considered the magic of their powers?

Go and sit with them sometime.

Climbing vines and purpled buds

The blooms of blue bachelor’s buttons blind-

Some beauty softens us to love;

Go and sit with them sometime.

Letters to Strangers

PART THREE

For L

Now this one hurts to think about.

I can just see your scrawny ass

Swaddled in some expensive minimalist clothing,

Telling some tattooed person about our failed friendship;

How I wasn’t “healthy” for you.

Well, fuck you.

Your facade is the unhealthiest thing I’ve ever known.

Your life is nothing but walls and pretend.

I’m only mad you blocked me first.

Letters to Strangers

PART ONE

For B

Days pass like dripping icicles.

I never knew how to love you right.

I still think about Apollo,

And your DVD collection

And your eyes.

Part of me wants you to meet my son

Because friendship was never hard for us,

Only the messiness of dating.

There are so many things I hate you for,

But I still need to say sorry.

I was never perfect either.

For Atlas

Being a mother is every cliché in the book,

And better.

But being your mother, Atlas,

Being your mother

Gives me hope;

Unbridled hope for the world

You will grow up in,

For the people you will meet

And the person you will become.

This universe needs you and it will try

To shake you up and

Hurt you,

But I will teach you to look it

In the face and roar.

I will lay out every avenue and stop sign I know

So you can navigate this world

Better than I did,

Better than my father,

And better than his.

Being a mother means

Looking at your face and

Wondering how someone so broken

Could make something so wonderful,

And it’s like suddenly every road of my life

Makes sense because

It brought you

Here.

Eternal Outsider

I used to live

Inside my sister’s house,

The way the dead live in

Our memories.

Not that I clung to her like spiderwebs,

But it seemed I gently refused

To be forgotten about.

I felt so loved, so cared for, so cherished

While I lived in that house.

My sister was (is) an angel that

No one I’ve met deserves,

Let alone this pile of bones

I call Myself.

I lived with her in New York once,

When I’d dropped out of school and

Thought about dying a lot.

I remember her telling me

Everyone Has a Different Path and

I loved that.

For the first time I felt like

Maybe I could still blossom

And still learn

And still live.

This past winter I wound up

Bound to her again, my womb full with a baby

And my life scattered in all these sharp pieces.

Her home was a place

Of real dinners and real laughter and real love.

And yet still,

I’d enter through the front door

And feel like a stranger; an outsider,

Intruding on a happy

Family.