Image courtesy of The Public Domain Archive
Things I Have Learned Are Also Love
The begrudging hour that should be kept still with sleep, instead music swaying the dark kitchen.
Shutter speed and ham radios, antennas spread eagle on the patio table, trying to tune in miles. The little instructional card that is holy in the way it reads Pull Out.
Between painted doorways, arches. Fountain mouths. An ache, so hot and direct. The bottle of water left on the dashboard like a map. Still, the need to be swallowed.
Trees that canopy. Trees that elbow the ground. Trees we remember while hiking but not to find our way back.
A man who asks what I like while he's between my thighs. Moonlet. Thunder's dense growl. Peanut butter thick against the roof of my mouth. Every shade of blue.
The way I can say my body is bodying and have it mean storm without the forecasting of longing or want. That immediacy. That wreckage.
Sutures in my abdomen that clamp dying. How they dissolve. Bells that quiet when touched, lightly. Spoons that have been in mouths of people I love.
Behind the three-story dam, lily pads and mosquitos. Damp quiet. Being wrapped in a man's arms, unknowing the moment was a before.
The unlikely hope that couples after, that grit.
An avalanche of flowers in a vase that looks like a paper bag. Blooms the color of Saturn. Blooms the color of milk. Every plot twist.
Drugs that fit the equations of my body's ache but steal from the lexicon in my brain. Notary. Ornithologist. Petroglyph. Their return mid-sentence.
When the neurologist said now we know you aren't faking, based upon brain scans that witness the tectonic shift of vessels and thought. Every morning a man's name rises in my throat. Catches.
How loneliness enters unaccompanied. Without collateral damage. That precision.
The overstuffed suitcase of grief I place on the bed that demands I use my full body weight to zip.
When he understands you don't need me to show up with it all figured out. Headlights from the bedroom window in motion to some other place.
My mother's guitar. The rusted chords. My refusal to clamp a capo, shift fingerdents, move her song any further away.
How waltz time lulls overthinking. The sycamore outside of my window that rattles lovely.
Poems that offer themselves when the longing becomes unmatched. Poems that offer zero certainty and still undress in the unabashed light.
