Trespassing

In Catholic highschool between

the Father forgive us

and the

as we forgives those who

 trespass against us—

I remember a girl

named Desireé and how we thought

 it so ironic

because no one desired her

at all and we loved

how ironic everything could be then.

She used to cling to us like a homeless badger,

 her beggar hands, gone claw-like,

 brushing past our shoulders,

pulling at our sleeves for compliments.

We punished her

with our silence,

our graceful retreat

 from lunch tables, our liquid kindness

 like nitrogen, drying up on contact.

 We evaporated out of doors, pooling

 on bleachers to roll

our Maybelline eyes and draw

little “ohs” from each other’s  lips

on the state  of those dreadful bangs

with that slow, muted face hiding behind

like an abandoned house

surrounded by unkempt shrubbery.

She was like that,

an abandoned house, we were

all desolate houses,

and after we had trudged

 across the autumn grass,

sauntered up the jagged front steps

and peered

into the broken glass windows,

we finally knew we had no right

to enter.

To a traveling Grandmother

I wanted to write something beautiful while you are sleeping

And send it to you like a dream so that even if you never wake

You will have in your pale realm of morphine, in the drip drip of

final hours, the shadow of my presence.

They are tubes and wires all over your strange body, a territory now foreign and altered. Like weeds overgrown across farmlands. Roots sunk into you— each pumping and purring. The persistent whirr that keeps you from slipping. You have entered a new country, somewhere far beyond hospital room 4572, somewhere

I do not know. I cannot touch your world, enter in, or pull you from it and I sit, watching you travel, afraid of how much I love you.

Your fire engine hair is turning matted mauve against the pillowcase and suddenly I miss the draping of your old lady arms about me, skin loose and hanging— like a bird’s wing deep with feather. I miss your bingo games, your cards, your jokes cut from the newspaper, your entrance into conversation without hearing what it was really all about.   I want you back from your islands in the fog.

Your restless eyes move open, caught back and forth between my face and the dragging of heavy sedated sleep. There is a second when waiting I see it. The second that stretches out like a lifetime when glassy pupils focus into mine. The moment when each eyes says “ah” before blinking and you rush back.

clasping to the next instant, the pieced paper chain of thought and memory, you wrestle to stay, as if you are still compelling me -Joy, now is the time to wake up.

Citylife.

Your kisses rain on a hot engine,

Extinguishing with a hiss in

A car that has broken down on

A slanted road with an ignition as sly as bourbon.

We’ve lost our way from the farmhome. 

A long time ago and are left wandering.

When did I become so urban?

When did my metaphors shape into city speak?

When did the grass blend into hard earth

And then become pavement? And when did you learn to look at me

 like this?

Pressed between cement and granite and dark

Streets slapped down with rain

I am lying. Through my teeth

Tell me how I got here. Take me back to

A field of daises where I can make my bed and lie in it.

You lick your lips, lick them like I was made of hot

Sand and you want to die of thirst. Hungering towards the city where there is only

strangers and sex

and no love.

I am familiarly foreign in your mind’s eye.

You only have a hint as to what to do

In this moment, in the heat of the metropolis

I hate to break it to you,

but women’s bodies were not simply made

Someone told me I need to grieve things today. And so, somehow, I suppose this is how I begin to grieve you.

When you smoke a cigarette. There is this instant when you light it, begin it. Work it between your lips. Make it glow. You reach its middle. And there you feel the happiest in the place just between the tip and filter. You begin to buzz.

This all I can say of you. You were the middle part. The briefest center. I’m sorry.

Yesterday, I found the book of poetry you gave me on birthday. I love that book. I think it might be my favorite present. From anyone. Ever. I wish I told that you that Sunday when you got out of the car. I wished I’d leaned over and whispered something better than goodbye.

I can’t tell you why we withered. Maybe because I am just a sad girl with all my own sadness. And I don’t know want to share it. Or maybe I just don’t know how. If I could find a way to keep you close to me, in more than just words, I imagine we would have looked different to one another.

Sometimes, when I meet someone, all I can think of is how I will tell him goodbye. And what it will feel like to lose them. What colors our melodramatic and flimsy ending will paint across the cinema screen. Your goodbye felt like that last rasping gasp when you’ve smoked to close to filter. I’m sorry.